'Brickception' Is A Perfect Afternoon Time-Waster That Redeems The Pop-Up
We love a good web game here at Digg, but sometimes you can't resist a classic. "Breakout" has been with us for longer than "Tetris" and nearly as long as its predecessor "Pong," and appeared on every platform imaginable from the Atari to click wheel iPods — and now you can play it with a pop-up, while playing it in that pop-up.
"Brickception" is Preet Shihn's brain-taxing take on "Breakout," and yes, you do have to enable pop-ups on the site in order to play it. You move the paddle inside the smaller pop-up by moving the pop-up, while the top border of the smaller pop-up serves as the paddle in the larger game.
The pop-up, of course, is one of the worst tools ever unleashed on the internet. Here's Ethan Zuckerman, the man who wrote the code for the first pop-up while working at Tripod in the nineties, on his creation's not-quite-loved legacy in an essay at The Atlantic:
At the end of the day, the business model that got us funded was advertising. The model that got us acquired was analyzing users' personal homepages so we could better target ads to them. Along the way, we ended up creating one of the most hated tools in the advertiser's toolkit: the pop-up ad. It was a way to associate an ad with a user's page without putting it directly on the page, which advertisers worried would imply an association between their brand and the page's content. Specifically, we came up with it when a major car company freaked out that they'd bought a banner ad on a page that celebrated anal sex. I wrote the code to launch the window and run an ad in it. I'm sorry. Our intentions were good.
Maybe "Brickception" doesn't totally absolve the humble pop-up, but at least it's a reminder that a lot of ideas out there that can be put to use for better ends than annoying advertisements. Someone should get to work on "Breakout" for those LED ad trucks, pronto.
[Via Preet Shihn]