Correct, it doesn't render all clicks (I dread to think how browsers would react if I tried) - all the results are put through a k-means cluster analysis at regular intervals to produce approximately 30 visible results. The percentages are calculated relative to all the clicks, though.
Do you know if these kinds of interactive content perform better (ie clicks/shares/views) vs other forms, ie longform or just plain data visualization pieces? I personally enjoyed it a lot.
This isn't really my area of expertise - we have people at the company dedicated to studying this kind of thing in far more detail than I know how, who may end up reading this - hi! - so I don't want to speak out of turn.
But in my experience there's a lot of variation - things like this interactive aren't as tied to the news cycle as many articles are, so it won't peak as high but may make up for it in longer term traffic.
One possible way of generating such images is to use more images since a lot of sport photos seem to be taken as part of a burst sequence. All you need is two such photos where the ball has moved over enough and the rest shouldn't be difficult.
But won't the players have moved roughly as much as the ball from photo to photo (since they're moving at about the same speed)? I suppose as long as the players haven't moved into the space where the ball used to be you could still trivially use that space to replace the ball in an earlier image.
Try with the stylus, I could be wrong but last time i played with a Surface Pro, I noticed that using your fingers on the touch screen game touchEvents and using the stylus gave mouseEvents.
That's the work of Sam Manchester, deputy editor on the Sports desk and chief Photoshop wizard. I believe most of it is just cloning different parts of the photo to cover up the ball, though it can get more complex. For example, on the 4th photo of this previous round:
I was wondering how he did that one!!! Part of my thinking was that you'd choose pictures that had the ball in an easy to photoshop location, and that threw me off
Sports photographers also take many shots in rapid succession. I bet you could clone the background from a shot a half second before the one in the article.
The accuracy is calculated compared to other readers, so if you all clicked on the wrong corner you can still be better than 80% of them!
I mostly did it this way because there's no hard number that makes sense here - we don't know ft/metres, and pixels aren't a unit everyone is used to thinking about.
I wanted to ask how long it took to make this, but that's an impossible thing to answer - so how much lead time did you (and the team) have before the first version went live?
I just checked my e-mail - it looks like we decided that we were definitely going to do it approximately two weeks before the first round went live. That's not typical but not necessarily unusual, if that's a sentence that even makes sense.
The concept is not new at all - Spot the Ball is a competition that ran in UK (and possible other) newspapers going back at least as far as the 70s. It was a cash prize competition and was pretty popular, though it's died out in recent years.
I wanted to bring it back to get people to interact a little more with a highlights photo gallery - it's a lot more fun that way. IMO, it's interesting because it's just the right level of infuriating.
One thing that people don't realise about newspaper spot the ball competitions is that the winning position was not where the ball originally was in the photo, but where the competition organisers thought it should be.
That removed any actual element of skill ("where are the players looking?") and turned it into pure guesswork.
People could buy rubber stamps of a grid of crosses so they could make very many simultaneous guesses.
If you notice the outline of the ball has different size for each photo, this allows to identify a relative distance where the ball is compared to height of players
Glad you noticed that! It's proof of the difference a great designer (in this case, Rumsey Taylor of our News Design team) can make.
As a developer it can be quite humbling to realise how many seemingly tiny yet actually really important touches exist in a project you think you know inside out.
Neat idea, but is this something you can actually be skilled at? Even if you know the game, and can figure out what trajectory the ball was on, it seems very hard to figure out exactly where on that trajectory it was when the photo was taken, given the high speed of the ball.
As I have mostly scores in the vicinity of 95-99%, yes indeed you can. In the UK and I think many other countries where soccer is popular, 'spot the ball' games have been a popular newspaper and prize competition entertainment for many years, probably long than I've been alive. It also helps to have played a lot as a kid and have a basic intuition of how the game is played.
following the eyeline of players (and sometimes background observers) is the most basic clue, but it's also important to remember that in soccer you're not allowed to touch the ball with your arms or hands if you can possibly avoid it, so when you see a player's stiffened arm you can often guess that they're fighting to avoid an accidental contact that would result in play being interrupted by the referee.
It's not a very useful skill but I hope that soccer gets much more popular in the US as I might be able to win some easy prize money if spot-the-ball competitions become popular. Or for a small fee, I will be happy to provide individual tuition in this potentially lucrative derivative sport :)
After logging many thousand of hours of dutifully watching soccer (over 30 years of full-on love for the game), I was able to match the given situations to similar ones I'd seen before and get close enough most of the time. It's still all probabilities at the end of the day.
Following the direction players are looking is just one parameter and can be wildly inaccurate without any information on the angle and velocity of the ball at the time of the shot.
One of the trickiest situations is when 2 players jump for the ball, usually coming from a goalkeeper's clearance, so high and fairly fast, and collide in the air (often closing their eyes): the ball could literally be anywhere.
That's kind of the genius of puzzles like these (we can't take credit for inventing it - Spot the Ball has existed for a long time in the analog world) is that it's a mix of skill and luck, so you can fool yourself into thinking you're amazing at it, when in reality the next photo might trip you up completely.
I can relate. I mostly ended up around 55% overall per round (only slightly above average) but I did get a 100% score on one photo which made up for some spectacular fails.
Couldn't you? It seems like if you were skilled enough you could figure it out by the reactions of various players in the photos with more than one or two people in them.
Trying to triangulate based on where players' eyes are looking rarely works. In many cases, the goalie is looking in a completely different direction than where the ball is. I guess that's why they're getting scored on.
Don't forget that the ball can come very fast and the keeper will need a split second to adjust. In other cases, the kicker can be masked by another player preventing the keeper to see the ball until very late.
John Graham-Cumming wrote an article about trying to hack a contest similar to this. I wonder if a similar technique could be used to find the ball on these images?
I started to roll my eyes when I saw your comment because I thought, "the NYT made a fun web interactive with no-stakes and someone is pointlessly wondering if the answers are in the source code"...so now I realize what a reflection this is on how lame and limited my own thinking is :).
This was a great link...I've been casually brainstorming heuristics for detecting possible Photoshopping and John writes about exactly that. I'm going to walk through his algorithm using Python and PIL.
It's odd to see a casual game, with no other significance or meaning, in the NY Times. It would be great to see them using interactive tools to tell news stories more often.
I remember seeing an arcade redemption machine that worked on the same principle. It had a database of hundreds of screenshots from soccer/footy games and the player had to guess where the ball should be. The more accurate the guess; the more tickets the machine dispensed.
Yeah I found that the players' eyes were mostly useless but often times the composition of the photo is helpful. For example, if players are gathered on the right edge of the frame and there's a bunch of blank space to the left, the ball is likely over in the open area
I used where the fans were looking instead. It worked sometimes.
I assume the players look where they are going, and at other people instead of the ball (since they can predict the trajectory they probably look where it will interact with something, not where it is.).
My understanding of the UK version of this was that the ball was actually placed by a group of pundits[0], rather than being in the original location, so even if you found a freeze frame of the original match you'd still not be able to cheat the system.
Would be fun to crowd source a position taken from wrong guesses to provide some variance.
I like that - a "most popular guess" vs "actual position" would be really interesting. As we seem to have at least one of the developers in this thread, maybe we can make that happen (or at least a post-mortem blog post analysing the data?)
For me this quickly became "spot the photoshop artifact". I only noticed it clearly for one photo and did marginally better than average (58% -- some guesses were way off) Still very fun.
reminds me of bestofthebest's car raffle... since you can't really gamble in the UK, they do a skill based game that is exactly this... you buy guesses and then click where you think the ball is... the person each week with the closest guess to where a group of judges says the ball is wins the car of their choice
Of course you can really gamble in the UK - that's what the bookies are for.
However, the regulations are a lot tighter for gambling, so it's easier to make it a "skill based game" which has much looser rules. Bingo and raffles have their own rules which, again, are a lot easier to comply with.
Indeed I recall Spot the Ball compititions in the national papers in my youth and nicely covered here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spot_the_ball in much better detail than I. So somewhat nostalgic seeing the new edition. Though recall it's demise in newspapers was down to the worry of technology enabling analysis of the picture reducing the human level of skill involved and with it being money related prizes then they moved on.
Of course we have gambling in the UK. It's just that skill-based games are less tightly regulated than purely chance-based games. Hence those premium rate TV phone-in competitions where the player has a choice between one obvious answer and two stupid ones.
