1980s, Dennis Miller, “Weekend Update”, Saturday Night Live
...Wheel of Fortune prices.

Solved Problem 9.2. Jerry, a contestant on Wheel of Fortune, is asked to spin the wheel 2.5-m diameter. If he exerts a tangential force of 75 N for his spin, what torque is exerted on the wheel?

Start by asking students if they ever watch Wheel of Fortune, or play games like Hangman or Scrabble.^® Ask whether they have ever noticed any patterns in the frequency with which letters appear.

The Wheel of Fortune is a similar game, with three players competing to be the first to solve a hangman-like puzzle. There are two significant differences in the puzzle, however, that suggest that Wheel of Fortune should be classified as a language game and hangman a word game. First, Wheel of Fortune answers are often names of people or short phrases

A middle-aged man in a faded blue windbreaker walks through the Governor’s ballroom lobby.... “Is this where the Wheel of Fortune auditions are?” he asks. A hotel official tells him he’s in the wrong wing of the hotel... Actually he’s not that far off, if you want to get cosmic about it. Except PBEO’s Ann Perkins would claim little in common with Vanna White.

The density of these games, however, is not limited and can range from very simple variations of Chess, Backgammon, Hearts, or Wheel of Fortune to very complex real-time strategy games or shooters. (Strictly speaking, Half Life and Day of Defeat are nothing more than round-based MPOOG.)

...we’d sit there watching Wheel of Fortune unless it was Sunday but we never did it on Sunday—and now that I think about it I don’t think we ever did it before seven o’clock—because it always started with Wheel of Fortune...and this girl would always solve the puzzles before me or before anyone on the show except she always had trouble with this one guy who was always getting them after one or two letters and consequently not winning much dough—but we’d watch Wheel and after Wheel we’d watch Jeopardy which again she was much better at than me...

For instance, suppose our subject is the “History of 0.” The invention of the wheel, the invention of zero, the construction of the Roman Coliseum, the invention of the compass, the development of the traffic circle, Pauline Reage’s book The Story of 0, and the Wheel of Fortune could be events indicated along a linear flow of time extending from prehistory through contemporary time.

Figure 14.2 is an example of a game flowchart...for an online multiplayer version of the Wheel of Fortune game.... Figure 14.3 shows an interface wireframe from Wheel of Fortune, an early concept sketch for the interface, and the final interface as released.

It’s not enough to heedlessly scatter characters throughout a game like chicken feed in the barnyard mud because we need an adversary at this moment, a merchant here, or a puzzle-giver there. Characters in games must be more than clones of Vanna White, magically revealing those letters on Wheel of Fortune. Characters have a right to their own lives in the game.

Wheel of fortune

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