A life-size version of the new Monopoly token, via the Today Show's Instagram. (Photo: Instagram)

Today is a triumphant day for cat lovers everywhere, but especially for those who despise ironing. Hasbro's Facebook stunt, devilishly proposed to distract us from the fact that Monopoly takes for-freakin-ever, has reached a delightful conclusion. Today reports that the iron token is getting the boot, and will be replaced with a sparkling cat token. Congratulations, Internet!

Last month, Hasbro asked Facebook users to vote in order to save their favorite Monopoly token. As it turns out, the iron, the hat and the wheelbarrow weren't exactly fan favorites, and were all in danger of being voted off. Though it's sad to bid adieu to a classic Monopoly token, the introduction of the cat is a wonderful acknowledgment that cats are the most glorious creatures to ever walk this fine planet.

We eagerly await more tokens that pander to the young and web-savvy, such as an angry Internet commenter piece and a Snapchat boob token.

(Photo: Facebook)

Tired of trekking all the way to Brooklyn for your retro video game fix? Lucky for you, Two-Bits Retro Arcade--which we wrote about back in June--finally opened its doors this past weekend, and it looks just as glorious as we'd hoped.

Two-Bits, located on Essex between Stanton and Rivington, has 22 rotating games and a giant projection screen for showing movies that will still your beating nerd heart. Games include Pacman, Street Fighter, Tetris and Donkey Kong. They also have one of the rarest games in the world--Star Warrior--located in the basement office, and according to Thrillist, if you ask nicely they just might let you play it.

The bar also comes with an upscale wine list, because who doesn't love swigging fine wine while playing a '90s racing game?

Little-Bits seems to have the nostalgia thing down pat: They also sell Fun Dips, Ring Pops and Nerds, so we look forward to the inevitable BuzzFeed slideshow about it.

(Photo: Google Play store)

When Google launched its new worldwide alternative reality game earlier this month, the web lit up with widespread questions. The game, called Ingress, allows users to move through the physical world with their Android devices, collecting pockets of energy in various locations that they can then use to complete virtual quests. It was an interesting idea, but on the surface appeared to not make any significant contributions to the company's bottom line. Why would Google, which has $217.59 billion market cap, allocate time and resources to a free Android game?

Technology Review called it "augmented reality's first killer app." AllThingsD reported that because the game incorporates real stores and businesses into its plotline, it's a natural next-level venue for advertisers--Zipcar, Jamba Juice and Chrome apparel have already all signs on to host ads on Ingress.

PandoDaily, meanwhile, pointed out the potential privacy violations that could occur when a game constantly requires users to record their GPS location:

Google has created an elaborate ruse to convince (possibly hundreds of) millions of people to share far more location and behavior data with the company than has ever been the case before.

And if there’s one thing Google can’t get enough of it’s data. The company made its fortunes by collecting more data (and better structuring and analyzing it into advertising opportunities) than any company in the world. Search history. Email correspondence. Maps usage. Content purchase and consumption. Google’s been watching. And it’s made billions off what it’s learned.

But there's another thing Ingress could do: Google could have its users help collect mapping data. (The company hasn't confirmed or denied this.) When playing Ingress, users are asked to explore walking trails, bike paths and other areas that haven't necessarily been documented by Google's StreetView cars. The geo data, photos and video recorded by game players is crucial in order for Google to successfully flesh out its walking maps. Knowing that even a company of its scale doesn't have the resources to map all walking paths across the world, Google has essentially convinced users to help them do their jobs by gamifying data collection.

If this tactic doesn't sound familiar, it should. Back in 2007, Google launched the GOOG-411 service, a free, voice-activated local search tool. Like Ingress, it seemed like a strange move at first: why would Google foot the bill for a Yellowpages-type service? But a few months after GOOG-411′s launch, then-VP of search products Marissa Mayer explained just why Google had decided to launch the service. GOOG-411 was collecting spoken syllables in order to build out its speech recognition tool, now employed widely across Android devices. But a few months after GOOG-411′s launch, Marissa Mayer, then-VP of search products, explained that GOOG-411 was collecting spoken syllables in order to build out its speech recognition tool, now employed widely across Android devices.

As Ms. Mayer told Infoworld in an interview in 2007:

You may have heard about our [directory assistance] 1-800-GOOG-411 service. Whether or not free-411 is a profitable business unto itself is yet to be seen. I myself am somewhat skeptical. The reason we really did it is because we need to build a great speech-to-text model ... that we can use for all kinds of different things, including video search.

The speech recognition experts that we have say: If you want us to build a really robust speech model, we need a lot of phonemes, which is a syllable as spoken by a particular voice with a particular intonation. So we need a lot of people talking, saying things so that we can ultimately train off of that. ... So 1-800-GOOG-411 is about that: Getting a bunch of different speech samples so that when you call up or we're trying to get the voice out of video, we can do it with high accuracy.

Ingress appears to be yet another version of this masked data collection strategy. By asking users to create new Portals, for example, Google could tap into a database of geo-tagged photos without ever having to head to the remote location themselves. After all, mapping the wilderness takes a fair amount of legwork. "You’ve seen our cars, trikes, snowmobiles and trolleys—but wheels only get you so far,” the company wrote back in June about its wilderness trekking camera. “There’s a whole wilderness out there that is only accessible by foot.”

Ingress creator John Hanke did not respond to a request for comment.

(Photo: Digital Spy)

If getting the shit scared out of you at a Broadway showing of Cats was a rite of passage for you, then you'll be pleased to know that the man responsible for that feline phenomenon is putting his immeasurable talents to good use by penning music for Nintendo Wii games. Oh, how the mighty have fallen...into the arms of Dance Dance Revolution.

Andrew Lloyd Webber has signed on for a game cleverly called "Sing & Dance," coming to a Nintendo Wii near you in mid-September. As one Observer arts reporter remarked, "This is like the equivalent of Orson Welles doing commercials in the '80s."

The game will consist of 32 of Mr. Webber's tunes, enabling your annoying theater kid friends to finally belt out Broadway tunes in a venue other than a high school auditorium or their shower. It will also feature the voices of famous Broadway actors and actresses, including everyone's favorite Mormon, Donny Osmond.

Hardcore gamers will probably scoff at a theater-themed game for the Wii (of all consoles!), and really, who would blame them? It's a game for a non-gamer, but we're guessing it will prompt plenty of drunken uncles to create lasting family memories come the holidays.

This dude wants some butterbeer. (Photo: insideipo.com)

It appears that Zynga, the evil mastermind behind FarmVille and Mafia Wars, is not completely hell-bent on destroying the world. The online game producer turned super villain announced today that it would help design a Facebook game to fight the oppression of women around the world.

The game is based on the novel Half the Sky, which follows the lives of women who have been victimized through sexual violence and trafficking, insufficient educational and financial opportunities and poor healthcare. It is part of a larger multimedia effort based on the book’s themes that will include a PBS miniseries as well as mobile games in India and Africa.

The game’s users will be tasked with ensuring the safety and prosperity of women and girls in their virtual village, overcoming various challenges in an effort to allow their avatars to eventually achieve independence. Players’ actions in the game will also translate into real donations that will go towards financing schools, supporting farmers and contributing to micro-saving campaigns.

Zynga’s game engineers will help Half the Sky’s Facebook game developer, Frima Studio, and its executive producer, Games for Change, finish before the game's debut on November 13. Ken Weber, Zynga.org’s executive director, expressed his excitement over the collaboration in a Games for Change blog post.

The mission of Zynga.org is to help make the world a better place through games … Zynga’s employees are eager to leverage social games for good, and we are honored to be collaborating with Games for Change and Frima on this important initiative.

So is Zynga’s sudden prep-school charm to be trusted, or is it all a ruse, their true intentions only to be revealed in a dying tear collected by a bespectacled wizard (Snape-style!)? Former employers have previously alleged that Zynga’s CEO Mark Pincus encourages workers to steal ideas from other companies. These disgruntled workers even darkly joked that Zynga’s internal motto is “Do Evil.”

But apparently these Darth Vader tactics aren’t having their desired effect. Zynga’s stocks suffered this summer, sinking below $5 in June. Looks like it’s time for the classic reputation cleansing move, "invest in a philanthropic Facebook game."

However, the ambiguously intentioned Zynga seems to have won over the book’s authors, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. (Just like Snape did with Dumbledore in Harry Potter. Gasp!)

“Zynga’s role in bringing this game to life is particularly special to us,” Mr. Kristof and Ms. WuDunn said in the blog post. “Using a game to potentially reach great numbers of people helps send a message not only that there are challenges women face around the world, but also that they bring great spirit and joy to their communities when they can live safe, normal lives.”

We should probably figure out who Voldemort is in this whole scenario--ASAP.

Betabeat gets fontBombed.

It's pretty rare that a "Show HN" post actually makes it to the top of the front page of Hacker News, as a lot of them are just half-baked startup ideas. Not so with fontBomb, a delightfully fun plugin that lets you blow up the text on your favorite (or least favorite) websites.

fontBomb is an HTML 5 plugin by Canadian programmer Philippe-Antoine Lehoux. As one commenter put it, "So awesome. Spent 10 min blowing the hell out of hn. Now instead of raging against trolls I can simply blow them up."

The video is worth watching, too: the bombs blow up on Hacker News, the Apple page and The New York Times in time with "Waltz of the Flowers" from The Nutcracker.

Goodbye, old friend. (Photo: Topix)

In the heady year of 1977, from that slice of meteorological heaven called San Jose, Nolan Bushnell--the cofounder of Atari--had a charming idea. In a fit of inspiration, he decided to fuse two of the best things on earth and then also tack on one of the creepiest (but who are we to judge?): Pizza, arcade games and animatronic animals so scary they make children hide behind their parents' legs.

He would build it, furnish it with a stinky ballpit, and they would come: it would be called Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theatre.

Many a child of the '90s spent their birthday eagerly wolfing down greasy pizza, losing at skee ball and then spending the car ride home feeling sick from wolfing down greasy pizza. It was magical! It was everything a kid could dream of, even if that Chuck E. Cheese mouse guy was kind of creepy.

But Mr. Nolan's dream was foiled by a startling lack of interest in pizza and arcade games. Chuck E. Cheese's went bankrupt in 1984, and was then bought by competing business ShowBiz Pizza.

Fast forward to 2012: Now that we can play videogames on our phones, why would we go to a pizza arcade? Chuck E. Cheese's new owners are confronting this question with an abominable concept: reinventing the Chuck E. Cheese mascot and twisting him into a bastardized CGI version.

As Boing Boing put it, "What was once a heart-warming pastiche of 'scary clown' meets 'stoned furry' is now just another soul-less CGI belch."

Kids, stick to Angry Birds. The dream of Chuck E. Cheese is gone and buried.

For us grownups, there's always the Lower East Side Retro Arcade.

If you enjoy some pinball with your pints, you'll be happy to hear that a new retro arcade--dubbed Two-Bits--will soon open at 153 Essex Street on the Lower East Side. Local blog Bowery Boogie spotted the signs announcing the new gaming spot a few days back. "Teaser signage, complete with punk-on-a-coin logo, arrived in the windows of 153 Essex late last week," they wrote. "We’ve since noticed numerous pedestrians stopping themselves at the sight."

Unfortunately, Two-Bit's website is disappointingly sparse, offering only the signage in question and some unnecessary share buttons (one for MySpace, for example). In the meantime, maybe you can catch Tyler DeAngelo and his mobile Frogger game if you're feeling especially nostalgic about '80s arcade games.

OMGPOP CEO Dan Porter with Ghostface Killah. (Twitter)

MegaMillions isn’t the only game in town capable of inspiring a feeding frenzy. Not content merely to snap up OMGPOP at something like $180 million, Zynga is making it known they’ve still got IPO cash burning a hole in their corporate pockets. Merger chief Barry Cottle basically told Bloomberg that they are hungry, ready to move fast, and rich as hell:

"We have a significant amount of cash, we have no debt, and we have access to debt to be as aggressive as we need to be."

Well, okay, then!

Such a temptation will not be ignored, says analyst Michael Pachter:

"You are going to have a lot of developers swinging for the fences and trying to hit it fast and hope Zynga will give them a couple hundred million dollars."

Now, on a scale of one to Instagram, how many people just started coding with visions of buyouts dancing in their heads?

The NYT's answer to the Kick Ass app

Oh, those New York Times Magazine folks--they're so edgy these days. In a think piece about the rise of "Angry Birds, Farmville and other hyperaddictive 'stupid games,'" the Times proves how truly addictive the Zynga canon is by embedding their own version of a "stupid" game as an illustrative complement to the story. The game allows you to destroy pieces of the website with your arrow keys and space bar--for example, we took the liberty of destroying the Style section, and automatically the Times became 10x less pretentious and assholey. If only every article offered this kind of catharsis.

It's hard to focus on the content of the article with a browser game embedded above it and cute illustrations of famous game characters to the left, but we're guessing that was their point.

"Tetris and its offspring (Angry Birds, Bejeweled, Fruit Ninja, etc.) have colonized our pockets and our brains and shifted the entire economic model of the video-game industry," wrote author Sam Anderson. "Today we are living, for better and worse, in a world of stupid games."

The Times game was designed by Jon Huang, a multimedia producer at the Times and former IBM developer. As Poynter notes, he's also a beekeeper, which is vaguely scary but also awesome.

The article itself is actually very interesting, in a "we're knowingly intellectualizing Angry Birds" kind of way. With the rise of big hits like Draw Something and the continued extension of Zynga's "With Friends" brand, it's hard to argue against the fact that we live in the age of distracting, artificial entertainment designed solely to keep our brains tied to our mobile devices.

Stupid games, wrote Mr. Anderson, "are designed to push their way through the cracks of other occasions. We play them incidentally, ambivalently, compulsively, almost accidentally. They’re less an activity in our day than a blank space in our day; less a pursuit than a distraction from other pursuits."

Interesting point. We really only break out Draw Something when waiting for the bus, or during a TV commercial. But in our world of stupid games, who even cares what Mr. Anderson has to say? Back to destroying the Times!