No electric vehicle is more iconic than Tesla Motors' Model S, and none of its features are more notorious than the colossal 17-inch touchscreen that replaces many of the traditional buttons and knobs found on your regular car dashboard. The Verge's Chris Ziegler wasn't too impressed with the interface when he took the Model S for a spin, finding it overbearing and unreliable. But what if you could bring your own touchscreen to an electric vehicle, providing more useful information while keeping the standard controls intact?

That's the idea being pushed by Terra Motors, a Japanese startup that says it's created the first "sophisticated" electric scooter to enter mass production. The A4000i looks more or less like any other moped, but its spartan dashboard features a conspicuously iPhone-sized slot for you to insert your phone. Once connected over Bluetooth and running Terra's app, the phone will display information such as the current battery charge and information about the trip. Although it's not ready yet, Terra is also developing its own navigation software to be used with the scooter, and plans to include the option to upload GPS data to the cloud to assist cities in congestion management.

Terra is looking to beat the likes of Tesla to market

Shinpei Kato, director of Terra's business development unit, tells me that there's little precedent for a "premium" scooter in the nascent electric vehicle industry, and his company is looking to beat the likes of the similarly named Tesla to market. Terra aims to ship 10,000 units by the end of 2013, and 100,000 in the next two to three years. Unlike Tesla, however, Terra is aiming the A4000i primarily at emerging markets such as Southeast Asia. The quiet scooter is also being positioned as a good choice for newspaper delivery in Japanese urban environments.

At 450,000 yen (about $4,500), one of the world's most expensive iPhone accessories wouldn't necessarily seem the most obvious fit for the streets of Hanoi. But Kato says there's a growing number of people — "the top 2-3 percent" — in such countries that would be able to afford it, and the iPhone connection lends the A4000i cachet as a "high-end personal transport device." The idea is that both smartphones and scooters are status symbols, and the combination of both will be much more desirable than previous mopeds. And, while the current model's dashboard will only fit the iPhone, Terra plans to ship an adjustable console next year to accommodate Android devices.

The iPhone app is limited right now, but perhaps that's for the best; even with a high-contrast black-on-white UI and a matte screen protector on the iPhone, it's very difficult to read the display in direct sunlight. For that reason, Terra has also included a simple monochrome LCD display to show readouts for more critical information such as speed, and the scooter's main controls aren't any different from those of a gas-powered equivalent. The iPhone integration, as such, is more of a curio at this point than a crucial part of the driving experience.

Pick up a charged battery at 7-11

The A4000i's most useful feature may be its battery design, however. The pack is slim, reasonably lightweight, and slots easily into a bay located beneath the scooter's seat. It gives the scooter a range of around 65 kilometers (40 miles) and takes two to three hours to charge, but Kato says its real strength is the easily swappable design. While Tesla is planning expensive, complex pack-swapping technology to build out its Model S network, Terra is working with partners to let customers pick up charged batteries at regular stops. Kato says there is interest from 7-11 and Japanese convenience store giant FamilyMart, and the initiative is designed to combat the lack of charging infrastructure in Japan and Asia.

And when it comes to performing on a basic level, the A4000i seems more than competent — in action, it's smooth, virtually silent, and surprisingly fast off the blocks. Its top speed of 65 kph (40 mph) won't set any records, but it accelerates quickly and appears well-suited to its target use cases and markets. But the market for a "premium" electric scooter is far from a proven one, and the larger question of where and why the iPhone fits into all of this remains unanswered. Could Tesla replace the Model S' unwieldy screen with an iPad? That's for Elon Musk to answer, but we wouldn't hold our breath.

There's a growing obsession online with cookies, imaginary chocolate chip cookies.

In early August, avant-garde game developer Orteil put his latest prototype online: Cookie Clicker.

In the free game, players have to click on a cookie to produce a cookie. Those cookies can, in turn, be used to increase cookie production through the purchase of virtual grandmas, farms, time machines and the like. There is no goal in the game beyond producing cookies at an ever increasing rate. My game, for instance, currently produces a smidge more than 28 trillion cookies a second.

What makes this particular web-based game so intriguing is that once a player purchases the first in-game item the game can play itself, producing cookies with no interaction. Despite the fact that Cookie Clicker only requires 15 clicks to become a game played by a computer on a computer, it has found a obsessive, increasingly large fan following.

Cookie Clicker has already spurred fan videos, latte art, a special controller and not a few tweets from obsessed game developers, including one from the man behind Minecraft.

Orteil, whose real name is Julien Thiennot, told Polygon that the success of the game is allowing he and a friend named Opti to create a new studio that will focus on making more of their creations. Though he shies away from calling himself a game developer. Instead, Orteil says he makes experimental prototypes.

"I'll put an idea into code in a few hours and put it online," he said. "If it gets enough attention and good feedback, I keep adding to it for awhile or I overhaul it into a real game. I can get some fun concepts out pretty quickly that way."

A player can dig all of the way down to the thought "This scent is good" in the mind of a wild horse living in the kingdom of Azleklym on the planet of Telluric.

His previous concepts, while not as popular, also challenge the definition of video game.

In Nested, for instance, players click on a word to open up related subsets. The goal was to create a nested view of the universe and everything. The game starts with the word "universe." When the word is clicked it opens into ten "galactic superclusters." A player can dig all of the way down to the thought "This scent is good" in the mind of a wild horse living in the kingdom of Azleklym on the planet of Telluric.

Ortiel describes what he creates as "non-games."

"Nested has pretty much no interactivity, and Cookie Clicker almost plays itself; the rest are mostly just random generators," he said. "Then again, if you're having fun using them, isn't that kind of a game?"

The idea of deconstructing a game to its basic elements isn't new.

ClickQuest, for instance, pulls apart the tenants of a massively multiplayer online game, leaving just the clicking. There are no graphics, just the ability to level up your unseen character through clicks.

"Players chose a color at the beginning of the game, and then have the ability to choose a lighter or darker version of their color at level 50," developer Chris Gamble said. "At level 75 they can change their color to any of the available options at will. These are the only benefits from leveling, apart from bragging rights."

Gamble said he created the game in 2010 in response to a Youtube video that jokingly referenced a game that was just counting clicks.

"To me it is a satire of how MMOs can be reduced down to clicking for levels with only minor benefits and people will still play them," he said.

Ian Bogost, video game designer, critic and researcher at Georgia Institute of Technology, created his own take on clicking games in 2010. Cow Clicker, which had players simply clicking on a cow, was designed as a sort of response to the popularity of Facebook games like Farmville.

"The idea was, what are these Facebook games?" he said. "Can I distill them to their essence and make sense of it, but not by writing about them, but by making a game?"

Bogost sees Cookie Clicker as a game created for a computer, not a person, to play.

"Maybe we've gotten to the point where our computers have broken free to some extent," he said "They have there own little social networks and now they have a game. You can almost see Cookie Clicker as a peak or a catalyst for that conversation."

The compulsion some have to interact with Cookie Clicker, when interaction isn't really necessary, is likely tied to the love of the click, Bogost said.

And there's a history there.

Back when the mouse wasn't as ubiquitous as it is today, Microsoft went to great lengths to get people used to using it. The inclusion in early versions of Windows of simple games like Solitaire and Minesweeper, Bogost said, was to get people used to a mouse and manipulating objects on a screen.

"You can make take the clicking game back to those pedagogical roots," he said. "Clicking games have a lineage.

"Maybe we've gotten to the point where our computers have broken free to some extent," he said "They have there own little social networks and now they have a game."

"It's definitely something people like. When you can make something happen, when you can have agency, that feeling is powerful and ennobling."

Orteil seems lost in the success of his non-game.

People and computers keep clicking his cookies and as long as they do, he plans to support them. Right now he's working on adding new content to the game and bringing it to the smartphone. While the game is still about clicking on cookies, Orteil included a sort of sub-plot about the rampancy of super-charged, space grandmas. He also plans to start creating dungeons in the cookie mines of his game.

He says the game isn't really meant to be a statement in itself.

"But I suppose you could draw some conclusions about its popularity and the nature of video games — some of which, unfortunately, would be rather cynical," he said. "I think what draws people in is simply the idea of accumulating large amounts of things over time —  cookies, gold coins, experience... As the players gain more stuff, they feel less and less like quitting because they'd have wasted all the time they've invested into it. As with MMOs though, there almost always comes a moment of "sudden clarity" where the player realizes how pointless it all is, and decide to leave the game (at least until the next update !)."

Orteil says he's thought about all of the computer processing wasted on crunching cookies, about 9,000 people play the game at any given time. The idea that a computer left to its own cookie-clicking devices could be better used doesn't bother him too much, though he's played around with the idea of creating a game that can be used for scientific research as well.

"If only to atone for all of the CPU cycles that have been lost to cookies," he said.

Good Game is an internationally syndicated weekly news and opinion column about the big stories of the week in the gaming industry and its bigger impact on things to come. Brian Crecente is a founding News Editor of Polygon.

Huawei, the multi-billion dollar Chinese telecom infrastructure and mobile device maker, just announced a new CEO — but only for the next six months. Eric Xu will be the acting CEO of Huawei from October 1st to March 31st under the Huawei Rotating CEO system, an experimental management strategy that the company revealed last year.

Under the system, three executives take turns acting as CEO. The temporary position entails leading meetings with the board of directors and executive management as well as taking the primary role in operations and crisis management. The executives bring expertise from different parts of the company, such as marketing, wireless, and research and development. Their normal duties do not change while acting as CEO, and they retain "considerable authority" even when not acting as CEO.

Three executives take turns as CEO

The reasoning for this highly unorthodox system? Huawei and China are in a period of rapid change, and having three CEOs will keep the company nimble. Founder and longtime CEO Ren Zhengfei wrote in April of 2012:

In times when social changes were not so dramatic, emperors could reign for several decades and create periods of peace and prosperity. Such prosperous periods existed in the Tang, Song, Ming, and Qing dynasties. The rotational period for each emperor lasted several decades...

Today, tides rise and surge; companies are springing up all over the place while others are quickly being swept away. Huawei hasn't found a way to adapt well to a rapidly changing society. Time will tell if the rotating CEO system is the right move or not.

Xu, a ten-year veteran of the company, is the third acting CEO to be named under the new system. He will take over for Guo Ping, who took over in March of 2012 from Ken Hu. Hu took over in late 2011 from Ren, who founded the company in 1987.

By John Walker on September 30th, 2013 at 5:00 pm.

Well, it’s finally confirmed, and yup, it turns out that Ubisoft’s promises of avoiding delaying the PC build of their games haven’t exactly proven, well, true. The PC version of Assassin’s Creed IV, as speculated after a developer accidentally blurted the truth, will be released three weeks after the current-gen console versions. It’s now getting the same release date as the PS4/Xbox One versions. So it’s because it’s a vastly superior version and they can’t blow thei… no, because the Wii-U version comes out that day too. Oh, and three days later in Europe, too!

We’ve been asking Ubisoft to tell us what’s going on with the AssCreed IV release date since June, and we’ve received blank stares. Now we know why. Just over a year ago, Ubisoft said to us,

“We need to improve our communication, and make sure we provide better visibility to the PC community on our release dates for PC.”

Yeah.

The game’s whole release couldn’t be much more of a mess. Why on Earth they’re not delaying all the releases until the 22nd November, to coincide with their next-gen versions, I cannot guess. But now you’ve got the PS3 and 360 versions out on the 1st November, and PC, XB One and PS4 (and Wii U) on the 22nd. Yup, they’re releasing the PS4 version before the PS4 itself is out. Oh, and this is all in Europe. Indeed, they’re doubling down on this idiocy by releasing in the US three days ahead of Europe! Go oceans!

Even better, currently (although only until, I suspect, the time this information is unembargoed and the websites change), they’ve been implying the 1st November release date for the PC version on their main pre-order website.

Follow the link from that page to pre-order the PC version via Game, for instance, and oh look:

Or Gamestop:

There’s that improved communication and better visibility for the PC community.

So a three week delay on the PC version, a PS4 version before there’s a PS4 to play it on, and a three day delay internationally for each. What a feat. And good grief, that’s before you even start to ponder the ludicrous array of special editions, unique store versions (different releases for Gamestop, Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy, Target in the States), online versions, and so on. Quite how releasing a game can have been made into such a spectacular mess is beyond my explanation.

Bossa Studios is currently prototyping a tablet version of its over-the-top and (intentionally) highly inaccurate surgical game Surgeon Simulator 2013, the developer told Joystiq.

Surgeon Simulator 2013, developed during the 2013 Global Game Jam in January of this year, has received a number of updates since its launch on Windows PC, Mac and Linux — including an alien autopsy and character swap-outs for the Medic and Heavy from Team Fortress 2. The tablet port is not a definite at this point in time, but the developers demoed a prototype of the mobile version at the Eurogamer Expo over the weekend.

According to Joystiq, the tablet version was built in two days and the version Bossa demoed at the Expo was in its sixth iteration of controls. These new controls include a Z-axis that will automatically adjust as players tap and swipe the screen, moving innards and flinging them around the surgical suite.

While the U.K.-based Bossa "isn't definite" about publishing the tablet version, it is "seriously considering it." This is because the developers believe tablets offer a more direct control scheme and these controls in turn open up the possibilities for new kinds of in-game surgeries. One of the new ideas Bossa shared included cracking, pulling out and replacing teeth.

Should a tablet version be published, Bossa prototyper Tom Jackson said it likely won't be available this year — although the rest of the team believes it could be possible with a little more midnight oil.

"Potentially, a few more sleepless nights, Tom, and I think we could do it," sad junior designer Luke Williams.

Surgeon Simulator's most recent update included the addition of anti-gravity kidney transplants and brain surgery in space.

Marina Shifrin was fed up with how crappy her boss was, so she did what any rational human being would do and quit. However, the method in which she informed her boss of her impending departure is unique, to say the least...

From her video's description:

"I work for an awesome company that makes news videos. I have put my entire life into this job, but my boss only cares about quantity, how fast we write and how many views each video gets.

I believe it's more important to focus on the quality of the content. When you learn to improve this, the views will come. Here is a little video I made explaining my feelings."

Submitted by: Unknown