This game sucks

It's called "The Dyson Telescope Game." It's a series of puzzles, the object of which is to move a ball into a hole by figuring out the correct sequence of pushes. The pushers are telescoping rods located at different places in the puzzle grid.

As a game, it's quite respectable. The puzzles are challenging, There are increasing levels of difficulty (and more promised). The interface is intuitive. The exercise of perception and deduction is engaging. It may not be a great puzzle. There are other puzzles like it. But what makes it unique, and worthy of our collective attention, is that it's not just a puzzle, but an advertisement. For a vacuum cleaner, no less.

The Dyson Telescope has nothing to do with astronomy. It's a feature of the high-tech Dyson Vacuum Cleaner - a telescoping wand that expands or contracts for easy storage. Some relatively brilliant marketing person apparently thought that making a game out of the expanding and contracting of it all would attract attention to the many marvels of advanced vacuuming embodied by Dyson technology.

For the fun community at large, what's perhaps the most noteworthy about this whole campaign is that it works. The game is kind of fun. And the kind-of-fun of it makes you want to learn more about the kind of fun to be had with the higher technologies of the Dyson vacuum cleaner. Even though the game has little to do with household hygiene, even though you can play the whole game without ever knowing that it's about a vacuum cleaner, it's a fun invitation, and it's an invitation to fun. Which is precisely what we're all about.