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Justin Gibbs (100 unread)

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If console games are Hollywood blockbusters, social games are soap operas

Posted: January 16th, 2012, 6:31am CET by justingibbs

With the console game business dropping off a cliff (sales plummeting 20% in December and 8% for the year) many developers are fleeing to the social games space. Seems like a logical move however most freely admit to not liking social games. Some even go so far as to explain their move as a chance to “make them real games” such as Philip Holt, co-founder of social gaming startup Row Sham Bow.

“What we want to focus on are things that have frustrated us as gamers on social games, one of which is that they’re highly compulsive, but not very compelling. They’re just not the kinds of experiences that we long to play on that platform,” he said.

What Holt and others should understand is that social games are the equivalent of soap operas. It’s like packing up the car and driving out to Hollywood with the dream of making movies but only finding jobs making soap operas.

If soap opera jobs are the only ones available what is one to do? Well make soap operas more, make them movies. How long do you think you would last in the soap opera business doing this? The soap opera audience might really enjoy movies too but Monday afternoon they’re looking for something different – they’re looking for the unbelievable twists and turns, the cheesy relationships, the bad acting. Introduce aspects that are more akin to movies and the audience might rise up in revolt or just find something else to watch.

What happens when Holt and his brethren introduce aspects of “real games” into social games?

“We want to innovate in gameplay, and one of the key areas we tried to do this in Woodland Heroes is we wanted the result of a player’s decision to matter in the game. There should be a loss state. You should feel that the stakes are high, so you take it more seriously. There’s a level of engagement you have when you go, ‘Oh crap, what do I do here?’ That, I think, is a fundamental tenet of what makes a good game,” said Holt. “A lot of games on the platform, in the pursuit of the broad public, have sometimes not delivered those essential elements for us.”

How many FarmVille players want to fail? How many players return after a long weekend to see their crops withered? If players wanted loss states why do they complain about them so much? Most new games today, like CastelVille have moved away from the spoilage mechanic.

But there is a “hardcore audience”

Developers Kixeye and Kabam have found luck with a “hardcore audience” and others like U4iA would like to join them.

U4iA (pronounced “euphoria”) believes that there is a new segment of players emerging: the hardcore social gamer. Facebook game creators Kixeye and Kabam have already discovered this. But Welch said in an interview that his company aims to shoot even higher on the quality bar, creating AAA-quality games along the lines of what Riot Games, creator of League of Legends, has done for web-based combat games.

There does seem to be a hardcore audience but how big is it and more importantly – do they pay? Seems like to me most payers are older woman.

Social games are soap operas like it or not

I understand how many of the people who enter the social game space hope for more, but that’s like saying you want to revolutionize the soap opera business. It’s great to see all these different perspectives in the industry but eventually people are going to have to come to grips with what we’re building. If all these experiments to create “real games” fail (I’m guessing most will have limited success) we of the social games industry should come to grips with what we’re building. And that isn’t all a bad thing; soap operas pioneered early television, more importantly how to make money. They entertained millions for decades, that is until social games came along!

Social games are today’s soap operas

Posted: January 6th, 2012, 6:47am CET by justingibbs

Seems like every week I read about another game industry veteran starting a social game company. Unhappy with what they see in the social game space they think they can do better and that usually means making them “real games”. Philip Holt, co-founder of social gaming startup Row Sham Bow, is a classic example.

“What we want to focus on are things that have frustrated us as gamers on social games, one of which is that they’re highly compulsive, but not very compelling. They’re just not the kinds of experiences that we long to play on that platform,” he said.

And how is Philip Holt going to create better games, well with the introduction of a loss state.

“We want to innovate in gameplay, and one of the key areas we tried to do this in Woodland Heroes is we wanted the result of a player’s decision to matter in the game. There should be a loss state. You should feel that the stakes are high, so you take it more seriously. There’s a level of engagement you have when you go, ‘Oh crap, what do I do here?’ That, I think, is a fundamental tenet of what makes a good game,” said Holt. “A lot of games on the platform, in the pursuit of the broad public, have sometimes not delivered those essential elements for us.”

I wish him well, more diversity in the social games space the better. But how many FarmVille players want to fail? How many players return after a long weekend to see their crops withered? If players wanted loss states why do they complain about them so much? Most new games today, like CastelVille have moved away from the spoilage mechanic.

The elusive hardcore audience

Still some developers, like U4iA dream of the elusive hardcore game audience - an audience that can appreciate failure states.

U4iA (pronounced “euphoria”) believes that there is a new segment of players emerging: the hardcore social gamer. Facebook game creators Kixeye and Kabam have already discovered this. But Welch said in an interview that his company aims to shoot even higher on the quality bar, creating AAA-quality games along the lines of what Riot Games, creator of League of Legends, has done for web-based combat games.

Some developers like Kixeye and Kabam have found luck with this audience but it’s certainly not the largest audience on Facebook. It seems to much their dismal the typical social gamer who “pays” is an older woman.

So if the largest and most lucrative audience is women why do some in the industry try so hard to serve a different audience or change the current audience? Maybe it’s a classic case of mistaking yourself for the customer or maybe it’s just their way of dreaming.

Who grows up wanting to create soap operas?

What Philip Holt is doing is the equivalent to moving to Hollywood with the dream to making blockbuster movies but only finding work making soap operas. They’re two different products for two different audiences. Even if the soap opera fan goes to the movies their expectations are very different. The same is true for social games. Social games are the equivalent of soap operas in a world where developers are dreaming of making movies. It would probably behoove Philip Holt and his brethren to understand the analogy.

But that isn’t all a bad thing. Soap operas pioneered early television, more importantly how to make money. They entertained millions for decades, that is until social games came along!

Can a social game make you cry?

Posted: August 1st, 2011, 1:25am CEST by justingibbs

I got into the game industry and joined Playdom to experiment with interactive drama. I dream of a future where we play or interact with games for the drama more than the game aspect. It’s a lofty goal but very similar to Bing Gordon’s dream at EA to see if a computer can make you cry.

“We see farther”, we crowed. We predicted the games business would develop to stand side by side with the $20 billion annual revenues of movies and recorded music. We foresaw a day when a New Hollywood would be created by “software artists” who harnessed Moore’s Law into a new category of art. We believed that their digital games would one day deliver the kind of emotional experiences we all enjoy in movies, what Stephen Spielberg describes as “sitting back and being washed over with emotion.”

Sadly though EA failed.

But we fell short of the lofty creative goal of “Can a Computer Make You Cry?” because we didn’t develop new models of character and narrative. Floyd, the robot friend in Steve Meretsky’s Planetfall, was a heart-warming sidekick but, no matter what words we typed into the Infocom parser, he died a sacrificial, text-only, death for us.

Bing has since had an epiphany and replaced his dream with a strange amalgamation. Instead of eliciting emotion through story he thinks the answer is allowing people to relive their gaming moments socially, to reinforce and create social connections.

But while we were looking for movies powered by millions of transistors, we ignored the emotions we were creating in games as a new kind of playground. Instead of creating emotion-laden, but passive stories, we elicited emotional moments off the screen, between friends, in the retelling, in the trash-talking. The emotional moments turned out NOT to have correlation with processing power, visual effects, and 3d graphics. The emotion came from who we played with, not what machine we played on. Games help us create richer photo albums of our lives.

So rather than trying to create stories and characters that “wash over” our audience, rather than trying to prove that a computer can make you cry, let’s create play spaces that help us make more and better friends. We are the characters, the heroes, the actors. And we are making stories together.

In that light Bing sees social games as the perfect beast but I completely disagree. I agree that social games help us connect but we aren’t building stories here. We aren’t the character, the heroes, the actors. I think their original goal to have computers make us cry is still attainable even if they failed. When EA started it was a much different environment, but as Bing mentions the playing field has changed with social games. And where Bing now sees social games as a place to make connections I see them as the perfect opportunity to try and make a computer, a game, an interactive experience make us cry.

It’s not a technology problem

Bing starts his post by describing Moore’s Law and how at EA they thought it would do the same for the video game industry. As processors got more powerful so would the game engines and graphics.

For 25 years, the videogame business has counted on Moore’s Law to deliver the promised land of the New Hollywood. We thought more powerful chipsets driving higher resolution pictures, more lifelike animations and bigger production budgets would almost automatically deliver the emotion of movies. We thought that amazing hardware would spontaneously generate resonant characters and heart-wrenching stories, but the highest points turned out to be a robot, a polygonal babe, and a horny swinger wearing a gold medallion.

Though good story has never needed technology to be. Even as movies became a popular medium for story books and comic books remained, even thrived. Story isn’t a technology problem, it’s a problem of creativity. They were led astray by the visual, Bing even admits to it.

They went after the wrong audience

We’re all familiar with the video game industry and its struggle to attract women. Most games are built for men and why not, they’re the ones lining up outside the stores. Listening to Bing talk of the early days at EA I would think them ecstatic if EA could deliver Star Wars in interactive form, with graphics equal to the movie. I would have loved playing that as a kid – fly the X-wing fighter, practice with the lightsaber, all that. But in reality if you handed me the controls I would just wreck shop. I would cut Obi-Wan’s arm off just to see what he’d do. A controller in my hand I could care less about the story.

However if you could create an interactive version of Gone with the Wind I would expect women to treat it very differently. Taken in by the story elements I would expect them to play the parts. Men, boys are the wrong audience to start experimenting with story.

Social games are a new opportunity

Where as Bing thinks the promise of social games is making connections I think they’re ripe for attaining his original goal at EA.

For one, a large percentage of the social game audience is female and they’re looking for story.

They also tended to prefer games that emphasized narrative and character development over combat and preferred solo to group gameplay.

Secondly, social games are easily accessible so if there is a hit the audience can grow overnight. And thirdly, the technology isn’t complex and is already in the hands of artists.

The dream to have computers make us cry was never a technology problem as Bing thought, it was a creative problem. What we need is artists and narrative designers to experiment with story. Social games seem to be the perfect opportunity to try and achieve the dream to have computers make us cry.

The best explanation for the economic meltdown

Posted: July 15th, 2011, 5:16pm CEST by justingibbs

The best explanation I’ve seen for the economic meltdown came from George Soros:

It is important to realize that the crisis in which we find ourselves is not just a market failure but also a regulatory failure, and even more importantly, a failure of the prevailing dogma about financial markets. I have in mind the Efficient Market Hypothesis and Rational Expectation Theory. These economic theories guided, or more exactly misguided, both the regulators and the financial engineers who designed the derivatives and other synthetic financial instruments and quantitative risk management systems which have played such an important part in the collapse.

Soros is laying much of the blame for the collapse at the feet of economist. I agree wholeheartedly. The more I study about economics the less impressed I become. My biggest complaint is why it isn’t treated more of a science. Some say it is too complex to study in that way, but wouldn’t have people said the same thing when doctors began studying the body? Where medical science has advanced by leaps and bounds in the last century, economics has spent that same time arguing a handful of concepts over and over again. Science is the history of disproven theories. Economics is still arguing as they have disproved nothing. It’s embarrassing.

Economists are basically witch doctors

In many ways economist aren’t much different from witch doctors. Most of their act is playing to our emotions rather than applying direct medicine. They spend their days trying to manipulate, working on their act and spectacle rather than trying to advance their knowledge of healing. No wonder they were such stooges for the banks and investment banks.

Their dogma starts early

As Soros said, it’s all about dogma. And interestingly enough Brit Marling, the Sundance breakout, can attest to that as well. Before turning to film she was an intern at Goldman Sachs and studied economics at Georgetown.

After three years of college, Marling spent her junior summer at Goldman Sachs in New York. “The experience there was deeply upsetting,” she confided. Her economic education she felt was more about indoctrination than exploration.

Their dogma never ends

As Dean Baker (an economist himself) points out over and over, most of the economists and nearly everyone we hear from about the economy completely missed the housing bubble. The biggest asset bubble in history and they missed it. Worse they seem to have learned nothing.

Nearly all economics reporters missed the housing bubble on the way up. They still seem determined to ignore it even after its collapse wrecked the economy.

Google Plus is the beginning of the end for social networks

Posted: July 11th, 2011, 6:26pm CEST by justingibbs

Google Plus has everyone talking. People asking for invites suggesting how it can beat Facebook, while others wonder if it ever could. As TechCrunch says, the war is on between Google Plus and Facebook. But is it really the beginning of the end for social networks?

Social networks are all about the newsfeed

Essentially the social network has become the newsfeed. Social networks provide the captive audience – your friends. You post because these people care and are more likely to respond with a comment. Prior to social networks blogs were all the rage and if you ever started one you probably know how lonely it could be. It’s like talking to an empty room, a dark empty room. And that was after you figured out what to write about in the first place. Social networks changed all that. You have a captive audience and you know exactly what to write about – yourself.

Which newsfeed, where do I post?

For most people today there are only two newsfeeds – Twitter and Facebook. LinkedIn is also making a good showing. Though essentially they have carved out their own niche. And now there is Google Plus. Where does it fit in? No need to answer, the fact that you have to ask is already changing the landscape. The next question is where do I post? Well when in doubt why not all of them? Posting to them all isn’t that difficult actually, many already support automatically posting from other feeds. You can post on Tumblr and have that automatically feed into Facebook. And now the social networks are getting more aggressive with transitioning your social graph. With Google Plus it certainly is a different landscape, almost as if the social networks are being marginalized.

Reminds me of instant messenger and its “end”

I use to work on Yahoo! Messenger and remember well the instant messenger wars. In Silicon Valley that war is ancient history. It started with ICQ, then came AOL Messenger. Friends would fight over which one to join. Then came Yahoo! Messenger and soon people would just join all of them. Then the natural thing was to start demanding interoperability.

Then came MSN Messenger and new clients that logged you into all of them – Meebo, Trillian, etc. The talk of interoperability died down and actually so did much of the hype around the whole instant messenger space. By the time GTalk entered the market much of the commotion had all but died down.

Instant messenger went from being all the rage to being something I got when I checked my email whether I needed it or not. The excitement I use to feel working on the Yahoo! Messenger team dissipated. I moved on, everyone moved on and that’s what I mean by “end”. I mean “end” in the way we say tech companies are dead. Granted there is still a lot of excitement in social networks – Facebook will set records with its IPO as Google Plus will likely set records for user growth. But I think we’ll look back to the Google Plus launch as the beginning of the end.

Finally made it into Google Plus

Posted: July 7th, 2011, 5:00am CEST by justingibbs

Now that I made it into Google + I can see what all the buzz is about and why some are saying Google Plus can’t compete with Facebook! Though so far it looks to be more competition for Twitter than Facebook.

All this Facebook talk reminds me a lot of the dot-com bubble

Posted: June 17th, 2011, 5:38pm CEST by justingibbs

Bubbles are a way of life in Silicon Valley and if you’re lucky you can ride one. I was lucky enough to ride the great dot-com bubble at Yahoo! Like a wave it washed me from LA to the Valley and once here I hoped for more bubbles. We all dream of working on that next revolutionary product but we’re also gamblers. If we’re lucky our startup hits the jackpot and IPOs ala Netscape, but we also know that in bubbles even bad companies can profit. Just look at theGlobe.com.

Being a gambler I think I’ve gotten pretty good at spotting bubbles, similarities I saw in the dot-com bubble and the one of today with LinkedIn, Pandora, and Groupon.

They haven’t even begun to turn on monetization

This quote came from an article about how P&G opened a store on Facebook.

Facebook will figure out a way to get people to sell on Facebook or through Facebook, and then figure out a way to take a cut from that. It’s a multibillion dollar opportunity.

Really? It’s that easy? So easy that they’re just waiting to turn it on when they need it?

They said the same thing about GeoCities in 1999. It powered some percentage of the whole Internet in those days and everyone thought it was only a matter of time before they figured out monetization. Yahoo! bought the service on those same expectations in 1999 only to close it down in 2009. Same words were mentioned about YouTube, it’s doing pretty well for Google but it’s more of a leverage play than a pure revenue source.

That isn’t to say that some companies haven’t figured out monetization, Google did. But more or less stumbled into it. There is a big difference between turning on monetization and trying everything under the sun until you hit strike gold. This talk of Facebook knowing exactly how to monetize but waiting to do so is crazy and such talk seems to become deafening during bubbles.

These are real businesses

A lot of people hold out that this bubble is different because these businesses have real revenues. True many in the Dot-com bubble didn’t but some did. I worked at Yahoo! and it had more than real revenue, it had growing profit. Even when things began to turn sour Yahoo! was still profitable and would tell the press that it was a very different company than those flaming dot-coms, it had real revenue. But soon it became apparent that a lot of those revenues were from those same dot-coms now on fire. When they burned out so went their ad budgets.

I’m betting the largest ad buyer on Facebook is Groupon and LivingSocial, then maybe Zynga. What if Groupon flames out? They’re already spending a massive amount on advertising, similar to dot-coms looking for portal deals in 1999. What if Zynga does? Facebook’s revenues might not look so hot.

What you should do is watch for slowing growth

A lot of these high flying tech companies get there by capitalizing on powerful trends and brand positioning. It was called first-mover advantage in the days of the dot-com bubble. In 1999 everyone thought they needed a place on the Internet and were planting their flag using GeoCities homepages. It was an unstoppable juggernaut but in time even that trend faded out. The party atmosphere ended and the really difficult work began. Most companies never make the transition and muddle on for years like GeoCities did under Yahoo!

When things are going up everyone takes credit for the success. “We added a million new users because of my feature”, because of this or that. But many times that growth is almost inevitable due to the trend and brand. Riding trends is a lot more about not fucking it up.

So when the trend peters out you should take heed. If Facebook’s numbers are slowing I would begin to question all this talk of taking on Apple or expanding into mobile. It changes managements focus. You go from one day thinking you’re unstoppable and will rule the world, to suddenly pulling people off projects to kick start growth again. Soon you question everything. It’s like trying to hold water in your hand.

That said, Sterling still thinks the site may be vulnerable. “[Facebook CEO] Mark Zuckerberg has characterized Facebook as a utility — a communications utility — but I’d argue that it hasn’t yet made itself into one the way that Google has,” Sterling told PEHub. “In the same same way that we joined Facebook because our friends did, we’re likely to leave if those same friends become less engaged,” he says.

Then again there’s evidence that Facebook isn’t slowing at all. Hopefully the trend is still going for Facebook, and even if it isn’t they can ride the bubble and parlay it into something.

The rise of Social Circles

Posted: May 31st, 2011, 4:52am CEST by justingibbs

Jason Schwartz, the founder of matchbook, says that [www.businessinsider.com] href="http://www.businessinsider.com/the-end-of-the-social-network-era-the-rise-of-the-social-circle-era-2011-5">we’re moving from the social network era into the social circle era. I agree, but I might be a bit biased as I’ve never been a big social network user. I didn’t use them much because I didn’t feel the need to share with “everyone” I added as a friend. Facebook is more of a phonebook for me, a way to connect with everyone I ever met but not a tool to share. If I’m going to share on Facebook I would just as likely share on Twitter so the whole world could see. If I’m going to share with friends I do what I’ve always done and email local friends, college friends, etc. This is also what’s at the heart of Schwartz’s argument and I’m sold on his concept of social circles. I could really use something like that, however I don’t exactly agree with his theory that such circles will be built automatically.

Facebook has quite a few tools for managing groups of friends. These fail because they rely on the user to manually curate these groups. Users won’t do the manual work necessary to make a Social Circle work, just like they won’t be selective with whom they friend on a check-in service.

One of the reasons I don’t share is I don’t know who will see it. For me to safely share I need to know exactly who will see my message. I’ve already lost track of who are my friends on Facebook, but let’s say Facebook gives me a way to automatically filter my friends. My question then would be can I trust it?

But could Google manage to make one automatically?

I can understand the appeal that algorithms will magically create and administer social circles, but then again there’s always algorithms arguments floating around Silicon Valley. They also don’t usually pan out. If anyone can make it work I would think it would be Google – they’re known for algorithms. Maybe they could create a social circle using Gmail. Would I use it? I couldn’t trust it completely as in theory the algorithm would constantly be adjusting who’s in my social circle and who isn’t. But maybe I would use it some of the time, perhaps to invite people to a parade or something. I doubt that would be enough for me to feel like it is anything other than a feature of Gmail and I think social circles have more potential – to be services in themselves.

Betting the battle for social circles will be more about positioning

All this reminds me of classic positioning marketing. Of all the brands in the world we identify them with something – Heinz is ketchup, Porsche is sports cars, Cadillac is premium but not as premium as BMW. Facebook is a phonebook to me. To many it might be something different but I doubt it will be difficult for them to morph into a social circle.

Schwartz thinks the leader in social circles will be whoever can crack the nut on how to create social circles automatically.

Solving this problem is going to be very tricky. If you want to know why Path and Color were able to raise so much money, it’s because they are tackling this problem, not because they solved it. The investors were placing a bet that if anyone can solve something as difficult as this, it will be those teams.

I’m betting it will end up being more of a battle of marketing. I’m waiting for such services, now one just needs to click for me. Maybe it will be a friends recommendation or one that catches fire on mobile. I’m not against having to manually create my circle, but I have to be sure who and who isn’t in my network at all times.

Are Facebook customers happy or just trapped?

Posted: May 16th, 2011, 1:16am CEST by justingibbs

Silicon Alley Insider ran an interesting poll this week How do you feel about Facebook? Of the 900 who took the pole, most were not too happy with Facebook to which Nicholas Carlson added his own anecdotal data.

This jibes with our own anecdotal data. Friends and colleagues tell us they use Facebook all the time, but they don’t actually “like” it. They feel stuck with it.

Such comments reminded me of when AOL increased the monthly fees for internet access just after the purchase of Time Warner in 2000. It went from $19.99 to like $20.99 and I remember reading that it was not a sign of trouble at AOL but more a move of strength. We all know what happened after that. Though in 2000 AOL looked to be on top of the world because they had such a lock on their customers, heck they could even increase the price and see no ill effects. But underneath it all customers had begun to hate AOL. They didn’t see the price increase as a fair exchange but more a sign that they needed to do everything they could to migrate away from AOL. As the following years would show, people hated AOL and felt trapped.

Now that doesn’t sound all that different from the comments Nicholas Carlson is hearing about Facebook. I doubt Facebook will fall as far as AOL did, but companies should be weary when their customers feel trapped. All those supposed lock-ins can fade quickly. AOL had a long list of lock-ins – email, chat, credit card data. It made switching harder but it didn’t stop what eventually became a mass exodus. How many of Facebook’s supposed lock-ins will fade?

Does Ping really need Facebook Connect?

Posted: September 3rd, 2010, 5:51pm CEST by justingibbs

Apple’s new social network Ping had Facebook Connect one minute and not the next. It’s a bit odd for a feature like that to disappear in less than 24 hours, but what I found intriguing was some people’s reactions across the blogosphere. Om Malik was severely disappointed:

As a long-time customer of Apple and its iTunes store, I’m severely disappointed that I can’t bring my pre-configured social graph to Ping. I hope Apple and Facebook both come to an agreement and kiss and make-up.

Maybe it’s just me but I don’t want my social graph to follow me. I like having different graphs at different services. Having Facebook Connect would help me pull those that I might want over, but at the same time I’m kind of hoping the cool ones will move on their own and we’ll create a new social graph. I think it’s the same way with dive bars or clubs – you always keep moving.

Facebook Connect will most likely not return to Ping

Some speculate that this just part of corporate one-upmanship.

Otherwise, Ping would really suck and the big losers in this game of corporate one-upmanship are the consumers, who probably — like me– just want recommendations from our friends, then buy those tunes.

Some believe that once it’s worked out, Facebook Connect will return. I highly doubt that, simply because Facebook charges for access.

According to AllThingsD, Facebook was responsible for turning off Apple’s access to its Facebook Connect API. Typically this API is open to just about any application developer. However, with higher-volume apps (think social games and services with lots and lots of users), Facebook apparently requires a special agreement for these kinds of connections.

Apple is huge, they’re the product company everyone wants to emulate, their fans are rabid. Why would they need to pay for access? I’m sure what Apple asked itself is what’s the value add for Facebook Connect? Given who they are and that there are people like me out in the world who actively want to recreate social graphs they couldn’t justify the expense.

When I asked Jobs about that, he said Apple had indeed held talks with Facebook about a variety of unspecified partnerships related to Ping, but the discussions had gone nowhere. The reason, according to Jobs: Facebook wanted “onerous terms that we could not agree to.”

Ping is directly challenging Facebook’s place as the de facto social graph

We would be surprised if this feature didn’t make a reappearance at some point. That’s a good thing, because Facebook is becoming the de facto social graph for many users and makes the friend discovery process much easier.

I would agree that it is the de facto social graph today, but that is what Apple is challenging directly with Ping. My money isn’t so much on Ping, but more on the fact that Facebook’s lock on the de facto social graph is fading. I can still remember when there was only one place to build a personal homepage – GeoCities. Eventually people discovered other places, then entirely new ways to establish a home on the Internet.

Facebook seems unstoppable as of late, but this encounter with Apple could open up some cracks in the walls.

Frivolous mediums evolve – so will social games

Posted: August 26th, 2010, 5:22pm CEST by justingibbs

Adam Rafkin has a very opinionated piece on GigaOM – Why Google has no game. It’s an interesting read but I feel like he’s just on the Facebook bandwagon. I remember a time when everyone was on the Google bandwagon and it was Yahoo! who looked like the chump. That’s the way they hype cycle rolls in Silicon Valley.

Adam starts off with quite a stretch.

Real social engagement comes from photo-sharing and chat. I thank Fred Wilson for that insight. It’s why FriendFeed was such a fantastic acquisition for Facebook: because they deeply understand that. Google should start by turning Picasa into a social application. If Google really cares about social engagement, copy Flickr.

As if all else doesn’t count as “real” social engagement. What does Adam mean by “real” social anyway? I’ve heard countless conversations started around social games.

Reading further you get the feeling that Adam just dislikes social games.

Many people are just not into social games. That’s right, half of Facebook users don’t play games, and many users hate games. Plus, the whole gaming ecosystem feels like it’s about to collapse on itself. It’s no wonder that Playdom sold out. For Facebook, games were a means to an end: a way to experiment with the pay-for-application-installs business model long enough to evolve into an advertising unit allowing brands and companies to promote (and pay for “likes” on) their Facebook Pages.

Lesson one of Product Management: Listen to your customer

I got into the social game industry six months ago and I was skeptical like many. Was it all a fad? I hated the viral spam as much as anyone. But social games had already done the impossible – garnered a large woman audience. That’s what intrigued me and the potential for interactive drama. Being a Product Manager I went in with open eyes and was a bit amazed at what I found. Some players actually loved sending virals, it was part of their game play. What was most encouraging though was how passionate some of the players were. Some of the games had become part of their daily lives and they would certainly let us hear it if we tweaked something they liked or were down. That kind of passion is a rarity. It’s what excites me about the medium and keeps me and the likes of Bing Gordon hopeful for it’s future.

We knock what we don’t understand

A lot of what Adam says reminds me of my friend and manga. My friend grew up on American comics and can’t stand manga because it’s black and white. To him it’s a step backwards, he doesn’t understand why people get so into it. However they do and they’re plunking down millions to feed their hunger.

A frivolous medium

Interestingly both comics and manga were considered frivolous when they began. However through the passion of their audiences and efforts of talented artists they both evolved.

Osamu Tezuka (1928-1989) is the godfather of Japanese manga comics. He originally intended to become a doctor and earned his degree before turning to what was still then considered a frivolous medium. With his sweeping vision, deftly intertwined plots, and indefatigable commitment to human dignity, Tezuka elevated manga to an art form.

-Back cover of Ode to Kirihito

Seeing audiences passion I expect the same evolution for social games.

The end of the one size fits all social graph

Posted: August 19th, 2010, 6:38pm CEST by justingibbs

Google’s Chrome presentation at GDC Europe, left Mashable’s Ben Parr asking just how will Google determine your social graph?

We find the “Apps your friends like” section to be especially intriguing: is Google going to use Gmail, Buzz or something else to determine who your friends are?

It’s a very good question and it’ll be interesting to see what Google comes up with. However at the same time I have a small sense of dread for having yet another social graph. Is that a sign that I’m getting dated or that the social graph is? Depending on which it is, one of us is due for an update.

The social graph is so last year, or is it?

Working in the consumer Internet space I joined many of the social networks long before people heard of them, from Friendster to Cyworld America. The whole thing was novel years ago but now just seems so common. In a way it reminds me of how everyone cared about interoperability between messenger clients years ago. Today there still is nothing in the way of interoperability and yet people couldn’t care less. People’s Internet habits seem to change as quick as the weather. Messenger clients haven’t gone away, they’ve just evolved and handed the limelight over to newer trends.

I don’t prune my social graph, I just make new ones

It’s widely perceived that Facebook users can’t be bothered to recreate their social graphs and that these “switching costs” make user-acquisition too difficult for competing services. A win by Foursquare – heck, even survival – while in direct competition with Facebook will call that assumption into question.

- Places Is Facebook’s Biggest Bet To Date

For me it’s the exact opposite, I want to switch. I wanted to get far away from MySpace and was happy Facebook was there. I’m happy when I’m on GChat and my friends on Yahoo! Messenger can’t see me. Frankly I’ve forgotten who some of my Yahoo! friends are. Messenger is old, it has my old friends on there and like many of them I’ve moved on.

I guess I could always prune my social graph on Facebook or Messenger but I just don’t care too expend the effort. Plus I feel bad in a way about deleting someone I once knew but have since forgot. The only list I care to prune is the contact list on my phone and it would be a stretch to call that a social graph.

So in the end I counter the perceived notion that there are “switching costs”. I’d rather jump and create a new social graph that better represents my current life than prune an old one. Like leaving bread crumbs to mark my path, I’ll leave the Internet sprinkled with my old social graphs.

All too often my feed is just noise

Email was great when I first got an account. I eagerly awaited every message. Now I can never get my inbox to zero. I feel the same way with my feed on Facebook. I know I can filter it, but I’m not going to for the same reason I don’t prune my social graph.

Location just adds to my social graph fatigue

I have a lot of friends so when I come to town I can’t possibly see all of them, so I’ve taken to only alerting those that I can see on that trip. It’s easier if the others don’t know I’m in town, helps to avoid uncomfortable conversations. Also helps avoid the, “I don’t want to hang out with you outside of work” conversation. Why do I have these work friends in my social graph? Because they asked to be added. All of this just ads to the anxiety I feel about my social graphs – just who’s exactly in it and will get this message? We’ve already seen people be fired for what they send out. Why do I need more anxiety in my life? Should I be fearful of who might show up next time I give out my location?

All this anxiety makes me want to just step away

Speaking of anxiety, every time Facebook releases a new feature the more I’m worried about my privacy. Can I really trust them with my social graph? Can I trust anyone with my social graph?

I already established that I’m not going to prune my social graph so that leaves me with little choice other than pack up and move on.

The death of the one size fits all social graph

In the end I find myself taking the easy route and using Facebook less and less to share. I share less personal stuff and tend more toward broadcasting links – which I find is better a task for Twitter. But I still like some aspects of social graphs like Facebook. What I really would like is multiple social graphs – a social graph for my family, close friends, and local friends. Maybe I’ll keep Facebook as my clearinghouse of every friend I’ve ever known and LinkedIn for my business connections.

Multiple social graphs could work, however that strategy doesn’t really leverage the true power of the social graph. I’m sure Mark Zuckerberg has dreams for more unique ways to use our social graph, however based on my personal use I think I’m heading in the opposite direction. What I really want is more akin to Rapportive, a Gmail add-on that surfaces contextually relevant information about the email sender combed from the web. Open an email from a recruiter and see their avatar image, job title from LinkedIn,Twitter feed, etc. This is what I need – a loose social graph.

Maybe Rapportive can build in some levels to its social graph. If I email the person back we’re at level two of the graph. Maybe this unlocks other information that can be displayed. Maybe Rapportive can pull up information like what game I’m currently playing, book I’m reading, song I’ve starred.

Of course I don’t need this all to become noise either, I don’t want all of the info on this person. Maybe they could randomize it – surprise me. That’s what my daily routine needs more of anyway – fun surprises. And I’m being serious about the surprises.

Surprise me what social game my insurance agent is playing. Now that would be truly viral.

There is hope

After Facebook introduced Places all the talk last week was about what Foursquare would do now? From what it sounds like they’re moving toward splintering the all encompassing Facebook social graph. Just what I needed.

The goal is to make Foursquare a product that does a better job than Facebook Places of keeping users in touch with their real friends – as supposed to the 700 people they know on Facebook.

Yahoo!’s problem is that it never knew what it was

Posted: August 17th, 2010, 3:09pm CEST by justingibbs

In the post, What Happened to Yahoo, legendary programmer Paul Graham dives into how Yahoo! fell from grace. I was at Yahoo! around the same time as Paul, we even worked on a few projects together and I agree with much of his post. The availability of easy money allowed Yahoo! to truck along without ever actually defining what it was.

But what Yahoo really needed to be was a technology company, and by trying to be something else, they ended up being something that was neither here nor there. That’s why Yahoo as a company has never had a sharply defined identity.

Yahoo! still doesn’t understand what it is. It’s almost comical how to this day they still try to hedge around actually defining themselves. Even a 100 million dollar [www.businessinsider.com] href="http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-yahoos-brandindex-2009-10">ad campaign can do little for them.

Lack of identity meant it was impossible to be strategic

Paul explains Yahoo!’s other mistake was to not take programming seriously. Unlike Google where they are manic about hiring the best Engineers, Yahoo! was content to take on mediocre Engineering talent. As Paul says, the Product Managers were in charge. I of course was one of those annoying Product Managers and while I never felt we had mediocre Engineers I certainly felt the lack of direction all stemming from Yahoo!’s inability to define itself.

I liken corporate strategy to football. Say it’s been a tough game, we’ve played our hearts out and we’re still tied going into halftime. In the locker room we’re all looking to our coach for direction, for a plan that can ensure us the win. But all too often the senior executives lack a clear actionable plan, they may think they have one (ala Yahoo!) but all it amounts to is, “Play harder and we’ll win”. It can be heart felt and emotional but if there isn’t a strategy it falls flat the minute we retake the field. What we need to hear in the locker room is a plan, “we’re a running team so we’re going to run the ball down their throats until they leave our star receiver open, then we’ll get it to him in the in zone”.

As Paul pointed out, all Yahoo! knew about itself is that it was winning in 1999. When things turned ugly they’re locker room speech came up hollow – I know, I was there. Paul believes Yahoo! might have still saved itself if it had been a home for the best and brightest Engineers. Another way to look at it is to expect the players to come up with their own strategy, for the star player to take it on their shoulders to pull out the win. I don’t disagree but I doubt they could have pulled out the win. Google is a good example, their Engineers have done some great things but they’ve also come up short a few times as of late – Google Wave and the privacy fiasco around [srph.it] href="http://www.dailyfinance.com/story/company-news/oops-google-says-were-very-sorry-for-the-big-buzz-blunder/19357443/">Buzz come to mind.Google has a mission – to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. The closer their Engineers execute toward that the better, the farther they stray the more questionable the results. Anyone remember Google Lively?

In the end it’s a team sport. If you don’t have a strategy you can hope some star players manage to pull out a hat trick. I for one would rather have the coach come into the locker room at halftime with a plan.

Using storyboards to build social games

Posted: August 3rd, 2010, 4:04pm CEST by justingibbs

If a car comes off the assembly line with only three wheels it’s obvious to everyone that someone screwed up. I wish that were true in the software industry. Maybe the Product Manager knows when a new email product is missing a “wheel” but does the rest of the build team? Maybe if they read the specs, but how often is that done? When was the last time the artist read the spec? I find the problem only gets worse when building social games, but we’ve stumbled upon a tool to make it a little more obvious a social game is missing a “wheel” – storyboards? Using storyboards we’ve found that we can lessen the confusion about what you’re building and even enlist the entire team in contributing to the design.

Storyboards

Of any product I’ve ever built, social games have to be the most open-ended. Everyone has a different vision in their head. Even when writing a screenplay I have a structure to cling to. Games are a different beast all together. To help get everyone on the same page we started using storyboards on my last project. Most games start with either a concept doc or if you’re lucky a full Game Design Document (GDD). As the Product Lead I would take that and write out use cases. However instead of handing those over to Engineering to start building we turned many of them into storyboards. Capturing a typical play session in storyboards we not only found it helpful in communicating the design but in advancing the design.

Allowed us to engage the entire team in design

I like to engage my entire team in building the game. Many of us are in this industry because we like games so why not collect everyone’s input. However it’s a bit cumbersome to get everyone from the Game Designer to Engineering, and Customer Service in one room let alone on the same page. Having not been privy to earlier design discussions most input isn’t all that helpful but using the storyboards we found we were engaging everyone in a more productive way.

We weren’t a room full of people with our own ideas or vision in our heads. In a typical meeting we might draw a diagram or two on one of the white board to clarify something. With up to a 100 slides in the storyboard it was equal to a 100 diagrams spread about the room. Everyone in the meeting understood the user experience with the current design, so our time was spent arguing how best to improve that design.

Highlighted issues we couldn’t see in use cases

Use cases are always helpful to highlight something you or the Game Designer might have missed. Seeing some of those use cases in storyboard form brought even more issues to light. Ultimately anything that isn’t caught in preproduction will cause trouble down the line. If it’s something major it might call for a major course correction – which no one enjoys. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words and that certainly goes storyboards too. Never hurts to see a little emotion too, which is nearly impossible to communicate through a use case.

Improved communication

Having storyboards I think if I would use them even if I went back to typical web development. It isn’t that far from using flows to diagram a product but I feel like it goes even further – to capture more the experience you’re trying to build.

I use to say, “you never really know a product until you’ve done a few use cases, or a few hundred”. Now I might add, “and have done a few storyboards”. One of the biggest problems of relying on use cases was that few ever read them, but having a visual and one charged with emotion goes a long way in the communication department.

Mouse ears for me

Posted: July 28th, 2010, 6:36am CEST by justingibbs

The rumors started last week with a TechCrunch article and today - Disney Paying Up To $763 Million For Social Gaming Company Playdom. So it looks like mouse ears for me and a free trip to Disneyland.

It certainly changes the landscape for social games. Also plays to the theory that the game industry at large is moving toward social games.

Companies that have embraced casual games have been the ones that have been able to revolutionize the games business. Those that have held onto the core games have not. Look at Facebook, they embraced casual games. Apple with the iPhone embraced casual games. Look at the three major consoles. Who won? The Wii. Why? They embraced casual games.

No related posts.

The iPad screams for a new form of entertainment to compliment it

Posted: May 2nd, 2010, 5:54pm CEST by justingibbs

I spent most of Saturday playing with my new iPad at WordCamp San Francisco 2010. Of course it was a bit odd playing around with the famously proprietary device while Richard Stallman was on stage, but oh well. I have to say I’m very impressed with the iPad. I bought it mostly as an e-reader and excuse to test games, but am surprised at how the device fills me with a desire for other forms of interactive entertainment.

At home I love streaming Netflix movies through a Roku. Equally I was happy to see I could stream the same movies on the iPad as well. However I haven’t been able to sit more than a minute watching any of them on my iPad. My thumbs are right there, I want to interact, I want to do more than just watch. For me static media isn’t going to be enough, I want more.

Sure I can jump on Twitter or some other social media apps but I find even those don’t capturing my attention. I want more, I want entertainment. So I download a few games. Yet even these don’t keep my attention for long. Sure they’re clever how they take advantage of the iPad’s novel interface but I just don’t find them that compelling. Maybe it’s a consequence of that very novelty? Maybe it’s still early in the evolution of these games? In either case I find myself wanting more.

What I want is a mashup of Netflix and games – interactive drama. It would be more akin to visual novels or dating sims. Sadly the only visual novel I could find in the App Store was in Japanese and there are no dating sims yet. After spending the day with the iPad I find it to be as revolutionary as Steve Job’s attests and believe it should find an equally revolutionary medium to complement it.

Will Apple pull an end-around Facebook with social games?

Posted: April 27th, 2010, 5:03pm CEST by justingibbs

On TechCrunch over the weekend Michael Arrington claimed it the age of Facebook.

Someday, maybe a decade from now, some new technology will rise and allow other companies to threaten Facebook. But until then there is little to stop them. Their march to dominance has just begun.

I agree that with Michael that Facebook has stolen the limelight from Google however I’m not as sure they will reign for a decade. One serious threat on the horizon – social games. Some go as far as to claim social games the killer app of social networks. According to a recent PopCap survey, 49% of the time social gamers login to Facebook specifically to play games.

That’s great for Facebook, currently it’s the home of social games. However I doubt Facebook is that comfortable with such a moniker. Facebook has already taken steps to limit the viral nature of social games, showing more of a concern to fight against spam. Facebook’s hesitation to fully embrace social games fully leaves the door wide open for competition. And seeing as how Facebook takes a 30% cut from game developers with Facebook credits they’re practically driving developers to seek out alternatives. In steps in Apple with Game Center. And how far behind could Google be with Android?

Michael is correct that no one will be able to take Facebook head on, but they can surely do an end-around by embracing social games. It might not be enough to topple Facebook but it could give some a beachhead. A decade is a long time to try and stay on top.

What do you think about Facebook leaving the window for social games open?

Social games are like mini startups – always in search of a business model

Posted: April 25th, 2010, 5:16pm CEST by justingibbs

After working for a fat startup that died I was introduced to lean startups by Eric Ries, I even attended Eric’s fist workshop. Friday I was lucky enough to attend Eric’s first Lean Startup Conference . Where as most hate conferences this one was power packed - Kent Beck, Steve Blank, and Randy Kosimar riled everyone up enough to run out and begin their own startups if they hadn’t already. But a startup of my own was never dream of mine so I ran out trying to figure out how to apply the methodology at Playdom. And when you think about it, each social game is like a mini startup.

It’s a dynamic hits driven business

Social game companies have already shown that there is a business model behind virtual goods and games but as we all know, every new game is a new opportunity for success as well as failure. It’s just like Hollywood and as William Goldman says:

Nobody knows anything.

That doesn’t mean Hollywood executives are stupid, but refers to the fact that prior to a movies release, Hollywood has no idea how well a film will do. It’s the same for social games but where as movies are static, social games are highly dynamic. That isn’t to say you can interact with them but that they’re continually evolving. Testing features to see if it will improve monetization, engagement, lifetime value, etc. Startups do the same thing.

Search for a business model

One of the tenets of lean startups is understanding that a startup is in the search business. Not the search business like Google, but as Steve Blank says – for a business model.

A startup is the organization used to search for a scalable business model. It’s all about the search, not execution or maximizing profits.

Blank goes on to explain that because it’s a search, startups have different metrics than a traditional business. Where they think of balance sheets and cash flow, a lean startup worries about viral coefficient, lifetime value, etc. That certainly sounds a lot like the social game business.

Built to learn

As Eric points out, lean startups also differ from fat startups in that they’re built to learn not execute.

Many founders believe that early stage startups are endeavors of execution. The customer is known, the product is known, and all we have to do is act.

Eric takes a different approach. He believes that many early stage startups are labors of learning. The customer is unknown, the product is unknown, and startups must be built to learn.

In many ways the same is true for social games. The industry is still young and wide open. The majority of players are female, the game industry has never seen that before. The game industry has a good idea what guys look for, but women?

Currently the industry use game mechanics to engage players but is there a potential to employ other mechanics? Hint, hint…

Social games as lean startups

As Steve Blank explains, lean startups execute customer development and lean startup methodology. I get to do the same with social games at Playdom. Exciting times.

Xbox live for the web – Mark Pincus keynote

Posted: April 21st, 2010, 7:30am CEST by justingibbs

Today I had the privilege to see Mark Pincus deliver the keynote at arguably the first social game conference. Many things in his keynote caught my ear but three in particular.

It’s going to be an app world
Made multiple comparisons to television
Need to curate the audience

An app world

The meme going around in Silicon Valley is that the future of mobile is apps and since mobile is the future – it’s also the future of the Internet. Apple is certainly a big proponent where as Google is frightened about what that might mean for search. So far Zynga and the social game industry has just dabbled in the apps market, at least where the iPhone is concerned. So if Mark sees apps as the future that sure means a big change for Zynga, for everyone in the industry. Up to now there’s been a big divide between mobile and social game companies – different revenue streams, user base, and distribution.

Multiple comparisons to television

More than once Mark mentioned social games and television. Spoke of how he was on the hunt for a new show Sunday nights, a show he could really get into and how it should be the same for social games. On another topic he mentioned how Zynga needs to strike a balance between adding and taking away features or risk their games becoming to complicated. Comparing the balance to the TV series Lost and how it isn’t fun anymore, it lost something.

It’s natural to compare the emerging social game industry to Hollywood, but maybe Mark is thinking about it more than most. Which led me to notice something else during the conference – we were still a lot of gamers talking about games. That might seem odd to say, but is there potential for more beyond games? Listening to Mark I might hazard a guess that he’s thinking beyond games.

Need to curate the audience

Mark also mentioned his concern for when a user has a bad experience in a game. It’s the classic – one bad experience might turn people off. Combined with the desire to see people search for social games like he searches for a new show to get into on Sundays and it all reminded me how unproven the social gaming market is. Sure FarmVille has revolutionized the gaming world but it’s only been two years, hardly enough time to prove it’s long term viability. Games aren’t going anywhere but the reach FarmVille has might not be repeatable.

Xbox Live for the web

Mark sort of wrapped his keynote up in saying he wants to see social games evolve into Xbox live for the web. It would have persistent navigation, universal feeds, and user communication channels. I couldn’t agree more but would also like to see the medium experiment with other mechanics to create engagement – maybe something more akin to Hollywood such as drama.

“Don’t Make Me Think” for social games?

Posted: April 8th, 2010, 5:40pm CEST by justingibbs

I’ve built and designing web pages since 1996. Having seen the art of web design evolve I can honestly say the best book I read on the subject and recommend more than any other is “Don’t Make Me Think” by Steve Krug. It brought a sense of clarity I had never felt before. In 1996 people were trying anything and everything when designing web pages. Anything was possible so it was time to experiment. Which is great but as Krug’s book pointed out, visitors didn’t care much for our experiments. They typically only spent a few seconds on any web page and were quickly looking elsewhere. “Don’t Make Me Think” made this painfully obvious and then explained the conventions that had emerged over the years. Your logo goes in the top left hand corner or across the top of the page, don’t use fancy words in your navigation menu, on and on. “Don’t Make Me Think” seemed to cut through all the endless possibilities and get down to business.

Now that I’m building social games I can’t help but wish there was an equivalent book to give some clarity. A book that could quickly outline the conventions emerging today. I know many in the field would throw up their arms and say each game is unique and hence the menu system should be designed accordingly. However I heard the same things with web design and when you get right down to it, our audience isn’t that much different than those surfing web pages. Seconds lost trying to figure out how to add neighbors or add a bookmark can cost you that customer. I know how to make a link big and bring attention to it, but everything can’t have emphasis. It’s all a balance; a balance easier made if you know the conventions. Thankfully a much smarter man than I outlined them for web development, now can someone do that for social games? Granted it might still be a bit early, but I’m sure eventually Krug or someone will write “Social Games, Please Don’t Make Me Think”. On second thought that might not be the best title, but you get the point.

Joining Playdom and the social game phenomenon

Posted: March 13th, 2010, 8:56pm CET by justingibbs

I start at Playdom on Monday. I’m incredibly excited to dive head first into the social game arena and with a company like Playdom. The market is wide open, it’s the Wild West and I feel incredibly fortunate to be getting in at this point. Being the Wild West I hope to test the medium’s potential for interactive drama. Unlike virtual worlds, social games have the audience and they’re hungry for something new, for interactive entertainment.

Hollywood meets A/B split testing

The opportunity is also exciting because it’ll allow me to use my experience as a Product Manager building online apps and apply that toward entertainment. Imagine applying the type of feedback loops we see on the Internet to movies? Split test a movie or video game in real-time? I’ll also get the opportunity to leverage my years of studying screenwriting. It’s a very different world from trying to optimize a feature in Yahoo! Messenger to trying to figure out what game feature or story twist was more entertaining. It’s a different game and one I’m desperate to get into.

Saying goodbye to Visual Purple

It’s with some trepidation that I say goodbye to Visual Purple. I learned a lot about interactive story from the seasoned team there. Their roots are in interactive movies from the 90′s, producing such hits as Silent Steel and Blue Force. Beyond that they’re experience with interactive story goes as far back as Leisure Suit Larry.

I’ll miss reminiscing about Hollywood’s multiple attempts to make the medium interactive – from games or interactive drama. I remember returning from the 2009 Screenwriting Expo where Anthony Zuiker was pitching is digi-novel Level 26.

Scene from Leisure Suit Larry

I mentioned it at the office and was met with tale after tale of similar attempts to merge Hollywood and interactive story. From Mr. Payback and the doomed CSI Second Life tie-in, to expensive startups we’ve never heard of.

It was great learning about the convoluted history of interactive story and actually build training simulations that almost crossed over to interactive drama. I’ll miss it, but I’m hopeful social games will open up a new chapter for interactive drama.

Will social games push users to open data standards?

Posted: March 10th, 2010, 4:53pm CET by justingibbs

Social gaming is getting a lot of buzz lately. Not only is the industry profitable but it’s driving a lot of Facebook usage – the killer-app of social networks. A recent study from PopCap showed that many are using Facebook as a game platform.

Nearly half (49%) of the times when they log into social networks, social gamers do so specifically to play social games.

But no industry likes to be dependent on one company. Zynga has already begun to try and move away from Facebook by launching FarmVille.com. Social game developers love the Facebook firehose but don’t want to be dependent on it, which makes the latest version of BuddyPress interesting. With version 1.2.1 installation is as easy as adding a plugin to a standard WordPress blog.

Now you can use BuddyPress with your single site installation of WordPress, and you can keep your existing theme. Seriously, could BuddyPress have made it any easier for you to add social networking to your site? I know I can’t wait to try it out this weekend, how about you?

Which leads me to ask – will the growth of open independent social networks and protocols become a new platform for social games? And if they do, will social games in turn push users to these open data standards?

The first hurdle is registration

Having to register and setup an account had already kept me from participating in many an online forum and the same is likely with social networks. I can barely keep my Facebook account up to date much less MySpace, Friendster, and Orkut. With Ning I only have one login to access any social network they host. BuddyPress could integrate a similar type of solution using Gravitar or OpenID.

Second hurdle is content over connections

Ning has certainly made a good business out of servicing independent user-generated social networks. They aren’t exactly open but as an example they can be very telling. For one, Ning shows that it is more a content play than connecting with friends like on Facebook. Ning users setup networks around a club, organization, or a fan club. Much of its social networks can be considered niche.

Get a boost from social games

Ning has already proven that independent social networks can work, but like name brand social networks they can probably benefit from an infusion of social games. BuddyPress already supports a plugin framework which can be used to create some types of social games. Knowing that these independent social networks will be about content, imagine a social network about bread having a social recipe game? And if you don’t want to build it how about pulling from the WordPress plugin community or social game companies – who wouldn’t want more distribution.

Push for open data standards

If BuddyPress proves half as succesful as WordPress it will be a huge win for open data standards. It will also lend support for OStatus and other open standards. Combine that with Google Buzz, built on open data standards, and you can see a few cracks forming in Facebook’s walled garden.

But I think the biggest push might come from the social game developers trying to lessen their dependence on the Facebook fire hose. That might explain why Streamy CEO, Don Mosites, recently joined Zynga to work on a special project.

CEO Don Mosites, for one, is heading to Zynga to work on a “new, special project”. He won’t tell me what it is, but he promises it will be “big”. To be continued, I suppose.

If it’s true and social games are the killer-apps of social networks, it isn’t too much of a stretch to see their migration to open data standards migrating users there as well.

Sometimes story is more problem solving than art

Posted: March 2nd, 2010, 4:47pm CET by justingibbs

Most people saw the previews for Law Abiding Citizen and rightly stayed away. I of course sat through it. As a struggling screenwriter I see a lot of bad movies to see where they go wrong. This one however went wrong for a reason I wasn’t expecting. The story and movie fail because the villain couldn’t clearly and concisely state their reasoning. At one point Jamie Foxx’s character asks the villain point blank why he’s killing innocent people and all the villain can come up with is “They’ll get the message.” If you know anything about creating movies, they’re all about questions. Will he get the girl? Will Superman prevail? In this movie we want to know if Jamie Foxx’s character will stop the villain but also why the villain is killing? It’s in the back of your mind the whole time because the movie keeps bringing it up but never answers it. Since the movie nor the villain himself can adequately answer the question the movie fails.

But how did the movie makers get themselves into such a predicament?

Convinced themselves that providing an answer was unnecessary
Made poor choices when designing the story

Convinced themselves that providing an answer was unecesary

The old adage is still true:

If you can’t put it into words, you don’t understand it.

For screenwriters that translates to – if you can’t put it into a log line or elevator pitch that excites people to see your movie, you don’t have a movie worth making. A novice and struggling screenwriter myself I of course tried to ignore this – “I know the log line isn’t that exciting but once you read the whole thing you’ll see it’s magic.” If anyone was nice enough to actually read one of my scripts it always came back with the same comment – it sucked. It’s a novice mistake to believe other things can get you by the old adage.

The makers of Law Abiding Citizen may not be as novice but they’re still guilty of the same offense. Maybe they thought other parts of the story would make up for it, or the actors could pull it out, or like I suspect – just hoped somehow in the end it would magically work. They were right about one thing; whatever they did allowed them to get studio approval to make the movie despite its glaring hole. A hole I suspect was present in the log line and pitch, though they still greenlit the movie.

Made poor choices when designing the story

Of course your villains don’t always have to explain their motivation or even be rational, they can simply be evil. But that isn’t the story Law Abiding Citizen wanted to tell, it wasn’t simply a story about escape from or stopping an evil villain. It was a story about how a law abiding and sympathetic character turns into a villain, then the escape part. The first scenes show how he’s the perfect family man – a loving father and husband. His family is then murdered in front of his eyes and next we see him arguing with the lead prosecutor not to cut a deal with one of the killers. Jump ten years and that same sympathetic character is now killing innocent people in the justice system. The movie never establishes that the justice system was particularly corrupt, just not perfect. So what we see as the audience is a sympathetic character turn into a monster killing innocent people. It’s hard to swallow. Basically you can’t have it both ways. Either he’s evil and must be stopped or he’s killing in the name of something. In this movie they try to make the switch and all with no rhyme or reason when the villain can’t even explain himself.

One of the most famous MacGuffins

This is a story problem. One that you face in telling almost any story. There are of course tricks and ways to fix story problems. If there isn’t enough tension add a ticking clock.

Add a ticking clock time pressure to the main plot goal and a little ticking clock to each scene if possible – bomb about to go off, meeting, deadline, race, running out of something important.

- Writing A Great Script Fast In A Nutshell

Probably the most famous of these tricks is the MacGuffin. You may not know what it is or why people need it, you just know that they have to have it.

What the makers of Law Abiding Citizen did was equivalent to putting in a MacGuffin, only to turn around and require the story to tell us all about it. Making him sympathetic painted themselves into a corner. They had to explain the killings and as we can see, they never did come up with an adequate solution.

I wish it was more magical

This is also the type of story problem Pixar runs into but solves using a creative team and they do it better than almost anyone in Hollywood. They understand story and aren’t willing to try and skirt the problems, they hit them head on. When I started writing screenplays I found myself hoping for that magic more than ever. In fact my education in screenwriting could be summed up as constant beatings at the hands of readers to make me realize that there is no magic. Screenwriting is more problem solving than magic. Your first lesson – if you can’t put it into words you don’t understand it.

But we all believe in magic don’t we? This quote from Adam Rodnitzky about startups seems only fitting when you switch “technology” for “magic”.

It’s important to get customer validation early on. You can have the greatest technology, or website, or service, or whatever, but it’s ultimately meaningless if you haven’t verified that there are actually customers willing to spend money on or around what you do.

Are MMOs the best model for real time story?

Interactive drama won’t be about the technology

Posted: February 19th, 2010, 9:38pm CET by justingibbs

Tim O’Rielly recently posted about a dream he had for augmented reality and fiction.

I share this dream as a reminder that the fiction and entertainments of the future may have a very different form than the fiction of today. The first metamorphosis is just to change the medium, in the way that the paper map or atlas morphed first into online mapping sites.

In a lot of ways what he’s describing in his post is interactive story, or more specifically interactive drama. The technology is usually what draws people to interactive drama, but it’s the story that makes them run for the hills.

Story is hard

As Robert McKee has a funny line comparing aspiring writers to aspiring music composers.

If your dream to compose music, would you say to yourself: “I’ve heard a lot of symphonies… I can also play the piano… I think I’ll knock one out this weekend”?

McKee’s message – story is hard and it takes study. I’ve spent the last 10 years just trying to write a good screenplay. I’ve written lots of screenplays, none of them good so who cares. If the story can’t hold an audience no amount of technology is going to change that. It might prompt some posts on TechCrunch but the buzz will fade and the artist will move on to more rewarding projects.

Adding technology only adds to the difficulty of creating story

A few people have been plugging away at the interactive drama conundrum for nearly two decades. I’ve been plugging away for 5 years and have nothing to show for it but half-finished scripts, mock-ups, and this blog. Chris Crawford is probably the most dedicated in a field where I’ve seen more than a few come and go. It’s a tough problem to solve and it gets old when no one finds mainstream success. To this day when you explain interactive drama most people reply, ”You mean like those Choose Your Own Adventure books from the 80’s?”

Choose Your Own Adventure diagram by David Sky

There’s a reason Choose Your Own Adventure books were for kids, they’re really hard to write. David Sky does a great job of mapping out the branching storylines. Seeing it laid out you can better appreciate when Chris Crawford discusses the problems of branching storylines. The author had to keep everything in their head and resolve every storyline in a satisfactory way. It’s hard enough to perfect one storyline, try multiple intermingling.

Even though branching is the most common method for creating interactive drama there are others, or at least other theories. Chris Crawford has his approach. I think there is a lot that can be done with perceived agency.

Unanswered question

In many ways those of us in the field plug away with one unanswered question hanging over our heads – do audiences actually want the interactivity in their stories? The question has probably been the impetus for more than a few to leave the field as we can’t get the answer we want until we find mainstream success.

I know personally that it was the interactivity that drew me to the Choose Your Own Adventure books as a kid, however I also remember jumping back and forth to see how each storyline played out. Was it the interactivity that I enjoyed or was it the story? It all reminds me of how for years people told ATT they wanted picture phones. Hundreds of millions of dollars and decades later they gave them the Picturephone, but all people did was dial and walk away.

What we need are more artists

Film pioneers first occupied their time filming Vaudeville acts and oncoming trains. It wasn’t until the discovery of continuity editing that artists created the modern film. And when you really look at it, modern film doesn’t make much sense. We know logically that Superman will win in the end, he always does. But we still go along and emotionally feel that he might not. The artist is able to weave his tale and play with our emotions.

I hope the same will be true for interactive drama. Right now we mostly have technologists in the field, what we need are more artists. And I think they’re coming for a few reasons:

There’s a captive audience thanks to Facebook – artists can get feedback and social gaming companies are looking to feed that audience anyway possible
Hollywood model is dieing – they need to find a new model
Technology is cool – it draws buzz

Remember, it’s about the story

All that said, there are some examples of succesful interactive dramas – just from Japan. Look at visual novels and dating sims. To some these might only be scratching the surface of what the technology is capable of, however remember that it’s mostly about the story. I hope we see more variations, but it’s more about the story. Dan Hon said pretty much the same thing in his piece about ARGs – it’s not about the tricks and games but the story.

Will Google Buzz support social games?

Posted: February 12th, 2010, 5:56pm CET by justingibbs

I’m catching a lot of flack for being a believer in Google Buzz. Interestingly enough most of the flack is coming in through Google Buzz itself. One theme I keep hearing is “Where’s the social games?” The launch of Google Buzz brings up an interesting debate – are social games are the killer app of social networks.

With Google’s launch of its social networking feature for Gmail and mobile devices, Google Buzz, Tuesday, some are already speculating what’s next for new service. A killer app for Buzz? Social games.

If social games are the killer app, the question then becomes – is Google Buzz going to support social games? Off of the top of my head I can think of a few reason for and against it.

Reasons not to support social games

Facebook is already having difficulty striking a balance between viratlity and spam
Social games have the potential to change the dynamic of the social network itself – A-ya Chiu of Taiwan added over 4,400 friends on Facebook to decorate her virtual house in Pet Society
Have to deal with app developers – It can be a pain as we’ve seen the flack over Apple’s app store, however Google has already dived into this with the Android app store

Reasons to support social games

Certainly promotes usage – Facebook has a good idea of how important social games and apps are to its daily usage numbers
It can promote mobile use of Buzz – People have to get the game fix on wherever they are
Promote location-based features through augmented reality games – Also lends nicely to Google’s geek cred

Reasons for supporting social games beyond Buzz

Can push Android and Chrome OS for netbooks – If they’re also working on a tablet version of Chrome OS, the games piece might be critical to its adoption
Drives transactions – Anyone remember Google Wallet, maybe they can dust it off
Push open data standards which will loosen the grip Facebook and Twitter have on users
Push Google’s campaign for HTML5 and 3D in the browser – Google Chrome OS doesn’t support Flash; they spend their own money building out O3D while at the same time supporting it’s open competitor WebGL

Google hasn’t always been consistent in their message but overall they seem to support open web standards over proprietary formats. My guess is that open standards are in their blood and they think they can out compete anyone no holds barred. If the world was using HTML5 and WebGL at the expense of other game engines and Flash they couldn’t be happier. Some have already speculated that Google could change gaming and that’s a whole new market for them to cash in on.

Problem is Gmail is a tool, not a service

Of course Gmail, the home of Buzz is a tool and not a true social network. I use Gmail for personal and business where as I use Facebook more for fun – wasting time. Google search is also a tool, and we’ve seen how much they’ve cluttered their search homepage with ads or anything else that might be of interest. Google knowingly leaves hundreds of millions of dollars on the table not putting ads on their homepage.

I’m betting that Google won’t be able to resist the chance to dive into the social game market, the question is if they do it in Gmail or outside of it? They could easily launch Buzz as a stand-alone site – get people use to it in Gmail but let it all hang out on the stand-alone site. Then again maybe they have a few tricks up their sleeve to strike a natural balance between virality and spam? It might be odd to play a game inside of Gmail, but they could also let you jump off site for the playing experience. In this scenario Buzz is just the communication piece. If that’s the route they go I would also expect them to require O3D or WebGL as they’ve already stated that they restricted Chrome OS to only web apps for security reasons.

What do you think – will Buzz support social games?

Google Buzz will nullify Facebook

Posted: February 9th, 2010, 10:16pm CET by justingibbs

The echo chamber is abuzz with, we’ll Google Buzz. While some are negative:

But like many Google services, it lacks any imagination or compelling reasons to use it. (Starting with the name, a rip-off from Yahoo.) As a result, it’s probably not a threat to any of the services it’s trying to disrupt.

I’m a little more positive. Google Buzz relies on Google’s strengths – email and algorithms to surface your connections automatically based on who you correspond with. This is your own social network without the setup.

Won’t kill Facebook but will nullify it

The Silicon Alley Insider article asks who would make the switch to Google Buzz.

Why would they switch to this Google service when there are no compelling reasons to do so?

And if Google isn’t going to actually kill Facebook with this thing, what’s the point?

I disagree that the point is to kill Facebook. Users have been notoriously transient with their Internet use. First it was Friendster, then MySpace, then Facebook. Some say many have already moved from Facebook to Twitter. However one thing that has proven rock solid is email. Google Buzz is an instant social network, better than that it self-adjusting. People I haven’t talked with in a year will fade to the background, rather than hang around on Facebook prompting me to ponder when and why I added them.

Even today I hear, “don’t Facebook me, just send it to my email.” Email is where users return to time after time. It’s what goes at the top of their resumé. It’s the most sure-fire way to get in contact with someone besides their phone number. When users return to Gmail they’ll slowly begin to use Google Buzz and over time nullify Facebook. It won’t kill Facebook but it will take a chunk out of it.

What does it mean for social games and Flash?

I wonder what Google Buzz will mean for social games? With Facebook trying to strike a balance between virality and spam, how will Google tackle the issue?

There is also the issue of Falsh. Flash is to work on Google’s mobile OS Android, however not on Chrome OS for netbooks (and possibly tablets). Google is also a big proponent of HTML5 and pushes O3D as a direct competitor for Flash.

How do virtual worlds build community?

Posted: February 3rd, 2010, 7:50pm CET by justingibbs

More virtual worlds and virtual world projects are shutting down. Some may remember Google Lively died a year ago. More recently it’s been vSide, Metaplace, and now Project Wonderland. It really does seem to be the end of Virtual Worlds 1.0. I and a few others have even begun to ponder what will be part of Virtual Worlds 2.0 – rise from the ashes of 1.0? But it’s also a good time to review lessons learned.

Community is a chicken and egg thing

As the old saying goes, there is no shortcut to success. The strategy for most Virtual Worlds 1.0 revolved around a thriving community to interact with and supply content (User Generated Content – UGC). All you needed was an instant community, and apparently you get those by developing some cool technology like 3D scenes, avatars, etc. However at the same time user studies were showing that all that technology still wasn’t enough for typical users. It was essential that they capture a community – it was a chicken and egg problem.

How do you solve the chicken and egg problem, well virtual worlds tried to tackle this in various ways:

Google Lively
Google Lively launched hoping the Google name would bring so many users that enough would stick. But not that many stuck as this Google Trends graph shows.

It also didn’t help that the odd collection of avatars left users utterly confused as to the context of the world.

IMVU
One of the first movers in the 3D chat space, IMVU relied heavily on AdWords to drive early traffic. Being a first mover, IMVU also wasn’t paying much for those AdWords. Eventually they were able to tweak their product enough to find market fit and amass a community. A community heavily based on flirting but a community none the less.

Metaplace
Founded by game design legend Raph Koster, Metaplace’s approach was to appeal to game designers. They built some powerful scripting tools, however that presented its own problem as Simon Newstead’s , CEO & Co-Founder of Frenzoo, pointed out:

3/ Built for the builders, but not for the mainstream users

This one is a bit clearer, there was a great amount of feature support and tools added for world builders, but less tools or attractions for your average every day user. It seemed like a classic chicken and egg situation – not enough users for attracting game devs, and not enough games/content to attract users? The existing games on the site were ok but not up to the same level as many great flash games now, and the social elements and avatar stickiness perhaps wasn’t up to many average users expect. Perhaps MP should have jumpstarted some high quality gaming with internal development and showcase, and in parallel giving users something to get hooked on…

Of course IMVU’s strategy was the most successful, but it’s a little difficult to duplicate as the first mover advantage is gone.

Build community the old-fashioned way – around a product

Just as Google came out of Web 1.0, some virtual worlds will rise from the ashes and drive into Virtual Worlds 2.o. I think Frenzoo is one such world.

It started out as a fashion site, heavily sided toward user generated content. They made it easy to design your own 3D clothing and model it on an avatar. But that was about it when it started in 2008 – no virtual world or personal scenes. However I could create my own fashionable outfit. From day one it filled a need – how many girls dream of becoming fashion designers. It didn’t need the instant community to be useful, yet the more community it had the better an experience for the user.

Having already built a community Frenzoo then transferred them into a virtual world, complete with 3D scenes. It wasn’t a cake walk, but they applied age-old techniques of product and community management to make it a success.

That woke us all up! So the first couple days after the launch we we dropped everything to concentrate on fine-tuning the camera, angle and lighting settings and get our avatars looking better again.

They know their audience, they’ve cultivated their community long before transferring them into a virtual world. It’s the same strategy Japanese CyberAgent took launching the incredibly successful Ameba Pigg.

It can’t be just about the technology

Compare Frenzoo to Google Lively, IMVU, and Metaplace. The product they launched day one was mostly cool technology and they expected the community to magically form around it. When I first jumped into Google Lively I could customize my avatar and set up my own scene. I guess the “product” was self expression through 3D maybe? Everything else involved interacting with other people – the community. It’s the chicken and egg problem again. Trying to form an instant community around technology turns out to be pretty difficult and leaves you with some interesting issues as Simon Newstead points out in analyzing Metaplace.

4/ Who was the audience?

This is an interesting one. When I spent some time on the site I was struck how there seemed to be two distinct groups of users. Those older, technically proficient game dev types who loved being able to tinker and create world. And then a very young tween/young teen female set with “HoT ChiCs” clubs and looking for 14yo boyfriends. It almost seemed to confirm the 2d avatars suited the young female crowd and the game APIs suited the game devs.

Social gamers aren’t looking for games

Posted: January 28th, 2010, 5:48pm CET by justingibbs

Talk to most hardcore gamers and they don’t consider social games to be games at all. Talk with many social gamers and it’s likely they don’t consider what they’re doing a game either. So what exactly are they doing? Facebooking, that’s what.

Urban Dictionary defines Facebooking as a verb:

To check your facebook profile, search for something on Facebook or use one of its many apps.

Social games are apps, so social gaming is Facebooking. Daniel James, Co-founder and CEO of Three Rings spoke about Facebooking at a recent panel on social gaming.

They are mentally Facebooking. They are not there to play games, they are there to Facebook. And as a part of their Facebooking they are engaging with game experiences.

However that might be a little out of context as even he points out that the big question is if they think they’re playing games at all?

The big question that no one really knows yet is when someone is on Facebook are they in fact mentally, in there little mind, playing games at all?

So if the users don’t feel like they’re playing a game, can it be a game? That might be more, if a tree falls and no one is there to hear it… We could turn to some of the experts in the field of games for more help. But according to Daniel, they might not have high opinions of social games.

A lot of people, especially in the game business have a very snooty opinion about Facebook games. They describe them as basically, they won’t call them a game, “that’s not a game, I won’t call that a game, it’s a distraction” is a term I’ve heard used.

Social games are just a distraction - really?

A distraction! Now that isn’t very nice. But given all this, it isn’t too much of a stretch to assume two things:

Facebook has found a captive audience
Social gamers aren’t looking for games

In a way it’s a captive audience

They’re all on Facebook and they’re looking for a distraction, that makes them a captive audience. They aren’t looking as much on AOL or Yahoo! these days but they sure are on Facebook. Facebooking might be the modern form of channel surfing.

They aren’t looking for games

If they’re just Facebooking and don’t consider themselves gamers they can’t possibly be looking for games. They’re looking for a distraction, for anything. Well not everything, they seem to gravitate toward interactive entertainment. From Daniel again (I love pulling quotes from this guy):

I don’t know if that necessarily plays to the person wanting to a have a deeper more engaging, generally social experience. If they are there for distraction maybe that’s all the large scale market wants.

The opportunity is bigger than just games

What all this means is the opprotunity to experiment is huge. Everyone loves a captive audience and we know what they’re looking for – interactive entertainment. That’s a pretty broad category however. You can throw games into that, but it’s not just games. If I go to GameStop it’s likely people there are looking for games, not so much with a random sampling of people from the food court. The same is with people Facebooking, we don’t know exactly why they came to the mall but it’s safe to say it was to shop. What we don’t know is what for. So shouldn’t we try to throw everything and the kitchen sink at them?

To see the opportunity for social games as just games might be missing a whole lot. What about visual novels? Dating sims? Both are huge in Japan. I know I continually harp on how we need more story driven stuff but this seems like the perfect fit.

A friend of mine is addicted to Professor Layton. The game is a series of puzzles and for each you unlock you get more of the story. It’s nothing new but apparently my friend has been hooked by the story. So much so that she read blogs about the upcoming games in the series all the while professing that she does not like games.

People follow stories, gamers follow games.

As humans we can all follow a story; we think and learn in story. We can all play games as well but they don’t grab all of us equally. Some people love games, others can put them down at any moment. If I’m at GameStop my captive audience is looking for games, if I’m on Facebook what they’re looking for is much broader. Currently we throw games at the that captive audience. For one, it’s what’s working and bringing in profits. Second, it’s a great way to enhance sociability. However there has been little experimentation in interactive drama – outside of Japan that is. The classic example thrown around in the United States is, “Oh do you mean something like those Choose Your Own Adventure books?”

Facebook delivers a captive audience for interactive entertainment and the opportunity to experiment is huge. It goes way beyond what we’ve traditionally thought of as games.

Hollywood, meet multivariate testing

Let’s say the social gaming industry begins to experiment with interactive drama, just imagine what they could do. This is an industry built on metrics, on split testing – think of what you could do if you applied those techniques to a movie? Continuous deployment? You could start with a minimum viable product that isn’t very good and over time evolve it into something worthy of an Academy Award. That might be stretching it, but it’s very different from the screen tests Hollywood does after shooting has ended. This would be the true digital revolution Hollywood has been waiting for.

Social gamers don’t comparison shop

Posted: January 23rd, 2010, 6:17pm CET by justingibbs

Zynga’s strategy to copy and crush the competition could be more successful than it was for even Microsoft because social gamers don’t comparison shop.

One way Zynga creates huge hits is by identifying popular games from other studios, creating a near replica, and then beating the original with a bigger marketing budget.

The fact that Zynga can do this tells you a lot about the audience for social games. Actually it reminds me a lot of the market I was working with while at Experian. More specifically their Consumer Direct division which was responsible for those sometimes cute but always annoying FreeCreditReport.com ads. As you can expect it’s a marketing company through and through, but they’re also a product company. FreeCreditReport.com is your credit report plus a service to monitor your credit. It’s just not a very good one, but neither is the competition. The reason is repeated in the conference rooms and halls like a mantra – no one comparison shops for credit reports. Why spend money and time adding a new feature when that money can be better spent on more ads, on locking competitors out of a lucrative channel, etc.

The service has to work of course, just as Zynga’s games have to be fun but simply put – they aren’t winning because they offer a supperior user experience or novel game play. I could argue that it was very different for Microsoft when they employed the same copy and crush strategy. People did comparison shop. There were articles comparing products to one another, people would argue vehemently about which was better than the other. I never hear a word about which is the better social game.

It’s a new audience

Along the way Experian has faced much better product offerings in the credit report space, but they’ve all failed to offer much of a challenge. Experian Consumer Direct understands their audience and they should, they practically invented it. They started as a private company with a novel idea, give users their credit reports directly over the Internet. Prior to this you would only hear of your credit report when you tried to buy a car or rent an apartment. Experian dealt with car dealers and landlords, not individual consumers. But Consumer Direct went directly to the consumer through the portals like AOL and Yahoo! What they eventually discovered was a new audience - one that they learned doesn’t comparison shop.

Zynga and the other social gaming companies have done the same. Through the social networks they’ve discovered a new audience. They aren’t your typical gamer. They’re more female and most wouldn’t consider themselves gamers. They don’t comparison shop. They aren’t going to read magazines about games, they don’t care about Gamasutra, they enjoy social games that they hear about from their friends or see in an ad.

Understand your audience

Experian Consumer Direct certainly understands their audience. Their audience uses AOL and Yahoo!, they don’t use Google Wave. They typically are not heavy Internet users. Heck, they know the percentage of their audience search for keywords like “free credit report” vs. “credit report”. They know it all the way down to which search engine they use.

I bet Zynga is learning the same thing as I write this.

Why are movie based games failing?

Posted: January 20th, 2010, 6:01pm CET by justingibbs

While Avatar the movie is a huge hit, it seems that Avatar the video game is a flop. What’s even more interesting is it seems the industry is turning away from licensed franchises. The game industry has a long and lucrative history with licenses, so why are they failing now?

“Our plan is to take more care of our high end franchises, we will leave less place for licensed games,” CEO Yves Guillemot said in a recent call to investors. “So the goal is to reuse the investment and licenses and put more emphasis on the making of our brands bigger and make sure they can come more often with high quality. So it doesn’t mean we will stop but we’re going to spend less in licenses in the future.”

In the days of Atari 2600 and ColecoVision game developers rushed to license content. Of course games in those days were sold based on the box cover. Look at E.T. the game compared to the box cover. They couldn’t be more different. But that isn’t what screwed up E.T. the game and consequently killed Atari, it was the game play itself. It’s practically unplayable.

If you make them somewhat playable you could have a major hit as many developers have learned – Spider-Man, Lord of the Rings, etc. Avatar the game might not have the best reviews but it is no E.T. So why are they all of a sudden not meeting expectations? That might be for two reasons, which can be summed up as evolution.

Nick Saint points out that expectations have risen as game developers home grown franchises turn into brands.

But the biggest problems with licensed games is that more and more game franchises have been built into recognizable and beloved brands. No matter how popular a new movie is, a video game version will never mean as much to gamers as a new Mario, Final Fantasy, or Call of Duty title.

Makes sense, the industry has learned to support their own brands. Not only that, but the games themselves have evolved and learned to embrace the medium. Just as you would never see a beautiful sculpture and think “why don’t I make that into a painting”, you wouldn’t see a game and think that would make a great movie. Oh wait, we do exactly that. But the turning away from licenses is a sign that things are changing. I know Hollywood would love to turn every popular book into a movie, but audiences are learning what screenwriters have known for decades – some stories just don’t transfer well. Probably one of the best page for page translations to film was Watchmen, and see how well that did. Mediums evolve to embrace their defining characteristics and as such can’t support all types of stories.

As for games, look at LittleBigPlanet - the world it creates is wildly entertaining. Super Mario Bros. created a similar world with mushrooms, bricks, and sounds. Those worlds doesn’t transfer well to the movie screen as we saw. Most games also can’t support films, just look at Doom or the trouble Bungie has had trying to get Halo made into a movie. They’re two different mediums.

Avatar the game can put you in a similar enough world to the movie but lacks the story, the character development. I remember playing Spiderman 2, which was a very successful game, but being annoyed I had to save people. I know that’s what Spiderman does, but he does that in the movies if I’m playing him I want to take him somewhere else.

Facebook squashing the virality of social games?

Posted: January 7th, 2010, 10:04pm CET by justingibbs

Daniel James, CEO of Three Rings, had an interesting post yesterday with his predictions for social gaming in 2010. I’ve seen James speak at a few conferences and know he can always be counted on for a unique opinion. A lot of what he talks about in this post is how important Facebook is to the phenomenal growth of social games and how it will actively try and take a revenue cut for that.

He starts out by discussing some of the changes Facebook made to virality in 2009.

Virality will decline and may cease to be the major force on the FB platform. The changes that Facebook has started to implement will continue into 2010, causing a reduction in virality overall. Facebook is well-established as a great environment to acquire customers and generate revenue. By dialing down the viral component the platform will become less attractive to new developers who lack funding, but it’s not clear that Facebook cares.

Virality is the key reasons social games work otherwise they would simply be known as casual games, so if Facebook is looking to crank down on virality it’s big news for social game companies. James believes Facebook is taking such steps to try and take a cut of the revenues their platform makes possible.

Facebook takes ~50% of game revenues. The payment component is a part of Facebook taking back its rightful share of game revenues on its platform; the massive reduction in virality will be the other key component, driving paid acquisition models and more revenue for Facebook from ads, game placement, etc. Social games’ have been a bonanza because they’ve fed greedily upon FB’s extraordinary user acquisition machine, exceptional openess, and generous viral features, without necessarily returning a lot back to Facebook Inc. or the net user experience of most users. I think Facebook will change that in 2010, and I think they are quite justified in doing so. Successful social games can operate with 60%+ net margins, I think Facebook would quite like the lions share of that.

I tend to agree with much of what James is predicting, however I doubt Facebook will be as aggressive with taking a cut and believe a lot of the changes are being made more for usability.

Facebook is struggling with it’s own slowing growth

As James points out himself, Facebook has peaked and will see a flattening or decline in active audience. To add to that he also believes that daily active users (DAU) on social games have also peaked. What that says to me is that Facebook itself will be in need of growth. Social games are a big driver of Facebook use, so to start limiting the virality is certainly dangerous. If James is right and Facebook is doing this for revenue, they must simply expect social gaming companies to step up and pay for any lost growth from the change in virality. That could be true but I doubt the ecosystem is that robust. Many of the social gaming hits are still relatively new and as James points out the whole field might have already peaked.

I think it’s a delicate balance at this moment and expect Facebook to move tentively into taking a revenue cut. Social gaming companies are already buying up tons of ads on Facebook, there is little reason to rock the boat.

Facebook has shown a history of making usability priority 1

It’s my belief that the changes to virality were made more for usability concerns than for the sake of revenue. Facebook is where it’s at today, at the top of the social network heap, because of it’s superior usability. We can all remember how annoying MySpace pages were. Zuckerberg is also very big on usability so it’s understandable that virality was a hot topic within the walls of Facebook when users began to complain about some of the tactics social games were taking. Ultimately it seems the usability proponents won out, but we’ll see if they push for more changes in the name of usability.

Social gaming companies weaning away from Facebook

Facebook is undoubtedly important to social gaming companies and exactly why they’re actively trying to limit their dependence on it. Zyenga recently launched FarmVille.com and I would expect more sites are to follow. The question is if the recent explosion of social games has found a permanent spot in the public’s heart or is still very dependent on the Facebook spigot?

Social gaming’s next big hit – dating sims

Posted: January 6th, 2010, 7:36pm CET by justingibbs

The more I study the social gaming phenomenon the more I wonder why Zynga, Playdom, and other casual gaming companies haven’t launched a dating sim? Dating sims, also known as visual novels, are a big hit in Japan. Such a hit that a Japanese man married their girlfriend from a dating sim. Titles like Harvest Moon have even begun to crack the US market.

Dating sims seem to have a lot going for them that would make them appealing to social game makers:

Addictive – guy married his virtual girlfriend, need I say more
Require continual maintenance – most are structured around the passing of days, not unlike FarmVille
Ripe for virtual goods - already well established past time in Japan to buy a virtual girlfriend gifts
Appeal to women – It’s not just that it’s romance based, but it’s interpersonal relationships rather than a shoot’em up

So why haven’t the makers of FarmVille and Mafia Wars begun to experiment with dating sims?

One obvious reason is that dating sims aren’t exactly social. But then again what could be more about social media than a dating sim? Just play with the concept of a “social media character” a bit. The girl of your dreams could have a Facebook page. You can leave notes on her wall as part of the dating sim. The ultimate prize would be when she changes her status to in a relationship – with you. Of course others playing the game would be in direct competition for her affection, but that only adds to the simulation.

Another reason might be that social game makers think of dating sims as being too adult. Some of the titles in Japan are but the majority are more an outgrowth of the whole manga and anime culture in Japan. Where as there are a few adult oriented manga titles there are many more targeted for children. It isn’t like American audiences haven’t been exposed to teen romance novels before, anyone remember Sweet Valley High? Really what these dating sims allow you to do is deal with interpersonal relationships. In Harvest Moon you can marry but the courtship is little more than learning a character’s likes and dislikes.

As far as I can tell (not being able to play all the Japanese dating sims) it seems as if dating sims are taking over where anime left off. A natural evolution – as manga lead to anime, anime is now leading to dating sims. It brings interactivity to the storylines where games tend to be ancillary to it. Dating sims are the first truly successful form of interactive drama. They certainly seem addictive enough for someone to marry their virtual girlfriend, so why haven’t Zynga and Playdom begun to experiment with them?

The end of Virtual Worlds 1.0, now onto 2.0

Posted: December 22nd, 2009, 6:18pm CET by justingibbs

Another Virtual World 1.0 is shutting down. This time Raph Koster’s Metaplace.com. This after vSide shut down earlier in the year and Google Lively last year. Playing off of Web2.0 I would group these and current worlds under virtual worlds 1.0. They’re similar to Infoseek, Excite, AOL, and Yahoo! – Web 1.0.

A few things defined Virtual Worlds 1.0:

All about the technology – Classic problem of building a solution in search of a problem.
Myth of self-expression – In search of a problem, many virtual worlds settled on self-expression as the problem they were trying to solve. Too bad no one was seriously hurting for tools to express themselves.
Installs – Metaplace just used Flash but most had their own proprietary installs. No one like installs, especially the core audience most of these services were going after.
Just 3D chat rooms – When self-expression fell flat and they found it difficult to compete with true casual games sites, these worlds were left with little more than 3D chat.

There are however Virtual Worlds 1.0 success stories. IMVU is incredibly succesful embracing it’s core functionality as just a 3D chat. Ameba has been a big hit in Japan by transitioning a community pre-built around blogs into a virtual world. And then there is always Second Life, probably the winner by default.

Virtual Worlds 2.0

As Web 2.0 rose out of the ashes of Web 1.0, virtual worlds will do the same.

Two things I believe will define Virtual Worlds 2.0:

Built around 3D in the browser – Say hello to O3D and WebGL.
3D is for entertainment – Unlike what many believe, 3D isn’t exactly good for communication. What 3D is good for is entertainment.

Story isn’t a science, so why does interactive story need AI researchers?

Posted: December 8th, 2009, 4:34pm CET by justingibbs

A veteran group of researchers, and not so veteran, from MIT are taking another stab at artificial intelligence (AI). Reading the article from MIT news it initially sounds like they’re taking a new approach, but the further you read the more it falls into the grandiose promises made earlier in AI’s 50 year history. Such as Herbert Simon’s famous prediction from the 1960s.

Machines will be capable, within 20 years, of doing any work a man can do.

What I found most interesting about this supposed new approach to AI was the possibility of the group venturing into interactive story.

Among the concepts the group may explore are concepts for “intelligent,” adaptive books and games — or, as Gershenfeld suggests, “books that think.”

Funny how I didn’t see any writers or artists in the group. When was the last time you read a story from a scientist? Story isn’t science, it’s art. Why would adding interactivity then require the aid of AI researchers and scientists to crack the conundrum? Shouldn’t we be looking to artists for a solution, a creative use of smoke and mirrors possibly?

The future of online entertainment is still way beyond what we see today

Posted: November 19th, 2009, 9:08pm CET by justingibbs

Ken Auletta, author of ”Googled: The End of the World As We Know It“, recently put out an addendum which he titled Media Maxims. Two maxims caught my eye, Digital is different and Don’t think of the Web as another distribution platform. I agree with much of what Auletta is saying, however I don’t think he is going far enough.

Don’t Think of The Web as Another Distribution Platform:

In speeches, Michael Eisner likes to say that the Internet is just another distribution platform. He also says, as he did to me, “I don’t think a lot of the rules for storytelling are unique for the Internet.” I think he’s wrong. The Internet is a totally different medium. It is interactive, allowing not just two-way communication but also a stage for new story tellers. It is not one distribution channel but many thousands of them, each one a website on which stories might nest. There are no scarcity issues – sorry, we have only 21 hours a week of prime time to squeeze your program into; sorry, we have sold every 30-second spot in the Super Bowl. Because there are so many choices on the Web, and only a click away, Web stories will often be shorter, more like “snacks.” According to Scott Moore, who until late 2008 was Yahoo’s Senior Vice President and head of media, on the Web “people have shorter attention spans. We find the ideal length is one to three minutes.” The shorter time is partly a function, he said, of the fact that “prime time is daytime for us”; he means that people looking for diversions at work naturally jump around more. Also, on the Internet, users “expect to be in control,” and they like to roam. The ease of jumping around further attenuates attention spans, making the Internet a less hospitable medium for longer stories.

I completely agree that it’s not another distribution platform but I would put the emphasis on interaction more than breadth of choice and short attention spans. People have been talking about the birth of a new Hollywood with millions of independent video producers ever since YouTube struck it big. But if you’ve ever tried to create one of these Internet sensations you’ll quickly learn that it’s nearly impossible to tell a compelling story in just 30 seconds or even 3 minutes. Some commercials do a great job of this, but you don’t have to return to commercials every week for the next chapter – they’re pushed at you. On this point Michael Eisner was sort of right, “I don’t think a lot of the rules for storytelling are unique for the Internet.” To pull someone into a story you have to have them identify with the characters, that’s nearly impossible to do in 3 minutes on a consitent basis. Really less than 3 minutes just creams for stereotypical characters and situations.

Look at where film started, they would simply record vaudeville acts or trains coming at the audience. Eventually though they discovered continuity editing and created the modern movie. A modern movie format that is typically a 120 minutes long. Maybe the Web will shorten it to 100 minutes but not down to 3 or less.

What’s actually more interesting than the breadth and length of future entertainment is the interactivity. Auletta dives into it more when he talks about digital.

Digital is Different:

“When a product or industry goes digital, it changes fundamentally and irreversibly, ” Marc Andreessen said. Hardware becomes less important, software more so. “Because software is malleable in a way that hardware is not, it can be adopted worldwide and quickly.” Fewer resources or infrastructure are usually required. A digital newspaper, for instance, is not merely an extension of the print edition. It is a different product, and the software makes it so. Online news doesn’t have to wait for the next morning to appear. And it comes with links to other stories and even publications, to videos or audios that amplify the story. If a reader wants to dig down into a subject, digital archives are available. The function of the letters to the editor page is taken over by blogs, involving communities of readers and also compelling journalists to engage with the public.

The keywords for me are “It is a different product” and more so than just seeing news papers with comments, video, and archives. Where Auletta might see a drastic change from the traditional newspaper to online news site I see just one step in the evolution. Just as short videos on YouTube are an intermediary step to what will ultimately prove successful. Digital storytelling doesn’t mean digital distribution, it means interactive story. Video games experiment with interactive story every day and hopefully artists will stumble upon a technique that unlocks the medium for storytelling rather than relying solely on the game play for engagement. It would be paramount to the early film pioneers discovering continuity editing. It would be the birth of a new medium – interactive drama.

Maybe the slogan should be:

Interactive drama – because the Web isn’t just another distribution platform

Google’s O3D and WebGL the next wave for virtual worlds?

Posted: November 17th, 2009, 9:49pm CET by justingibbs

Virtual worlds seem to be waning. They rarely pop up in the news or in discussion. The last Engage! Expo! only a few hundred people in attendance and most of them were speakers. It’s the end of Virtual Worlds 1.0, Second Life won by default. That of course lets us dream of what’s to come with Virtual Worlds 2.0. It’s my guess that Virtual Worlds 2.0 will be built on the back of 3D in the browser - Google’s O3D and WebGL.

The more I learn about O3D and WebGL the more I’m impressed. But there are some constraints with these technologies – issues with latency, limited bandwidth, and performance limitations of running inside the browser. Stefano Buliani points out, the limitations will make intense video games a challenge.

This is all well and good when the interaction is limited to a few chat messages or coordinates of the mouse pointer on the screen, but multiplayer videogames have to shift a massive amount of data every second. When you play Gran Turismo online the position, speed and state of each player’s car must e synched across all the participants as often as possible. Add chat/voice data to that and you’ll soon realise that 30 players for one game calling your server at the same time to get and post data is just not manageable. Furthermore to ensure the timely delivery of the data to each client you are much better off pushing the data to the client rather than relying on it to call your server.

When I was playing a Infinite Journey you can’t help but notice the periodic lag that you see all the time browsing the Web, but this was in the middle of a jump. However virtual worlds have very different requirements than intense video games. Wagner James Au already commented on the potential for Google’s O3D and WebGL to support virtual worlds and highlighted that exact point.

Virtual worlds are hardly just about graphics, however; at least as important are communication channels between avatars and their groups, both asynchronously and in real time.

The Web started in a similar manner and look where it is today. From constraints comes creativity. It would seem that the video game industry is following a similar path toward creativity, moving away from the age old drive for better graphics. Just look at what the Wii has done with an old processor. O3D and WebGL might make intense video games a challenge but these technologies should be a boom for virtual worlds 2.0.

Thirteen hours of Slaying the Dragon

Posted: November 16th, 2009, 6:49pm CET by justingibbs

Saturday I spent all day in class, Lynda Heys and Steve Turnbul’s Slaying the Dragon Master Class. I had seen them at the Great American Pitchfest and the Screenwriting Expo but that was for only 45 and 90 minutes. Saturday’s class went for 13 hours and I got the feeling that many of us were willing to go more. Pushing past 10 at night and people were still peppering them with questions eager for more. After years of studying screenwriting, reading countless books, and seeing nearly every screenwriting guru the Slaying the Dragon approach still manages to be fresh and unique. I don’t mean to make it out to be the holly grail, but their approach and presentation made years of story knowledge click for me.

Now the real test begins, can I use their teachings and knock out a great screenplay?

3D isn’t good for communication

Posted: November 12th, 2009, 4:53pm CET by justingibbs

With 3D sneaking into the browser via Google’s O3D and WebGL many pose the question – is the web going to be 2D or 3D? Some are so confused they ask if social networks will evolve into virtual worlds like Second Life?

This reminds me of a time when communicating with a computer was a hot topic. The geniuses over at Microsoft and of course Bill Gates himself thought the best way this would be accomplished was to talk to your computer.

The PC five years from now — you won’t recognize it, because speech will have come into the interface, the screen will be a flat screen, the performance will be 20 times what it is today.

- Bill Gates

Today it’s obvious they were blinded by the technology as the fastest way to input data has always been the keyboard. I feel like many people today are blinded by 3D. It’s often said that one of the benefits of virtual worlds is improved communication, but exactly how is that? Sure there are some users who find having an avatar is helpful but the majority see it as a burden, a novelty at best. Just ask some co-workers to have a meeting in Second Life, they’ll ask if they could just give you a call.

The Internet is about communication – email, Twitter, message boards, Skype, instant messaging, etc. Comparitevely 3D offers nothing. 3D isn’t good for communication, at least not the kind that is taking the world by storm these days – asynchronous communication via Twitter, collaboration via Google Wave and Mozilla Raindrop.

3D is for entertainment

What 3D is good at is entertainment - games, interactive story, MMOs, etc. Read my lips, “3D is for entertainment”. I’ve heard the stories of how 3D models helped scientists visualize data in a new way and lead to some breakthrough, but that doesn’t mean it will help me with my email.

Interactive drama is on the lunatic fringe

Posted: November 10th, 2009, 4:35pm CET by justingibbs

Reading The Pixar Touch I found it consoling how there was a time when computer animation was considered the lunatic fringe. The term showed up in a quote about Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios.

“Computer animation was sort of on the lunatic fringe at that time,” said Fred Parke, a fellow Ph. D. student in Catmull’s class who also worked on animation. “People were just barely to the point where they could get a computer to put out still images.”

The amazing thing is that when computer animation was no longer fringe, Catmull pushed to the next lunatic fringe – creating the first fully computer-animated feature film. We all know where that ended – Disney bought Pixar for $7.4 billion.

I feel like interactive story is on the fringe now. Video games have found a way to incorporate it but only in very basic techniques. Talking to a few in the industry I feel like they’re still struggling to embrace the medium, continually reverting back to the game play for safety. At the 2007 Screenwriting Expo Chris Klug, Creative Director at Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment, advised a room full of aspiring game writers to never mention interactive story.

Mention interactive fiction and they’ll think you’re an academic.

Interactive story still seem fringe and if that’s true, interactive drama is certainly lunatic fringe. To think you can ditch the gameplay and still keep people engaged through just the story strikes most as crazy. Hollywood and the game industry have a long history of trying to do just that. Ed Heinbockel, CEO of Visual Purple remembers an early attempt, Mr. Payback. Actually the executive team at Visual Purple are a rare bread in the industry – veterans. The company’s roots are in interactive movies, producing such hits as Silent Steel and Blue Force. That also means they’ve seen more attempts to create interactive drama than they care to remember. I feel fortunate to work with them, especially seeing how they’ve managed to carve out a business producing interactive stories for training simulations. Hopefully we’ll find a way to unlock the conundrum that has plagued creators of interactive story. It’ll most likely be a long and winding road as it was for Pixar – from lunatic fringe to mainstream.

Entertainment at your fingertips

Posted: November 5th, 2009, 10:29pm CET by justingibbs

Giving her annual overview of Internet trends at the Web 2.0 Summit, Mary Meeker highlighted the mobile device explosion.

Mobile devices will evolve as remote controls for ever expanding types of real-time cloud-based services, including emerging category of location-based services, creating opportunities + dislocations, empowering consumers in unprecedented + transformative ways.

You can even see the explosion in the chart – tablet, wireless home appliances, home entertainment, mobile video, etc.

What all that looks like to me is a prime market for new forms of entertainment. As Hollywood is struggling the potential for new models are taking off. The most interesting of which to me is entertainment at your fingertips. The anticipated Apple Tablet will most likely go in your lap, well within reach of your fingers – begging you to interact with it. It’s the prefect place for interactive story. Granted, mobile game devices have always been at your fingertips but they’ve always appealed to a gamer audience. For interactive story to really take off it’ll need to expand into the mass market and tablets or e-readers seem a great place to start. Plus, interactive story isn’t as processor intensive as most video games. It’s almost a match made in heaven.

Interactive story will ride to mass market on the back of the mobile explosion.

Why am I excited for O3D and WebGL

Posted: October 29th, 2009, 4:40pm CET by justingibbs

An example of Google's O3D

I’m excited to see 3D in the browser though I may be in the minority. Google’s O3D and WebGLfrom Mozilla and the Khronos Group are exciting technologies but mention that to anyone in the game industry and they’ll laugh. Visual Purple is in the serious game business so you could say we’re in the game industry and if there was ever and industry built on escalating graphics it’s games. Just flip through the industry magazines and all you see are ads for game engines. But I think the tides are a changing, even if most can’t believe or see it yet.

Open Standards

All you need to do is look at the Internet to make a case for open standards. It isn’t a cure-all but open standards certainly have their strong suits. We’re constantly investigating virtual world and MMO platforms as well as graphic engines and would love if there was some sort of standard. I know most people in the game industry are more excited about new technology that pushes the graphics or game play further, but as the Wii has demonstrated – you can do a lot with an old processor if you get creative. In fact that seems to be where the industry is going.

Device independent

It was once a big deal to have the same browser work on Mac, Windows, and Linux. Now it’s what device they work on – mobile phone, set-top box, tablet, etc?

Easy integration with the rest of the Internet (social gaming)

Most video games are worlds on to themselves, even if they’re available online. You can play your friend from a distant city but you’re doing little other than talking trash while you play. We have yet to see games take advantage of what’s out there the way mashups have. Social gaming is getting us closer but we still have a long way to go. Being in the browser and using the same or similar protocols will likely change that. Plus, when you don’t have to worry about improving the graphics or creating some new game play you’re forced to be a bit more creative.

What will 3D in a browser do for games and virtual worlds?

Look at what putting a real browser on the iPhone did for mobile devices. Think of what 3D in the browser will do for games and virtual worlds. And I see a lot of potential for interactive story.

Apple tablet for web, books, movies, and interactive story?

Posted: October 27th, 2009, 8:31pm CET by justingibbs

Apparently Apple is asking Australian media companies if they want to put their content on its upcoming tablet computer. The Sydney Morning Herald goes as far as to say:

It will have a touch screen and be targeted at users who mainly want to surf the web, read books and newspapers or watch movies.

Seeing what the iPhone did for the mobile web and applications I can’t wait to see what it does for books. But more than that I’d like to see it be a catalyst for new forms of media; like webcomics or dare I say interactive story.

The Apple tablet will truly put the viewing experience in your lap and well within reach of your fingers. Think of doing more than hitting pause and play? It seems the perfect place to experiment with interactive story. Now if only Genkii would launch their One Coin comics platform.

And who knows, maybe it’ll stir up some excitement in virtual worlds again.

Why not task Pixar with inventing real-time story?

Posted: October 27th, 2009, 3:10pm CET by justingibbs

Walt Disney’s CEO Bob Iger thinks the Hollywood model is broken and in need of quick change.

“The business model that underpins the movie business is changing,” Mr Iger told the Financial Times “If we don’t adapt to the change there won’t be a business – that’s my exhortation to my team.”

So if the movie business is dieing as we know it, why doesn’t Iger task Pixar with innovating their way out of it. The group at Pixar, along with Steve Jobs, have already shown a peculiar knack for innovation. They made the first feature-length computer-animated film, now task them with creating the first mainstream real-time story that isn’t entirely game based. Tieing play to the server is the only way to combat pirates, it’s the WoW model and it’s the model Hollywood desperately needs. The game industry gets it, now Hollywood needs to move to the same model. It’s moving from overlaying real-time story on top of a game to using real-t time story to create drama, and who better to do that than Pixar?

Hollywood needs to go real-time

Posted: October 21st, 2009, 7:18am CEST by justingibbs

Hollywood Sign As the article on CNet explained, Hollywood’s world is dieing. It almost brings a tear to my eye as an aspiring screenwriter. I was hoping to slip into the industry before the collapse. Looks like I may be a little too late.

The past weekend, at a conference on the USC campus, Disney CEO Bob Iger said the “business model that formed the motion picture business…is changing profoundly before our eyes.”

Iger warned that studios must make profound changes, “or you will no longer have a business.”

It’s the same for all old media, their lock on distribution and production is fading and with it their massive profits. Hollywood needs to find a new way, but as anyone knows – change is hard. There are some who are trying to lead the way as I saw at the 2009 Screenwriting Expo where Anthony Zuiker was pitching is digi-novel Level 26. I was lucky enough to also catch Zuiker at the Virtual Worlds Conference in 2007 where he introduced the famous CSI Second Life episode and tie-in. I’ll give Zuiker credit, at least he is trying as he says, to merge Hollywood and Silicon Valley.

Returning to work after the screenwriting expo Monday I got to hear about the deep scars previous attempts to merge Hollywood and Silicon Valley had left behind. Visual Purple’s roots are actually in interactive story or better known in the 90’s as interactive movies, producing such hits as Silent Steel and Blue Force. They’ve also worked on countless projects with Hollywood that went no where. Hollywood and Silicon Valley are of two different cultures – one doesn’t get story, the other can’t admit failure. But as they say, necessity is the mother of all invention and Hollywood needs something new.

What we can expect from Hollywood in the next few years:

A rush to ancillary sales – Disney has maximized this model with their theme parks
Smaller budgets – this isn’t any surprise as they try and ratchet back expenses
Experimentation with SaaS (Software as a Service) type model – maybe we can call it MaaS (Movies as a Service) but it’s pretty much the same thing as games moving to subscriptions with the likes of WoW

The last one, the SassS model, might be new for some people but it’s one of the only surefire ways to make money on the Internet. The only problem is how do you cram movies into such a model, something where the movie itself is in real-time and can only be experienced if you’re connected. You have to tie the entertainment value to the server, not just try to encrypt or lock down a video file. But how would that look? What would it be like if movies were real-time?

Call it real-time story or interactive story it’s something I’ve been experimenting with for years. And for the last few months I’ve actually been building it at Visual Purple. Every day I work with Virtual Worlds, NPCs, and a story engine to create real-time story. There are others creating real-time story as well. MMO developers are creating story worlds, which are a type of interactive story. Narrative in video games are another form. However all of them are still not that similar to the movies Hollywood was built upon. At Visual Purple we’re building training simulations – they have story but when was the last time you paid $10 to watch a training movie? But the technology is there and evolving. When movies were new they were almost nothing like what we see today in theaters. Many just captured vaudeville acts. But they evolved and the same will be true with interactive story. The situation today is similar to what the early film pioneers dealt with at the turn of the century. The technology and production quality will improve as it did for video games and artists will learn how to create drama using the tools. It’s an exciting time and it might just be the next big thing in Hollywood.

Screenwriting vs. tech conferences

Posted: October 20th, 2009, 4:59am CEST by justingibbs

Over the weekend I had the opportunity to attend the 2009 Screenwritng Expo. This was the smallest I’ve ever seen it. Maybe only 1,500 to 2,000 people and most of them were just there to pitch. It was still a good conference, but this was also the 5th time I’ve attended the conference and you begin to notice the same people and if not that, the same categories of people – actors, film students, mom and pops, recently retired, not so recently retired. It reminded me of other conferences, namely the startup and tech ones in Silicon Valley. Now I know must in tech would never consider themselves to be similar to those dreamers down South but I started to see some similarities:

Most work very hard for long hours
They believe they just need that one connection to make it big
They’re all dreaming despite knowing that 99% of them will fail

We in Silicon Valley like to think what we do is serious work but as Eric Ries points out in his recent post, many of us in Silicon Valley are chasing a myth. A similar myth that anyone can write the next Million-Dollar Spec Script.

Another experiment in collaborative writing via Twitter

Posted: October 15th, 2009, 11:30pm CEST by justingibbs

Ever since computers started falling into the hands of average people there has been a desire to use these new tools to express story. To change how they’re delivered, consumed, or written. When the Internet hit people started experimenting with hypertext fiction. Now it’s Twitter’s turn.

Neil Gaiman, famed author and creator ofThe Sandman comic series, and BBC Audiobooks America have gotten together to produce an interesting creative fiction experiment utilizing the microblogging service. Neil tweeted the first line of the interactive story at noon EST Tuesday, with other Twitter users joining in to continue the tale using the hashtag #bbcawdio.

But unlike what Barb Dybwad’s post on Mashable attests to, Neil Gaiman’s experiment isn’t really like the Choose Your Own Adventure books she loved growing up. Those were more along the lines of interactive story, this is more an experiment in collaborative writing. There’s actually a lot such experiments as you’ll see in the comments on the Mashable article. The problem is they rarely go beyond experiments. It’s difficult to write with one partner and no technology is going to change that, no matter how hip it is. Just take a look at what Neil Gaiman’s experiment has churned out so far and you’ll see the challenge.

Seeing this I’m reminded of the great presentation Dan Hon did on augmented reality games – Everything you know about ARGs is WRONG. He nicely cut through all the hype surrounding ARGs, something that would be nice here as well.

Sneaky suspicion Apple is about to release a virtual world

Posted: October 15th, 2009, 4:18pm CEST by justingibbs

It looks like Nokia, or at least their investment arm is looking at virtual worlds.

The Wall Street Journal today is reporting that Nokia Growth Partners, with $350 million under management, is actively looking to invest in virtual worlds. Reporting from the VentureWire Technology Showcase in Redwood City, Calif., today, the news service writes that Mary McDowell, executive vice president and chief development officer at Nokia, said the fund is “particularly interested in investing in start-ups innovating in payments and transactions, analytics and advertising, and gaming and virtual worlds.”

Virtual worlds might seem an odd investment for the Nokia at first glance, but they might be thinking:

Social networks will naturally evolve to 3D
Virtual worlds are all about entertainment and outside of games and streaming videos there isn’t much of that on the Web
There is great potential for augmented reality in virtual worlds
Kids get virtual worlds
Outside of games and social networks, virtual worlds are ripe for virtual goods

iWorld - A virtual world from Apple

Nokia could be looking at any of these or more, but if they have reason to invest in virtual worlds the same could be true for Apple with its iPhone. Especially if they’re coming out with a tablet / e-reader as everyone suspects. Soon they’ll offer a whole suite of mobile devices and what would be better than being able to connect them all with a social network like Facebook? The only problem is they don’t own Facebook and building their own social network would just be foolish. So what better way to come at the market than with something new, from a new angle, something like a virtual world? Plus kids get virtual worlds, maybe all Apple has to do is expand that appeal to older kids and young adults. Hey, it isn’t like they haven’t done it before; they push a consumer based iPhone at the enterprise market and are starting to win converts.

It would be great to see what Apple can do with virtual worlds. I sure hope my suspicion proves correct.

Virtual worlds between a rock and a hard spot

Posted: October 13th, 2009, 4:13pm CEST by justingibbs

Blue Mars, the latest graphic rich virtual world is in open beta. I and a few friends checked it out but were quickly bored. Granted it’s only a beta, one of us commented that is was more like an alpha, but once you get beyond the graphics you wonder what there really is to do? It’s a problem not uncommon to virtual worlds. Trying to solve that problem highlights the tough spot developers of consumer virtual worlds find themselves in.

Only finding a few others running around Blue Mars we all gravitated toward the golf. I suspect most beta testers did the same. After you spend some time walking around the pretty scenery and sitting in chairs, golf is the only thing left. We of course never got beyond the first hole. The interface is built for virtual worlds, not specialized for driving a golf ball down the fairway. There are no tips on what club to select. It also isn’t clear how far away the hole is and you aren’t able to freely walk around to judge it yourself. I’d rather play Wii Golf or any other golf game for that matter – and here lies the trouble virtual worlds face. Virtual world developers know that there isn’t much to do, so they try and add games to keep people around. But that puts them in direct competition with game developers – between a rock and a hard spot.

Virtual world developers can emphasize collaboration and the social aspects of virtual worlds all they want, but when was the last time you went to Disneyland to meet new people or collaborate? Disneyland is the physical embodiment of a virtual world and you don’t go there to play golf together, you go to enter a fantasy land someone with more imagination than yourself cooked up. You go there with your family and friends, you don’t go to make new ones.

Virtual worlds can be about community, but it’s more likely that they start as a community first and then add the virtual world on top. Like most virtual world developers before them, Blue Mars is starting with the technology and hoping people will come. The graphics are impressive but such a strategy has failed many times before. But it’s still a beta – we’ll see what else they can dream up.

Social media can get you in the conversation, but are companies ready?

Posted: October 12th, 2009, 6:57am CEST by justingibbs

Seems like everyone is getting into social media these days. And why not, it’s replacing ad buys in old media. However it’s almost comical how most seem to forget that social media is about joining the conversation and conversation denotes two way exchange. It’s odd to see companies like CBSNews and Chevron_JustinH on Twitter. Other than a one sided conversation I don’t know what anyone would hope to gain following companies like this or more importantly what a company would hope to gain? Companies like this already speak through press releases and I seriously doubt they’re ready to divulge anything more. If you’re a faceless company, that’s what we expect you to be.

However now it seems like every company is hiring a social media expert to come in and ready the company for the future, but how can they if the company isn’t ready to get into a conversation? Almost anyone can start a Facebook page for the company or a Twitter account but they can’t make the company ready to talk.

But if the company is ready to talk social media can expand the conversation. Just check out ChromeBagsSF or SouthwestAir.

The same things that trick investors, trick startups

Posted: October 7th, 2009, 10:22pm CEST by justingibbs

Reading the post, Why Investors Make So Many Boneheaded Mistakes, I couldn’t help but think the same reasons investors make mistakes is the same for startups (founders, employees, and investors). We all think we’re being diligent, that we’ve checked the facts and this is the real deal, but as Michael Mauboussin points out in his book Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition our logic is often flawed. If you’ve ever worked in tech or at a startup, watch the video and review the 8 common mistakes investors make and tell me you’re not guilty? And if that isn’t enough, see what Eric Ries has to say about Ice Cream Gloves.

8 Common Mistakes Investors Make

View Each Problem as Unique
Tunnel Vision
Uncritical Reliance on Experts
Influenced by Peer Pressure
Illusion of Understanding
Assuming There’s a Definitive Answer
Assuming All Risks Factored In
Confusing Luck vs. Skill

Social media is the death of old media

Posted: October 6th, 2009, 6:45am CEST by justingibbs

Who would have guessed the downfall of old media would be social media? There was a time when people thought it would be the banner ad. When I worked at Yahoo! at the turn of the century and a small advertising company after that, we just took if for granite that advertisers would eventually migrate to the Web. It offered superior analytics and was where all the eyeballs were going, but the reality is people just didn’t click. I saw the eye tracking studies at Yahoo!, it was amazing how we could block out all advertising on the Web. When I worked at Experian I was convinced that it was only the older and novice users who clicked – that is outside of search marketing but Google pretty much has a lock on that.

Today traditional media is tanking, even CBS is on the brink. The economic meltdown certainly didn’t help but probably only accelerated a trend toward social media. Companies are taking money out of online marketing campaigns and transitioning that into their own websites, into social media. Funny how years ago we thought it would be the banner that silence old media.

Hardcore gamers down, perhaps it’s time for something new?

Posted: September 29th, 2009, 4:06pm CEST by justingibbs

At the Engage! conference last week Trip Hawkins brought up some interesting points during the keynote, namely that the audience for real time entertainment is growing and in new ways.

Trip Hawkins, CEO of mobile game developer Digital Chocolate and a founder of gaming behemoth Electronic Arts. Hawkins echoed many of Liew”s sentiments. “We’re going from 100 million gamers, to a billion or more,” he said. “These are not the people who are playing Grand Theft Auto or World of Warcraft.”

Interesting enough, the number of hardcore gamer seems to be shrinking.

Hawkins went a step further than Liew to say that hardcore gamers’ habits would actually become less “hardcore” as more and more of their friends migrated to the casual gaming model. “If you don”t count the Wii and you don’t count Guitar Hero, spending on hardcore console gaming is trending way down,” he said. With casual and social gaming fast becoming the most common gaming experience, more and more hardcore gamers would be swept up in that flow, Hawkins said.

What that sounds like to me is the growth and evolution of the audience, an audience looking for something new. I’m hoping that new is more along the lines of movies where story takes precedence over the gameplay. Nothing wrong with games, just be good to see the medium for real time story expand. There was a time when all Hollywood would produce was Westerns, then it was musicals. Today Hollywood caters to nearly every niche, maybe we’ll see a similar expansion with real time story.

Are MMOs the best model for real time story?

Posted: September 24th, 2009, 4:49pm CEST by justingibbs

At the recent GDC Austin, Tracy Seamster of ZeniMax Online and Steve Danuser of 38 Studios openly discussed storytelling in classic MMOs. They brought up some good points and I can’t help but question just how good quests are as a vehicle for story? It would seem Seamster and Danuser would agree if we’re talking classic story.

No one wants to read in MMOs. As much as writers want to think their quest prose is for the ages, reading is not a popular activity in online gaming. The genre is a bad fit for classic storytelling.

Simply put – people don’t want to read. They skim web pages, they don’t read manuals, they certainly aren’t going to read game text. But it’s the same in movies, and there the viewer is looking for the story. We don’t gather around camp fires anymore and we don’t want someone tell or explain the story, we want to see the story unfold. Movie makers learned this long ago.

Story is action

For screenwriters story is action. As Christy Marx points out in the comment thread, it’s visual storytelling. When players complain about having to read too much text, it’s more than likely that text is nothing more than exposition. Exposition is an evil world in the land of movie making. It stops a story in it’s tracks and should be avoided at all costs. The screenwriting guru Robert Mckee advices turning exposition into ammunition.

Skill in exposition means making it invisible. As the story progresses, the audience absorbs all it needs to know effortlessly, even unconsciously … In other words,dramatise exposition

Story moves the most between scenes

Screenwriters also know that story moves the most between scenes. In one scene the protagonist is alone on an island. The next they’re being picked up by a passing ship. Obviously they created a raft to save themselves. That’s movement.

The story will move within a scene but it will move the most between scenes.

MMOs and quests don’t lend themselves to either

These are maxims in the world of screenwriting however I think they would be difficult to follow in traditional MMOs and questing systems.

To rely on action to tell the story might interfere with game play. For one, the player has traditionally been in total control of the camera. You can dramatize a fight between two characters but outside of putting it in a cut scene or taking control of the camera you’re never guaranteed that the player would see it.

Most MMOs also involve an open world which is also persistent or running off one central clock. You may duck out for a day or two but your character didn’t and is still resting in the general area you left them. This doesn’t exactly lend itself to the creation of scenes where leaps in time are the norm. You can make a cut scene but with a persistent world you can only advance or get out of sync with the rest of the world by only a few minutes.

Players are looking for the game not the story

The player of course didn’t buy the game for the story they bought it for the game, the story is a nice to have. That nice to have most commonly comes in the form of a story world. As Tracy Seamster and Steve Danuser point out, MMOs seem more suited to story worlds where the player creates their own story using the rich source material provided. If you want real time story that is more along the lines of movies or books we probably need to look at different models.

Tell a story without becoming a movie – say what?

Posted: September 18th, 2009, 7:49am CEST by justingibbs

Reading the book Professional Techniques for Video Game Writing, I came across an interesting line from Jay Posey on the importance of innovation.

Innovate! Innovation needs to occur on both levels for the Narrative Designer. From the design side, games are still in the process of figuring out how to tell a good story without becoming a movie or something other than a game.

Except I want to do exactly that, it’s my dream to create something akin to a real time movie. Granted Posey is talking about writing for the game industry and a key part of any industry is knowing your audience. That’s also why I’m happy that I don’t exactly work in the game industry, but the serious game industry building training simulations. Our audiences are a bit different and that allows us to experiment in ways the larger game industry might not.

And with all that experimentation hopefully we’ll learn what it would take to create real time movies. Then we’ll just need to find the audience, and audience of me’s.

Want to innovate, start with a profitable business

Posted: September 3rd, 2009, 5:06am CEST by justingibbs

I’ve worked in successful startups and not so successful startups; established companies that make hundreds of millions in profit and some that make hundreds of thousands. What draws me most to a particular company or position is the opportunity to innovate. At one company that was my specific job – create new products. Over those years I’ve learned a thing or two about innovation, like you don’t join a startup to innovate. That’s for two reasons. First, most of the innovation was already done by the founders. They already had the idea, the spark and are now just trying to execute. To build their idea into a product. The second reason is that startups traditionally don’t care about profit. Profit is something to worry about after the IPO or sale to Google.

Think profit isn’t important to startups, just read the recent post on 37Signals blog – The bar for success in our industry is too low. Or watch this video from Watch David Heinemeier Hansson.

Startups keep a close eye on their burn rate, but have seemed to have lost track of classic business principles. The drive for profit not only keeps the lights on but adds structure to the innovation process. In startups I found the senior team was open to innovation as long as it was along the lines they were already thinking. They didn’t care to test much because they already knew. It isn’t that different in an established company but you have something in your back pocket – profit. Demonstrate that your idea can bring in a massive profit and they’ll listen a little more. They also tend to listen with a more open mind, they don’t feel like their job is to execute but to manage. They can also be incredibly risk averse, but startups can too despite the image.

If you’re still not convinced of the importance of profit I suggest checking out the Lean Startup from Eric Ries. He’s a big supporter of charging for a product from day one. And just remember, profit not only keeps your business alive but instills discipline, especially in the innovation process.

Wanting more from quests

Posted: August 29th, 2009, 6:59pm CEST by justingibbs

Colossal Cave Adventure Over at MMORPG.com, cmagoun makes a case for what he calls dynamic quests - Dynamic Quest System (or Life Without !?!?!?!?).

Our system will provide excitement by giving the player a fresh experience each time he logs into the game. We will tie the character’s actions to events in the game world and he will see the results of his actions as it affects NPCs, game locations and even his fellow players (albeit only temporarily). Instead of dryly telling the game’s backstory in flavor text, our quests will give the player a story to tell each session of play.

Sounds great, but where do we find this awesome questing system?

Much of what cmagoun’s asking for is the topic of discussion at Visual Purple. When building training simulations in virtual worlds much of what’s traditionally been done with quests in MMOs just isn’t going to cut it. As I like to say – we’re not building Lord of the Rings here, we can’t rely on lore and fantasy to draw the player in. We want to use more contemporary storytelling techniques, many of which would be empowered by the same things cmagoun is asking for.

Doing Instead of Getting: A friend of mine once said “RPGs are about doing cool things and getting cool stuff.” I agree. I also think that MMOs have the “getting cool stuff” part down pat. We’re here to work on the “doing cool things” part. For that reason, I am not focusing on the reward aspects of the system just yet. Of course quests will have rewards, but the focus is on what the players do as opposed to what they get.

It’s all too easy to fall into the trap of doing what’s been done before and probably more importantly, been successful before. I think most quest designers think only in terms of making it difficult to collect something. We need to open this up, especially in training simulations. We’re always throwing around the term – learning objectives. The keyword here being objective. That can’t always be to collect an item. A lot of the training we do is higher cognitive, like how to avoid an HR issue from escalating into a legal issue – what are you going to do to make that happen? If your successful you’ll get nothing but satisfaction.

Quest Flow Is Not Set: Another departure from PQs. With Dynamic Quests we should have the option to change the results based on the actions of the players. A quest designer could base the flow of the DQ on the success or failure of the players involved, or he might have the progression based on what levels of characters participate, or even change the quest flow randomly so that players who experience the quest more than once don’t know what to expect.

This is something we pay special attention to as replay value is a core aspect of training simulations. The objective isn’t simply to “get through”, but to learn. Playing through again but taking a different path is a core part of training.

Quests Have Natural Mechanisms For Getting People Involved: So, instead of quest icons and arrows leading players by the nose, DQs will have to find ways in the game world of getting players to the action. Alarm bells might sound because of an impending goblin invasion. Players might be stopped by a crying street urchin. A gigantic fire and plume of smoke might alert players of something amiss in a nearby village. Players that talk to town NPCs will be rewarded with rumors about nearby DQs. Heck, we could even go as far as to have conversation skills players could train (much like gathering and crafting skills found in other games) that made this process easier.

This one is a pet peeve of mine. A question mark above an NPC can certainly help to know what to do, however it also hurts the level of immersion. With training simulations we’re always trying to make them more true to life to enhance the immersion to increase the engagement to maximize retention and achieve true learning.

Let’s continue with the HR simulation. Sometimes we overhear things at the water cooler that could be an HR issue. If a player’s role is that of an HR manager, hearing such stuff should prompt them to act. Of course you might be asking – In a virtual world how would the player know to venture over to the water cooler without the question mark? I think of that as more a problem of pathing and design. It’s also a problem I’d like to have. Disneyland uses all kinds of tricks to direct visitors – obvious and not so obvious and they entertain you while they manipulate you (lots do the former, few manage the latter). At times its worth it to be obvious, other times it diminishes the level of immersion and they go for a more subtle guide.

Another benefit of the subtle approach is that we can better evaluate the player’s performance. If the player chooses to do nothing with the information he overhears, we could quickly correct them on their error.

Question marks and and more obvious guides also alert the player that something needs to be done. When in doubt the player just clicks from one signal to another without paying attention to the progression of the story or what is being taught.

All this isn’t to say that obvious guides shouldn’t be used, it depends on the project. It would just be nice to see other options in assigning quests.

Quests Have an Impact on the Game World (for a while anyways): Based on the results of the DQ, the game world will change. If a village is razed because players could not stop the dragon… the village is razed for an hour or so. If the players save the village, they are lauded as heroes and can expect gifts from the villagers, or lower shop prices for a similar period of time.

What cmagoun is really asking for here is interactive story. It’s a tall order and one that I have yet to seen done in a satisfactory way. But it’s what I think we all want.

Conclusion

Like cmagoun, I would love it if quest systems supported these features today, but to a large extent they don’t. So me and the others at Visual Purple must experiment and try to build them. Unlike MMOs we can’t rely on the game aspect to keep the player engaged. How many people want to go to school and sit through class? It’s more likely that players of training simulations don’t want to be there. However the better we can draw them in with the story the more they’ll learn and retain the information. And if we had cmagoun’s dynamic quests that would be a whole lot easier.

Reminder that virtual worlds start with community not technology

Posted: August 20th, 2009, 5:23am CEST by justingibbs

Many friends have asked me recently if I’ve seen Ameba? Apparently it’s a virtual world for older teenagers and young adults in Japan. Other than maybe it’s Japanese cute it isn’t much different from most virtual worlds, except it’s wildly popular. It’s thriving. But how can that be when virtual worlds, outside of MMOs and kid based worlds, are struggling? What’s different about Ameba?

Being Ameba is from Japan I wasn’t able to get much information going straight to the source. But it looks like any other consumer virtual world; you get your own virtual room, can dress up your avatar, even buy virtual goods. What’s so different? Then I learned a little about the history of Ameba, namely that Ameba started as a blogging community long before it started the virtual world piece.

I thought I would introduce Ameblo, the most popular blogging platform in Japan and talk about the culture and features surrounding Ameblo.

One thing my friends always mentioned about Ameba was how vibrant the community was, how whenever you were in world there were new and interesting people to talk with. That’s because they created that community long before adding 3D and the virtual world. Google Lively, like many virtual worlds, tried to create the technology first thinking that it was so cool people would rush to join. That strategy certainly didn’t work for Google Lively. Nor did it work for vSide. The technology doesn’t create the community however cool it is. It’s something we know in Silicon Valley but often forget – it’s not all about the technology.

Don’t count asynchronous out

Posted: July 9th, 2009, 4:14pm CEST by justingibbs

Gamasutra ran an interesting article on synchronous vs asynchronous play, and how we shouldn’t overlook the qualities of asynchronous.

Working in the virtual world’s field we are all about synchronous to almost a fault. For one it’s a huge technical challenge, one that engineers love to devote their time. We also believe it is exactly what users want as it’s what they ask for. Or is it? Blindly listen to users and you might build the next videophone. ATT lost millions producing one after 25 years of development only to watch people pick up the receiver and walk away from the camera and screen.

One of the biggest reason for looking at asynchronous again might be the sheer size of the audience.

Truth to be told, asynchronous games are still in their infancy from a design perspective. Their future is promising as the potential audience for asynchronous multi-player games is much great than the potential audience for synchronous ones – although anyone who can find time for synchronous games can find time for asynchronous ones, the opposite is not true.

I know whenever I envision real time story in virtual worlds it’s closer to an asynchronous experience. The article also highlights some creative ways to integrate other players while still being asynchronous.

I’ve moved to SLO and joined Visual Purple

Posted: July 7th, 2009, 4:59am CEST by justingibbs

Today I started at Visual Purple and in case you’re not familiar with SLO, it’s San Luis Obispo. I discovered Visual Purple a few months back and I have to say, working there is almost a dream come true. Most of the time I’ll be working directly on real time story and virtual worlds so you can understand why I jumped at the opportunity.

The company’s roots are actually in interactive story or better known in the 90’s as interactive movies, producing such hits as Silent Steel and Blue Force. That history also gives them a unique perspective in the field of virtual worlds training and serious games. Namely that it’s all about the story.

Besides the great team what excites me most about the position is trying to solve a common problem in virtual worlds, how to get players to engage and lead them through an experience without being heavy handed? Being a big fan of the teaching of Eric Ries and The Lean Startup it’s also nice to be doing all this with paying customers. There is nothing better to validate your learning than having a paying customer. To top it off I also get to experiment with virtual characters.

It’s also great to work for a company that includes in it’s stated goals – world domination. Considering what I envision for the future of entertainment world domination would just about sum it up.

What if Apple entered the virtual worlds fray?

Posted: June 23rd, 2009, 5:26pm CEST by justingibbs

iWorld - A virtual world from Apple Last week a friend asked me, what do virtual worlds need to go mainstream? After a minute my answer was pretty simple, for Apple to get involved. Apple could revolutionize the industry for consumer virtual worlds as they did with the MP3 player and phone market.

By now the field for consumer virtual worlds is pretty well defined. We’ve seen success with MMOGs and kids worlds, as well as complete failures such as Google Lively and the Second Life tie in with CSI. We’ve learned what it takes to make a virtual world successful – Sally Schmidt of Circle 1 Network laid it out at the recent Engage! Expo. And with that virtual worlds loses some of the excitement and enthusiasm which sprung forth after Second Life hit the public’s imagination. Maybe this is to be expected but I feel there is still a lot of unexplored potential. Interesting enough this is also the time where Apple enters the market.

The market for MP3 players was pretty well defined by the time Apple entered it with the iPod. Everyone already knew how the game was played – it was all about price and expanding flash memory. Some companies had already tried using expensive mini hard drives and they bombed because of price so they laughed when Apple entered with a $400 MP3 player based on a mini hard drive. Needless to say the leading MP3 players of the time are all but gone and Apple owns 70% or more of the market today. Apple would do the same with the iPhone. So what could Apple hope for entering the virtual world space? What would an Apple virtual world, an iWorld look like?

Browser based

Seeing Google release O3D (an open-source web API for 3D) and Mozilla is working with the Khronos Group to develop a similar API for Firefox I can’t help but think Apple is working to add one to Safari as well. That way users won’t need to download and install additional plugins, the 3D will be native to the browser. It would also lend itself to going mobile as well.

Entertainment focused

My guess is that it’ll be entertainment focused. There are many examples of successful virtual worlds – enterprise, virtual events, serious games, etc. but if you’re talking consumer based it’s quickly narrowed to games and kids. On one end we have World of Warcraft and MMOGs, on the other we have kids worlds with strong context like Club Penguin. Google Lively, which flamed out after only a few months, was neither. It had little context and only promised game developers tools in the future. The fact is that when new users enter these virtual worlds their first question is usually – how do I play the game or what’s the story? If the answer is anything like, “It’s a 3D social network where you can express yourself” they run for the hills. Even if you incorporate, “play games with friends” it won’t resolve the users confusion. They already have a social network, it’s called Facebook. They already have messenger and they were never lacking for ways to express themselves. When they see 3D they think game, they think entertainment.

Need more than just a game or games

Naturally when people think entertainment and computers they think games, it’s the same with virtual worlds. But I’m guessing Apple would take it beyond this obvious conclusion. For one games are a hits driven business and second, they are not Apple’s strong suit. Apple also likes to appeal to wide audiences and crossover hits like Tetris and the Sims are notoriously difficult to come by. World of Warcraft is wildly popular but it’s audience is still rather narrow compared to Apple’s other markets.

That isn’t to say that Apple will completely neglect gaming aspects, it just won’t be core. Apple could turn the virtual world into a platform for game developers such as the iPhone is with app games. However the iPhone launched without an app store and was still a success. The games help but are not core.

Another way to think about it is by examining virtual worlds that build themselves around games or mini games. It seems like a logical step, once you have people in world keep them entertained with games, it’s also a common request from users. The only problem is that this strategy puts the virtual world in competition with game companies and casual game sites. The question then becomes what do you bring to the table that is different? What is core to your experience that you can’t get on a casual game site? It’s a difficult question and one where I think we’ll see the real innovation coming from Apple.

Apple won’t fall for the self expression myth

Yahoo! Avatars The question is what does your virtual world bring to the table that is different? Most virtual worlds would answer with some combination of an avatar and self expression. Problem is I was never hurting for new ways to express myself. Oh people love customizing their avatars and virtual rooms, however after a few weeks it gets old and they move on. People use to spend hours building homepages on GeoCities, customizing their MySpace page, but they’ve all moved on.

The same happened with Yahoo! avatars. It was one of the top requests from users for years and they were excited when we launched early 2D versions, but after a few months there was little activity.

The majority of users are just observers not content creators. Even less are artists in need of self expression. Such features can greatly enhance a service, but can’t carry a service on there own.

Strong context

So what else might Apple’s virtual world build at its core around? Simply having avatars and allowing for personalization probably isn’t going to separate it enough from casual game sites and the rest of the competition. Kid’s worlds get around this with strong context. Kids find endless entertainment in the penguins of Club Penguin, even if they aren’t playing a game. However with strong context Apple faces the same problems as if it was game laden – it’s tough to appeal to a wide audience and it’ll evolve into a hits driven business.

Instead of games, story

Maybe it isn’t necessarily a question of what Apple could bring in addition to the games but the games and activities themselves. Most social gaming sites are a collection of self contained or semi-contained games and a leader board. Maybe the core of Apple’s virtual world will be set up by the selection of games themselves?

Games have notoriously been an insular industry. The Wii and Sims have shown that there is a much wider audience but it’s still very much locked to their traditional audience, because it’s safe. Serious games have shown some of the potential outside of shoot’em up games. And there are simulations, interactive story, immersive story, etc. There is a lot of potential that has never truly been explored. It’s risky when games costs go into the millions, but Apple has shown the wherewithal to place big bets before, like switching to Intel chips.

What it really opens up is room for story in the gaming world. Instead of the challenge leading people through the experience the drama could. Of course the conflict between games and story have been played out many times before and so far they have remained separate entities in many respects. It’s like sculpture vs painting, each has it’s own feature set however virtual worlds give us the ability to merge these like never before and this is where I believe Apple’s virtual world will play. It will push games into their next stage of evolution just as they did for the mobile Internet.

Platform for real time story artists

You just have to look at Xtranormal to see what is possible. With Xtranormal moving making is simple and completely digital. It isn’t much of a stretch to see it become real time with interactive or immersive story. AI technology is also improving, it’s not at the point where users can freely talk with chatterbots but in the hands of an artists a few constraints could unlock their potential. The technology is there, real time story artists have just never had it all brought together into a platform.

Think of it this way, the traditional carnival is full of games. Darts, the ring toss, and more. Rides were added, but it wasn’t until Disneyland opened that it truly entered into the story world. The App Store made it possible for game developers to create more games but an Apple virtual world could make it possible for real time story, for a Disneyland of story experiences.

Is Apple building one?

Well I’ve speculated a lot on what Apple would do if they built a virtual world, but is there any evidence that they’re building one? Not really, but then again Apple is one of the most secretive companies in the world. They just announced plans for an East Coast data center, which makes you think as virtual worlds are very processor intensive. Apple also isn’t saying what the data center is for nor how big it is going to be.

Real time movie making with Xtranormal

Posted: June 18th, 2009, 4:12pm CEST by justingibbs

One of the more exciting companies I’ve come across recently is Xtranormal. It’s a great example of where I see the future of entertainment going.

Movies have been digital for a while, but Xtranormal moves the entire creation process into the digital realm. Newspapers went fully digital with the Internet and look what it did for them. I’d expect even more for movies.

People’s first foray into scripted movies is usually as part of a class project. Going through the motions you quickly learn how incredibly time consuming it all is. Your friends, now actors, are difficult to organize let alone direct. Having a script would be helpful but most people start without one. The biggest lesson you learn is that re-shoots and last minute edits take up more time than shooting the original footage. It simply isn’t an easy medium to work with and in the end you settle on something far below your original vision.

Edit and re-shoot in real time

Being fully digital changes much of that. With Xtranormal the actors are completely virtual, using text to speech for their dialogue. Even the camera and editing can be automated. You can build a film in less than a minute. Granted the text to speech is still a little rough and there are only a limited set of characters and sets, but the technology will only improve with time and what you gain can be much more powerful. For one, you can all but do away with those pesky re-shoots – you can create a movie in real time if you’d like.

Open source movies

Xtranormal also enables you to set a movie as being open – open for others to cut, remix, do whatever they’d like with your original work. That’s taking fan fiction to a whole new level and truly powering mass amateurization as defined by Clay Shirky.

Movies as a continuous evolving product

Editing movies in real time also changes the concept of a finished product. Think of a movie being in Beta. With edits and re-shoots being this easy it’s possible to also employ continuous deployment and continuous learning as advised by Eric Ries and his Lean Startup methodology. Think of split-testing not just a new ending, but a single line of dialogue. Truly the movie itself becomes a continuously evolving product.

It’s all about the level of content

I’ve seen other similar tools like GoAnimate but none use text to speech and the 3D aspect certainly puts Xtranormal a step above. That said however, Xtranormal will succeed or fail based on the level of content created with the tool. There are only a limited set of characters and sets to choose from so you’re story will be pretty confined to talking heads but with a little creativity I’m sure you can work around that and the roughness of the text to speech. I just started a project to try and experiment with interactive story using Xtranormal, hopefully others will start experimenting with it as well.

Is no spec process better than an overly detailed one?

Posted: June 16th, 2009, 9:27pm CEST by justingibbs

The other day I was meeting with a company and was a bit shocked when they openly admitted to not writing specs. And before you ask, yes the company is rather successful and been in business for years – all without formalized a spec process. As a product manager I find it difficult to image, I’ve seen companies with an overtly detailed process before but none? Then I began to question, is it better to have no spec process or an overly detailed one?

Paint by Numbers I once worked for a very successful Internet company that also worked under the Waterfall model. This was my only experience working outside of an Agile shop and I can safely say that if you aren’t doing mission critical stuff, like building a plane, you should never use the Waterfall model. Any-who this company also had a very detailed spec process to go along with it. The Product Manager outlined the product, the Project Manager would translate that into a spec, it would then go to Engineering, etc. What you got at the end of it all was an engineering team that basically did paint by numbers. They only did what was asked and nothing more. They were more worried about covering their ass than pointing out faults with a spec. Of course saying that implies that they knew what we were building, I think most saw the numbers and simply painted. This is certainly not the Engineering team you want when building innovative products.

Compare that with an Agile company that works off of lite specs. Lite because they’re always changing and also because most people don’t read them fully (any part that is unread is wasted effort as Eric Ries points out and startups are about eliminating waste). So the spec is incomplete by its nature so everyone has to add to it in their own way. But how do you know what to add or not to add? That comes down to communication within the company, having a clear vision. Where as with the example above the responsibility was pushed to an all encompassing spec, with a lite Agile process the responsibility is shared with the spec and the communication within the company. With a company that doesn’t use a spec the responsibility must be all on the communication.

Of course adding a lite spec process to where there was none before can be helpful, likely facilitating more communication. However changing the spec process at a company with a detailed process doesn’t yield much gain. If it’s been years you might have departments in serious atrophy as the one I had to work with. So I’d say no spec process is better than an overly detailed one.

Real time story gurus – where are you?

Posted: June 15th, 2009, 1:51am CEST by justingibbs

I spent all day Saturday at the Great American Pitchfest. It was great to be immersed in all that story knowledge again. These conferences are usually built around access to Hollywood types and pitches, but also include a healthy dose of screenwriting gurus. Syd Field probably more than anyone is responsible for making screenwriting gurus famous. Of course each guru has their particular way of breaking down story, but the very fact that they can do it so easily is a bit amazing. But as Drew Yanno put it, “We are the most sophisticated story receptors ever”. We are simply exposed to more stories than at any other time in history and the more exposure means the easier to gleam knowledge. All this lead me to think of what early film pioneers in 1900 would give to know what we know today? What would real time story artists give to know the techniques and conventions that would become standard in the field in say 2050?

Being at the beginning and lacking that knowledge can also be fun. It’s when the wildest experimentation takes place, but that also means a lot of failure. Yet for those who trudge through it there is usually great success. Take Pixar for example. Watching The Pixar Story, the early founders realized that to create computer animation they would first need to get all the data into the computer. Every tree, every leave, ever piece of bark.

It will not take thousands but millions of triangles to create the photo realistic animated films we see today.

That’s a daunting task given the processing power of computer in the early 80’s. We wear more processing power on our bodies today than existed in the average computer lab in the 80’s. But Pixar’s early founders saw through to the potential and kept at it to become wildly successful.

Of course much of Pixar’s journey was on the technology front. They didn’t experiment with story, rather much of their success can be attributed to their strong use of classic storytelling. Screenwriting gurus use their movies as examples of classic storytelling. Pixar’s experimentation took place in the creation process – one half technology and one half structural. Unlike Hollywood studios Pixar creates a movie more by committee (which some would argue is how Hollywood worked in the early days). In Hollywood where movies start with a screenplay written by a single screenwriter, Pixar many time starts with a concept and work as a team to build it into a movie.

I see a much different path for real time story on the experimentation front – much of which will be on the story front. Real time story is about changing the rules of classic storytelling. It’s going to be an interesting time. I can’t wait for the day I attend a conference to hear real time story gurus.

The power of character and responsive environments

Posted: June 8th, 2009, 11:38pm CEST by justingibbs

I just saw this video of Milo from the E3. It’s from Lionhead Studios and designed to highlight Xbox’s new Project Natal. Seeing the video you can easily see where immersive technology and virtual worlds are going. But more than that, you can see the power and potential of immersive story. Remember immersive story, unlike interactive story, does not require their to be interactivity with the storyline just that the player imagines there is. To pull this off the environment has to be highly responsive as it is here.

Lionhead Studios also correctly focused on the character Milo to draw you into the scene rather than the technology itself. The augmented reality aspect is great but it’s Milo that really captures your attention and engages your imagination. It’s the difference between using technology to build the scariest monster Hollywood has ever seen or using technology and story to engage the audiences imagination. As they say in Hollywood, don’t show the monster till the very end or ever if you can help it – you simply can’t compete with what audiences can imagine in their head. We imagine Milo as a full character and see the augmented reality as simply a way to interact with him.

Serious games, the best application for interactive story

Posted: June 8th, 2009, 1:38am CEST by justingibbs

I’ve been waiting for interactive story to take off for years and I’m relatively new to the field, Chris Crawford has been plugging away at it for over a decade. Originally I thought the games industry would lead the way in developing interactive story, however the defining feature of games is of course the game – not the story. The industry has also famously been conservative as Wagner James Au put it, The game industry is Hollywood for Lost Boys.

It’s a business comprised almost entirely of young gamer dudes, serving an audience of young gamer dudes, covered by a gaming press of young gamer dudes, all of whom are only interested in creating, playing, and covering games that interest young gamer dudes—which they believe to be the pinnacle of entertainment.

Seeing virtual worlds though I thought it was a second chance for interactive story. However most are struggling just to find a business model and the technology is nascent. There’s still a lot of opportunity in virtual worlds but what has captured my attention is serious games. For one they have a business model. Secondly, their educational value is increased the more immersive they are and incorporating story will only help that.

Over the weekend I spent some time going through examples from Visual Purple. They specialize in serious games and simulations for training and education. What impressed me most was their incorporation of movie techniques. In Winning in Wireless: Year 1, they incorporate a virtual world but also utilize great cut scenes to pull the player into the story. Exposition is the bane of storytellers and especially in training materials, but WiW does a great job by putting it over an action sequence.

Seeing examples from Visual Purple I can say that serious games are the best application of interactive story yet. And Visual Purple isn’t the only pioneering company in this space.

Daden Limited and their open source project PIVOTE
PIXELearning
Serious Games Interactive
Tandem Learning
Visual Purple

It will be interesting to see what these companies come up with in way of tools, innovations, and conventions. It also won’t be much of a stretch apply these to interactive stories aimed at more entertainment than educational pursuits. Just check out the Power of Story: Driven to get an idea of where it can go.

Interactive story isn’t just about decisions

Posted: June 4th, 2009, 4:49pm CEST by justingibbs

Over the years interactive story has captured the imagination of many. Hollywood even tried to create one – Mr. Payback. But nothing has caught on with mainstream audiences. Most people’s exposure to it probably consists of Choose Your Own Adventure books, seeing the Holodeck on Star Trek, and if you’re lucky dating sims or a serious game. If you’ve ever read a Choose Your Own Adventure book you’ll know it’s full of questions. Interactive stories to date are just a series of decisions, of which Mr. Payback is a great example.

For me it’s really difficult to watch, forced to make decision after decision. Needless to say Mr. Payback was also a complete failure. The problem is story isn’t just about decisions. James Bond doesn’t really have a choice to accept a mission or not, he has too. The story comes out of his skills and audacity of the master villain. The only decisions James Bond really makes is how to subdue the master villain. Trying to incorporate that will inevitably lead the interactive story down a path to becoming a game with resource management, strategy, and all that. Soon the story will be taking a seat in the back to the game aspects.

Decision points can actually hurt immersion

The creators of Mr. Payback could have done a better job integrating the decision points but it also demonstrates the problem of relying solely on them for interactivity.

Interactive stories typically proceed like Mr. Payback. A cut scene followed by a decision point, followed by another cut scene and decision point. Most of these decision points are directed at the player as if he was the protagonist in the story. The player is asked to dawn the role of the protagonist. However that presents a few problems of its own.

Michael Hauge, the screenwriting guru, explains that stories are interactive by their very nature. To enjoy them we already have to see ourselves as the protagonist.

Movies, screenplays, and novels are participatory events. In order to experience the emotional roller coaster they offer, audiences can’t just observe the action, they must become the hero as she faces all the obstacles standing between her and her goal. In other words, they must empathize and identify with the hero.

- Selling Your Story in 60 Seconds by Michael Hauge

Empathy is the key, however it’s difficult to empathize when the character is yourself. If you’re like me you’ll answer the questions as yourself rather than as the character. Every decision point is actually a point to just play around. Let’s go this way and see what happens. Where this might be good for educational purposes (serious games) it kind of falls flat for entertainment as demonstrated by Mr. Payback.

We need to expand the interactive story tool-set

Story is about more than just decision points. Interactive story will need to expand it’s tool-set if it hopes to attract a mainstream audience and expand beyond serious games. If you’re hoping to create an interactive drama all you can rely on is the power of story – you have to create empathy organically from the story. Serious games can more or less expect the player to take on the role of the protagonist simply for the instructional value. Games on the other hand are about simple play and rarely care if you take on the role or not. We play just to see the explosions, for the challenge, etc. That said, serious games and games themselves would be greatly improved by incorporating more pure story.

Eventually the conventions and techniques of the new medium will emerge. It took years for film pioneers to discover continuity editing. Prior to that they were accustomed to just filming Vaudeville acts and trains. Continuity editing unlocked films story potential, perhaps we’ll find an equivalent technique for interactive story.

If you’ve seen other techniques that work well, please let me know by leaving a comment. In a future post I discuss some of the techniques I’m experimenting with.

Breaking the reality distortion field

Posted: June 2nd, 2009, 4:40pm CEST by justingibbs

Drink the Kool-Aid I’m a big fan of a concept Eric Ries calls shadow beliefs. Of course they aren’t something to strive for. Shadow beliefs are shared assumptions that are widely believed in the start-up but never spoken. For example:

We know what customers want.
We can accurately predict the future.
Advancing the plan is progress.

They can also be unique to the start-up and company, but most of the time these shadow beliefs lead to executives and employees living in a reality distortion field. And reality distortion field is another name for a confirmation bias.

confirmation bias is a tendency to search for or interpret new information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions and to irrationally avoid information and interpretations which contradict prior beliefs.

Yahoo! is a great example. It came to fame as a portal but lost that distinction years ago. However the company never could realize that inside the reality distortion field. Even when Jerry Yang took charge he called Yahoo! a start page.

We have taken significant but disciplined steps to refocus our business on our objectives to become the starting point for the most consumers and the must buy for the most advertisers and enhance Yahoo!’s long-term performance.

Problem was that most people start with search, and Google owned search.

Most companies are guilty of creating reality distortion fields. Some are small and some are huge. In very rare occasions they can be successful, as with Steve Jobs and the original Mac. Other times they can take down a company. Much of the reason GM filed for bankruptcy is do to their reality distortion field.

After Roger Smith, Confirmation Bias kept GM from viewing the threat from Toyota as significant, contributed to its decision to pull its electric car off the market, and more recently led it to ignore the impact of higher gas prices and a collapse in credit markets on consumers’ willingness to buy profitable gas guzzlers like the Hummer or tricked-out Escalades and SUVs.

At GM it was beneficial to your career to toe the line and ignore what customers were saying.

So the smart thing for those seeking promotion within GM was to praise the CEO’s wisdom and carry out his orders.

But many times employees simply get pulled in, they drink the Kool-Aid. I have a friend right now working for free while his start-up looks for funding. You have to be dedicated at start-ups but that can also slip into a reality distortion field.

Breaking through the reality distortion field

I’ve run into my share of reality distortion fields in my career. When I was younger and more naive I thought I could simply prove my way through them. If I presented a strong enough business need they would see the light. Of course they never did, that’s the whole point of reality distortion fields.

Having taken part in Lean Startup workshop I think Eric has found a great process for breaking through the reality distortion field. Acknowledging the shadow beliefs is a big step in itself but he goes beyond just that.

The first place to find reality is in your users. But don’t just listen to them, validate your what you’ve learned through Customer Development. And remember the best form of communication is through providing customers with new products/features. They vote with their time and money – money being the more important validation. Eric also dives into a few techniques to shrink the time between major iterations, which is another way of saying speed up the conversation and learn more. Learn more than your competition and you’ll win.

Eric also offers some internal techniques to keep free of the reality distortion field. One he took from the Toyota Production System, Five Whys. He of course tweaks the techniques for software companies and start-ups.

In the end I think it might be one of the most important of Eric’s teachings – breaking the reality distortion field.

WordPress and Matt’s passion for design

Posted: June 1st, 2009, 12:22am CEST by justingibbs

WordCamp I’ve always been impressed with WordPress. It’s fast, clean, and open source. A lot of my enjoyment comes from it having just what I need and nothing I don’t. But a lot of that enjoyment also comes from the fact that it’s a beautiful tool.

Everyone knows that Auttomatic and WordPress are focused on open source, but at WordCamp yesterday I also learned how committed Matt Mullenweg is to design and aesthetics. His presentation was full of snapshots and more than once he pointed out the incorrect use of the logo. He also took time just to highlight the T-Shirt designs from earlier WordCamps. Design is very important to Matt.

I find Matt’s commitment to open source inspiring and am thankful he is so committed to design.

The first Lean Startup workshop

Posted: May 30th, 2009, 8:01am CEST by justingibbs

Today I had the privilege of attending the first Lean Startup workshop put on by Eric Ries. I came across Eric’s teachings and consequently Steve Blank’s Customer Development while working at Vivaty. At the time it seemed everything we were doing was the exact thing Eric and Steve advised against. Needless to say I became a big convert, so much so that I plunked down my own money to attend the first workshop Eric put together and I wasn’t disappointed. I was already sold on the material and more exposure to it would be well worth it however Eric also forced us to do something I always dread at workshops – participation exercises. Whenever instructors force the audience to do these exercises they say it will help impart the information, and they’re usually correct despite the pain. What I learned from these exercises will probably take a while to fully sink in. It was also to learn from the other attendees through these exercises. I have to give it to Eric, he was trying to impart a lot of information and I think he made a great start. I have a much better grasp of the concepts than I did before the workshop. Eric is very sincere about his passion to spread the concept of The Lean Startup. Like many in Silicon Valley he wants to see what innovation it can spur.

My only complaint is that one day isn’t enough. Eric has a lot of material to cover and was only able to focus on what he felt was the most powerful, leaving the rest for the workbook. Needless to say I have a lot of reading to do.

Interestingly enough Tim Ferriss of The 4-Hour Workweek was there. I always expected him to be the constant marketer but he is actually very humble and down to earth. I look forward to catching him at WordCamp tomorrow.

In closing I feel compelled to pass along a great video Eric showed during the workshop. It so captures the traditional start-up.

Virtual events and the ticking clock

Posted: May 27th, 2009, 6:41pm CEST by justingibbs

One of the most common complaints I hear about virtual worlds is that they’re empty. Visitors either take that as proof there is nothing to do or that there is no reason to stay as being social is the only draw. Being a screenwriter I see the parallels with movies. The problem with most independent movies is that they’re boring; there is nothing driving them. Screenwriters employ various tricks to create a sense of drive, one being the ticking clock. Movies are all about pressure and tension, the more you can keep from letting it dissipate the better. Think of Cinderella.

Add a ticking clock time pressure to the main plot goal and a little ticking clock to each scene if possible – bomb about to go off, meeting, deadline, race, running out of something important.

- Writing A Great Script Fast In A Nutshell

Unlike most virtual worlds, virtual events are all about the ticking clock. The virtual world an event uses may stay around for days but the virtual event itself is constrained to only a few hours. You’re there or you’re not. It’s more than just bringing people together, virtual events employ a ticking clock to heighten the event, to add a sense of drive.

The ticking clock would also suggest that virtual events not be open ended where time is concerned. Saying that the even goes until everyone has left dissipates the tension. It also wouldn’t hurt to shine the light on the clock every once in a while.

Positioning as more than just marketing

Posted: May 22nd, 2009, 5:48pm CEST by justingibbs

I’m reading Peter Drucker’s seminal book on management and came across the interesting story of Sears expansion into new markets. It was meant to be a cautionary tale to learn from failure and reexamine your theory of the business. However I wonder if it can also be a cautionary tale of positioning.

Seventy years ago, in the midst of the Depression, Sears decided that automobile insurance had become an “accessory” rather than a financial product and that selling it would therefore fir its mission of being the informed buyer for the American family. Everyone thought Sears was crazy. But automobile insurance became Sears’s most profitable business almost instantly. Twenty years later, in the 1950s, Sears decided that diamond rings had become a necessity rather than a luxury, and the company became the world’s largest - and probably most profitable - diamond retailer. It was only logical for Sears to decide in 1981 that investment products had become consumer goods for the American family. It bought Dean Witter and moved its offices into Sears’s stores. The move was a total disaster. The U. S. public clearly did not consider its financial needs to be “consumer products.”

Was it that the consumers didn’t see them as consumer products yet or was it more due to the fact that they didn’t see Sears as that type of company? Al Ries and Jack Trout explained in their book Positioning, the proliferation of marketing messages has forever changed how we market to consumers. It’s moved the battle field into the mind of the consumer and they only have one slot, or if you’re lucky a few slots, for any product category. If you already see BMW as the leader in driving performance it’s nearly impossible for another car to knock them off and you’re better off trying to create another slot to own - Volvo and safety.

Sears expanded into auto insurance and diamonds when there were much less messages plastered everywhere. Consumers hadn’t yet built up processes to deal with the influx of messages. By the time Sears bought Dean Witter the consumer had already put Sears into a slot, a slot that didn’t include consumer products. Of course that in itself should prompt Sears to reexamine their theory of the business as Drucker advices.

Without context you might be a bit fleeting

Posted: May 14th, 2009, 10:26pm CEST by justingibbs

Rick van der Wal alerted me to the post What’s The Story? by Jessica Helfand. She discusses the millions of short (140 character) messages we’re seeing today on Twitter, status messages, and the like. Sometimes funny, these messages can also incite a story.

the wedding cake in the middle of the road

You can see a story, however it also void context - that’s all for you to add. Helfand seems to pine for a more traditional form of story.

Nevertheless, the pithy, out-of-context statement is becoming its own narrative form. Yet despite its appeal, it is almost singularly flawed: isn’t it by its very nature meant to perpetually self-destruct? (How else to make way for the next one-liner?) On one hand, it’s blessed with the patina of abstraction, a gestural cast-off intentionally divorced from context lest it appear too serious.

It’s value is fleeting. How many people remember tweets or funny status messages? For all their entertainment they’re fleeting. Which got me thinking. For years people have been advising the use of story to communicate, most importantly in businesses. We think in stories, so marketing and business should also. Seth Godin has been advising businesses to use story to break through today’s tidal wave of marketing messages. One problem is that they’ve been taking the advice but cling to the most basic form of story - the creation myth. Yahoo! being started by two graduate students from Stanford. eBay and the Pez dispenser myth. Companies are learning that they need to move beyond this most basic form of story. But beyond that these companies also default to stories with little context. Context takes time; the whole strategy of adding story is to maximize the little time you have with customers, why waste that precious time on context. Which leads me to ask, without context are they more fleeting?

Google Lively the perfect example of fleeting

Google Lively closed Let’s use Google Lively as an example. I harp on it and many consumer virtual worlds for a lack of context. You could modify your avatar to be a big headed kid, a bear, or almost anything. Compare that to World of Warcraft where you can be one of only a small set of characters and all taken from the established WoW universe. In Club Penguin you of course have to be a penguin. With SuperSecret you’re a teenager trying to grow up. These might not be the best examples but they have a whole lot more context than Google Lively had. Without context Google Lively proved very fleeting.

Google Lively like others in the virtual world space thought they were building a utility and expected users to generate the content and in so doing, the context. They were very similar to the the pithy phrase - the wedding cake in the middle of the road. There was something there but it was fleeting without context.

Offering superior utility

That isn’t to say that they had to have context to survive, they could have provided superior utility. However compared to their competitors it was pretty much more of the same. Hence they were in the context game and sadly they weren’t even suited up to play.

In today’s world where everything is competing for attention if you don’t provide superior utility or context, you’re fleeting.

Movies meet split-testing and continuous deployment

Posted: May 12th, 2009, 4:19am CEST by justingibbs

Emerging technologies give us a lot of opportunity when it comes to entertainment and much more than just as a distribution channel. You only have to look at Xtranormal to see some of the potential. This is machinima on steroids and just the beginning really. I can’t wait till Xtranormal is integrated with an real time story engine. That’s what excites me the most but I’m almost as equally excited by the ability to apply split-testing and continuous deployment to story.

To an extent Hollywood has always done some testing. However screenings are done after filming is complete and there is little that can be changed at that point. We can do much better with these new forms of entertainment - continuous deployment and split-testing. However unlike the technology products we’re testing in Silicon Valley, it’ll be a little more difficult breaking story down to actionable items to test. For centuries we’ve broken story into three acts. Others have broken it into sequences. I’m sure we’re about to see an entirely new way.

Virtual events - Another area of success for virtual worlds

Posted: May 8th, 2009, 4:09pm CEST by justingibbs

I’ve likened the recent phase of virtual worlds to Web 1.0 - Virtual Worlds 1.0. Much of it was engineers building a solution in search of a problem. However one problem that has been pushed to the forefront by the collapsed economy is virtual events. Dannette Veale of Cicso believes it’s more than just the economy.

Virtual events have a lot going for them, not the least of which being crowds. It can be painfully obvious when a virtual world is empty. It can be the same for web sites, especially social ones. Jack Moffitt, creator of Chesspark an online community for chess players, faced just such a problem. With only a few dollars to devote to an AdSense campaign he like most people spread it out evenly. But it wasn’t until he switched to blowing it all in just an hour a day that he saw real returns. Users were guaranteed to find others on the site and consequently stayed longer.

Consumer virtual worlds spend a lot of their time just trying to keep users online. Time they could spend enhancing the experience when users are actually there. Think of all the tools virtual worlds employ to help you meet others who are online the same time you are? With virtual events this isn’t a problem. People bump into each other as they would at a real event - it’s natural. But as Drew VanVooren points out, it even goes beyond that.

There’s another component that’s come out of the analytics: participation,” explained VanVooren. “[A type A] personality at a physical event would walk down the center of a trade show floor and walk up and introduce themselves. There’s a lot of people that just hang out in the middle of the floor and never participate. Online, everybody has an A personality. You see participation from everyone who enters the event.

Not only do virtual events give context and introduce a time factor, they supply a crowd. That gives them a few legs up and puts them in company with other successful examples of virtual worlds - MMOs and kids worlds.

Design decisions using travel and arrival mode

Posted: May 7th, 2009, 4:13pm CEST by justingibbs

As product managers we’re always asking why people visit our company’s site. We can ascertain this in many ways - user feedback, analytics, surveys, etc. Avinash Kaushik explains that you can go a long way with just three questions. Of course all of this is goals based and not only can it return some insightful data but it can be rather confusing.

Another way to really get into a user’s head is through a listening lab. The whole point of a listening lab is to make the participant comfortable enough to get more legitimate data. The more comfortable they are the more frank they will be and less likely to be lead by the moderator. One thing that comes through crystal clear is what mode they’re in while on the site. Usability expert Eric Stephens uses two modes - travel mode or arrival mode. Users are either trying to find what they want (travel mode) or have found it (arrival mode). Modes are an easy way to quickly see how your site is performing and understand how visitors use it. For example, when on your homepage users are in travel mode and will likely ignore any important alert on the page.

Eric Stephens goes into more detail in his interview with Mixergy about listening labs.

Bots don’t need social networks, they need a personality

Posted: May 6th, 2009, 6:27pm CEST by justingibbs

Bots or chatterbots have been around since ELIZA. So it’s little news when researchers are giving one its own Facebook profile page. The interesting part is why - to help foster meaningful relationships with people. Researchers hope this immersion in Facebook will lead to longer engagement.

While robots that can engage people have been produced before now, research suggests that humans lose interest at most a few weeks after being introduced as the behavioural repertoire of the machine is exhausted.

Stan Schroeder from Mashable is a bit skeptical to say the least.

Well, this may come as a surprise, but I’ve been reluctant to stay in touch with robots for several reasons other than the lack of their Facebook profile. First, there aren’t that many of them; and those that do exist aren’t really all that intelligent.

I’m with Schroeder, the problem isn’t the lack of friends or the environment we interact with them it’s their lack of personality. Researchers could learn a lot from the art of screenwriting and how to build character, ones with real personality.

Mr. T First of all, why start with a new character? More importantly why start with one so alien to us? Hollywood has always looked to leverage already established material - from books, comic books, etc. However the researchers wouldn’t even have to go that far, they can just use archetypes. Why are movie characters always architects or doctors - because they’re familiar and more importantly, exciting. It’s really about familiarity. Horror movies in the 1980’s followed the same storyline - teenagers slipping away for sex or drugs would be killed and only the pure would survive. We knew these characters before they even spoke.

The researchers should be looking to build a virtual Mr. T. That is someone I might engage with for more than a few minutes. That also highlights an important ingredient for engagement - humor.

Researchers should also understand that they’re not trying to create a real person. As Robert McKee explains so eliquently.

A character is a work of art, a metaphor for human nature. We relate to characters as if they were real, but they’re superior to reality. Their aspects are designed to be clear and knowable; whereas our fellow humans are difficult to understand, if not enigmatic. We know characters better than we know our friends because a character is eternal and unchanging, while people shift - just when we thing we understand them, we don’t. In fact, I know Rick Blaine in CASABLANCA better then I know myself. Rick is always Rick. I’m a bit iffy.

If researchers can give these bots some personality maybe we can start using the same technology to create virtual characters in immersive story.

Can we turn the art of story over to the players?

Posted: May 5th, 2009, 3:21am CEST by justingibbs

On the surface the concept of interactive story seems simple. All the trouble comes when you try to create one. Not only it is a technical and interface problem, it’s a logic problem (That Darn Conundrum). But beyond even that, as an artist you have no idea where to begin. You know how to move an audience using the various mediums available today but interactive story itself seems completely foreign. That might be because interactive story actually hands the majority of the artistry to the player.

In his book Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware, Andy Hunt highlights research that shows we find attractive things to be easier to use. We even learn at a faster pace if it’s attractive. Seeing the importance of beauty, Hung goes on to quote the famous architect Louis Kahn about the relationship between beauty and design.

Design is not making beauty; beauty emerges from selection, affinities, integration, love.

Hunt explains the quote further.

Kahn explains that beauty emerges from selection. That is, art comes not so much from the act of creation itself but rather from selecting among a near infinite supply of choices.

The musician has a near-infinite palette combining different instruments, rhythms, scale modes, tempo, and the hard-to-define but easy-to-sense “groove”.

Art is a process of selection. What is true for musician is true for writers.

Narrative Story However interactive story hands this selection process over to the player.

Interactive Story

If art is selection, interactive story has less art than traditional narrative. True, interactive story may still allow the artist to narrow the set of choices a player can make, but that is loose selection where traditional story is definite. Plus the choices will likely compound each other, ultimately putting the player in control. The player usurps most of the artistry.

That might also explain why we have yet to see any famous or semi famous artists looking to create interactive story. First they likely don’t know how to start, but more than that they can’t see the artistry.

I’m dealing with much of this today trying to build a dating sim using Ren’Py, which is essentially an interactive story. I continually struggle with the question - is the inclusion of interactivity adding to the entertainment value or would it work just as well or better as a static story? If I hook the user, if I get them to empathise with the characters why would I then want to turn them loose to the player? It isn’t just me being a snob; we see movies made by professionals who have spent years honing their craft. Seeing a movie I don’t want to be the lead character, I want to see what happens to that character.

That said, interactive story does offer a new medium and I’ll continue to plug away at it, if not just for the learning experience. And one day I hope to test the hypothesis using Customer Development. However my intuition tells me that another form of real time story will prove much more successful given time - immersive story.

For immersive story to work though you need a highly responsive environment. Virtual worlds are perfect for this however as a platform they are nascent. Plus the costs to creating an immersive story likely increases ten fold over creating interactive story with Ren’Py. But the day will come when there is a viable platform and/or engine for immersive story.

A lite approach to virtual worlds

Posted: May 1st, 2009, 4:58pm CEST by justingibbs

Comcast of all companies has an interesting ad campaign using virtual worlds - Comcast Town. The campaign combines a funny jingle, commercial spots, and an easy to use virtual world or more specifically a virtual room builder. It’s Flash based so there is no need for an install and that isn’t the only thing Comcast got right. What they’re really playing on is the fact that most people find virtual world technology nifty. They may not stick around and make the virtual world part of their daily lives but many will spend a few minutes decorating a virtual room. What advertiser wouldn’t like that type of engagement with their products and brand? It’s quick and has more context than technology. As I continue to harp on - virtual worlds are about the context. Comcast Town is a lite example of context leveraging the technology.

But like I said, they do a lot of things right.

It’s got style - from the art to the odd incorporation of squirrels
Reinforces Comcast’s products - phone, TV, Internet
Incorporates other trendy brands - Boing Boing and Notcot
Makes a great use of sound
Doesn’t require an instillation
Has context - pulls much from the commercials and grounds you in building a room
Has a goal - it’s a contest (however weak that is it certainly adds to the context)
Game elements - you only have so much money

Is it viral? I doubt it. It incorporates with Facebook so there is that but it’s not like you’re building an army of vampires. But I think that lends to it’s feeling of being lite.

Overall its a great use of virtual world technology and an example other virtual worlds could learn from - namely context. It’s lite and engaging, what brand wouldn’t want that?

Best books for lean product managers

Posted: April 28th, 2009, 11:44pm CEST by justingibbs

Being an avid reader of non-fiction I find that I tend to go through phases. Right now I’m racing through books that have anything to do with Disney Imagineering. Prior to that it was lean product development. Having just finished Four Steps to the Epiphany I thought I’d compile a list of what I found to be the best lean product management books I’ve read over the last year.

Four Steps to the Epiphany

This book is all about Steven Blank’s concept of Customer Development. If you’re not familiar with Customer Development you should be. It’s very different than the traditional product development model. Where as most start-up founders start with the conviction that they know success looks like and just need VC money to build it, customer development starts with a hypothesis. It’s only once a hypothesis has been validated that you really start building.

The book covers much more than just product management but gives you a good idea of the role in a Customer Development start-up.

The Four Steps to the Epiphany

Inspired - How to Crate Products Customers Love

The book by Marty Cagan is much more focused on product management and interestingly enough, describes a process that’s very similar to Steve Blank’s Customer Development. It’s all about quick prototyping and listening to users - seems simple enough but goes much beyond that and gives you detailed action items. Like Four Steps of Epiphany, much of the suggestions in are counter to what you might have come to expect from start-ups today.

Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love

The Back of the Napkin

Lean development means getting your idea across in simple ways. I can’t tell you how much trouble misunderstandings have caused me in my years of product development. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words but this book by Dan Roam goes beyond just making pretty pictures. It explains how to go about creating the most informative picture even if you don’t know how to draw.

The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures

Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind

This by no means is a new book, but having re-read it recently I can’t get away from how timely it still is. Everyone talks about viralitiy, social media, etc. but the fundamentals of marketing are still about positioning your product in the minds of users. As a product manager you need to understand this if not just for the fact that your products success is not entirely up to which features you build or do not build.

Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, 20th Anniversary Edition

Made to Stick

If it’s all about positioning then Made to Stick is a timely guide to do just that. It’s also more than just marketing, it’s message of simplicity goes much farther.

Consider it a great how to guide to finding simplicity. Products and processes can get very complicated, this book will help you take a step back and see what’s important.

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

Here Comes Everybody

Threw this in because I found it to be a book that makes you think about how the landscape is changing. It’s all about mass amateurization, something Clay Shirky introduced us to when he described how the world of publishing is changing.

Product managers should be familiar with the concepts in this book as they did social media a few years ago. Mass amateurization changes everything.

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

Honorable mention

If Eric Ries would ever write a book about his Lean Startup I’d have that up here too. I’ve seen him speak twice and am always interested in hearing more. His Lean Startup is almost a nuts and bolts approach to Customer Development and more. Luckily he’s running a workshop next month that I’m attending.

Virtual worlds a hits-driven business?

Posted: April 23rd, 2009, 4:50pm CEST by justingibbs

Hollywood sign Highlighting innovative companies in the entertainment industries, AlwaysOn recently released their OnHollywood 100 and recycled that old saying - content is king.

But the failure of many of these services to drive consistent audiences and attract premium advertisers has made it clear that Silicon Valley won’t usurp Hollywood, content is still king.

That’s not what many in Silicon Valley wanted to hear. Content is king is another way of saying hits-driven business. Are virtual worlds destined to become a hits-driven business?

Successful virtual worlds

Sally Schmidt laid out what it takes to make virtual worlds successful - the 5 Cs.

She then broke down the five key strategic points into the 5 Cs: Creativity (dressing up avatars, decorating homes, designing clothes), Collection (free goods, paid goods, points), Caring (feeding a virtual pet, charity), Community (chat, events, message boards), and last but not least Competition (levels, comparing points wit other players). Her conclusion was that each of the big sites encompass all five key points, but only strongly emphasize a few. For instance, on Stardoll the draw is obviously in the creativity of designing your own clothes and styling your avatar. On Neopets, your role as pet owner promotes caring.

Seeing the success of kids worlds I would also add strong context. We see the importance of context when comparing virtual worlds that had little, like Google Lively, to those that had a lot, Club Penguin. Google Lively was trying to be general purpose, appeal to everyone, and in the end appealed to nearly no one.

Let’s take the first C - Creativity (dressing up avatars, decorating homes, designing clothes). Yahoo! has had avatars. You could customize their hair, dress them up, change their mood, even add a monkey however few know about them and even less use it. Yahoo! is the poster child for general purpose and lack of context, adding avatars did little. Maybe it’s different when it’s 3D, but I would argue that Google Lively discredits that theory.

In the end, without context these virtual worlds become little more than 3D chat and when was the last time you used chat? To move beyond 3D chat virtual worlds need context, something kids worlds have known for a while now.

So why the sour faces?

If it’s about content, it’s a hit-driven business. But for many a hits-driven business is not a business they want to be in. As a business model it’s:

About narrowing your audience - Everyone can use a search engine but how many find horror movies too scary to watch? It’s also a fickle business.
A fickle business - The line William Goldman captured this perfectly in the line, “Nobody knows anything“. That isn’t to say that Hollywood execs are stupid, just that prior to a movie’s release they have no real idea how well a film will do.
The domain of artists - What drew most developers to the virtual worlds industry was the technology, not content.

WoW and the MMO space captures these points perfectly. It isn’t a question of technology as much as content and game design. WoW is incredibly successful while other MMOs of equal or greater technology flounder.

Of course Blizzard, creators of WoW, is based just outside of LA. Silicon Valley has traditionally shied away from hits-driven businesses. We in Silicon Valley live by the model “build a better mouse trap and they will come”. We simply don’t feel safe competing on content, it isn’t our industry. Which is exactly what Paul Heckel brought up in his book The Elements of Friendly Software Design.

Movies did not flourish until the engineers lost control to artists - or more precisely, to the communications craftsmen. The same thing is happening now with personal computers.

Guiding Users in Virtual Worlds

Posted: April 21st, 2009, 8:14am CEST by justingibbs

Speaking about casual games at a recent Facebook Developers Garage, Andrew Mayer mentioned that users aren’t innately curious. Seems odd but Mayer mentioned that he’s seen more than his fair share of great content go unseen because users never stumbled upon it. Users need to be lead, more then that they need to be entertained.

Disney Imagineers probably know this better than anyone. The book Designing Disney - Imagineering and the Art of the Show, explains that they use what they call The Wienie.

Walt observed that people moved toward things that are inviting, and he coined the term wienie to refer to such things (Walt had a lifelong love of hot dogs). Imagineers have found that people respond to a wienie at the end of a corridor because it beckons them to continue further in their journey. We often use archetypal forms in designing a wienie, forms that have centuries-old associations that express some kind of action. Certain sharp-edged, pointed forms suggest danger, adventure, a struggle for survival. Rounded forms tend to be reassuring, suggesting shelter, safety, and fun. In telling a story in three-dimensional visual terms, both kinds of forms can be used to say, “Something is happening down this way, and you’re going to like it.” The wienie promises that you will be rewarded for the time and effort it takes to walk down the corridor. A well-designed wienie can brighten and energize an entire area. The Matterhorn at Disneyland, the Tree of Life at Disney’s Animal Kingdom, and Big Tillie, the stranded ship at Typhoon Lagoon, area all effective wienies: they set teh stage, establish a mood, and draw the eye.

Virtual world designers could learn a lot from Disney Imagineers and the wienie.

For a wienie to be effective, we have to set the scene for it, using staging techniques derived from film, such as an establishing “long shot”, and special effects and lighting.

The techniques is not as heavy handed as others used in virtual worlds today. WoW uses quests and floating explanation points. Jeffrey Kaplan, gameplay director at WoW, calls it directed gameplay and probably takes it just as seriously as Disney Imagineers.

“Directed gameplay is a phrase we use at Blizzard to represent the idea of leading a player to a fun experience. [It's] an underlying tool to help a player become immersed in your game,” says Kaplan.

Though you tell me, which is more inviting? Or is it more dependent on they type of audience?

Twitter is a great example of character development

Posted: April 16th, 2009, 11:03pm CEST by justingibbs

Twitter As Twitter goes mainstream I hear more questions about what makes Twitter so special? Many are from people outside the tech industry - they simply don’t get Twitter. Is it all the celebrities who got on? Is it the tech geeks? Like any successful product it’s a combination of things, but one ingredient that is often overlooked is it’s character development. Such strong character that the infamous fail whale is the equivalent of famous movie lines people quote.

Twitter’s character is more than the great art. Twitter uses every opportunity to express itself and with a touch of humor. How can you not like the “Who goes there?” screen?

Twitter suspended

Twitter did a lot of things right but beyond the more obvious they utilize classic character development techniques from screenwriting. I doubt they were thinking about screenwriting at the time but their minimalist design has unforeseen benefits.

Character is revealed through choices made under pressure

As the screenwriting guru Robert McKee explains, true character is expressed in the choices they make under pressure.

TRUE CHARACTER is revealed in the choices a human being makes under pressure - the greater the pressure, the deeper the revelation, the truer the choice to the character’s essential nature.

When Twitter is under pressure, say when the service is down, it chooses to add a little humor and a art. Where other services use the opportunity to be informative Twitter uses the majority of the error screen to express character, to have some fun.

Action moves story

Ask Jeeves

Dialog doesn’t move screenplays, action does. Most of the time the action taking place on Twitter is from other users, however when there is action they use the opportunity to reveal character The service being down would certainly count as action, so would finding a user who has been removed.

Where other services rely on their ads or about pages to build character, Twitter speaks most often through their actions. Compare Twitter to Ask.com’s old mascot Jeeves. He was around for years and we never really knew him. They built ads around Jeeves and plastered him all over the site yet none of it from action.

Characters are simple

Twitter also follows another cardinal rule of screenwriting, keep it simple. We all have our favorite movie characters and think of them as being rich and complex, but in reality movies need to deliver simple characters so we can know them.

A character is a work of art, a metaphor for human nature. We relate to characters as if they were real, but they’re superior to reality. Their aspects are designed to be clear and knowable; whereas our fellow humans are difficult to understand, if not enigmatic. We know characters better than we know our friends because a character is eternal and unchanging, while people shift - just when we thing we understand them, we don’t. In fact, I know Rick Blaine in CASABLANCA better then I know myself. Rick is always Rick. I’m a bit iffy.

- Robert McKee

Twitter doesn’t do much PR or ads to confuse us. Like the service itself, Twitter’s character is simple and I can easily plug it into my head just as I do great movie characters.

Other examples of great character

Can you think of other services that exemplify character development? Or maybe some things Twitter is doing that is detrimental to the character development?

Not only do you need a story, but a storyline

Posted: April 14th, 2009, 11:00pm CEST by justingibbs

I saw the new Seth Rogen movie Observe and Report last week at a sneak preview and thought it was a great example of applying the trappings of story but never actually delivering a story. The same can be said for many companies today.

Some are applauding Observe and Report for taking risks while others are condemning it for picturing date rape. Seth Rogen explained the date rape scene.

When we’re having sex and she’s unconscious like you can literally feel the audience thinking, like, how the fuck are they going to make this okay? Like, what can possibly be said or done that I’m not going to walk out of the movie theater in the next thirty seconds? . . . And then she says, like, the one thing that makes it all okay: “Why are you stopping, motherfucker?”

The line let me laugh, but it didn’t completely free me to laugh out loud. The line makes it okay to laugh but not a 100%. It is a black comedy after all, you have to expect this kind of stuff. That interplay however is a great way to sums up the movie - horrendously black comedy matched to character development and tricks to let you feel okay enough to laugh. What the film makers forgot in all of this was the storyline and as any screenwriter knows, without a storyline the audience can’t get fully engaged. They do some character development which was nice but the storyline is just a collection of jumbled cliches - the loser going after the popular girl, the quiet girl secretly pining away for the loser, etc. The black comedy bits start popping up and we’re along for the ride, but never committed. Seeing it as a sneak preview the film actually cut out half way through and the lights came on. I and another friend debated walking out as it was unknown how long it would take them to get the movie back on. We could have walked out and never thought twice about how the story ended, because there was no story. Fortunately the film started seconds later.

All black comedies use tricks and character to let me laugh but great black comedies like Dr. Strangelove involve storyline as well. Compare the two films and see if you could walk away from either, if you can laugh fully, if you’re engaged.

Missing storylines aren’t only a concern for movies. As Seth Godin said, marketing is about telling a story. But today many companies are just using the trappings of story in their marketing and PR. They never flush out the whole story because many of them don’t have a complete story. I bet if you ask the creators of Observe and Report what their inspiration was, they might mention wanting to put some of the darker moments on film. What I doubt you would hear is anything about showing a character overcome their position in life.

How many times have you been caught watching a horrible movie but can’t step away? Even as friends plead with you to turn it off and go with them to dinner. Minutes earlier you admitted that it was a horrible movie, but somehow you can’t step away without seeing how it turns out. That’s storyline. Adding the trappings of story to a product or company will help a little, but you need a full storyline to get people fully engaged. The trappings can make date rape funny but without the storyline the movie is destined to fade away without much of a trace - not unlike some companies.

Story is conflict, therefore real time story is conflict

Posted: April 14th, 2009, 5:38pm CEST by justingibbs

Over the years I’ve studied maybe a hundred different strategies for creating real time story, more specifically interactive story, and come away with the same three things.

Nothing seems to be a finished product I can my hands on
I don’t have the foggiest idea how to go about using these tools to create a story
Conflict is never discussed

The last one has me the most confused. Reading everything I could find about Chris Crawford’s Storytron, AlterAction’s Masq, the Oz Project, and the Virtual Theater Project I’m always struck with how little conflict is discussed, if at all.

For me Facade was the first example of interactive story that reflected what I imagined in my head as interactive story. For those interested, many of it’s creators thoughts can be picked from Grand Text Auto and their earlier work on the defunct Oz Project at Carnegie Mellon University.

The Oz Project’s approach to interactive story is similar to other platforms. It always reminds me of your car’s GPS - you enter a destination and it plots a course based on your current position. If you make a wrong turn it will simply recalculates the route. The Oz Project uses a similar process to create believable agents. Each believable agent has their own goals and motivations, or in our analogy a destination. Just as a driver can take the wrong turn the player character in an interactive story can take an action that requires the believable agent to recalculate their route.

Lets say in the future GPS units go even further and help you plan a trip. Taking in time allotted, traffic conditions, weather, etc. they will plan a weekend road trip guaranteed to give your kids a true sense of LA. If you spend too long at Disneyland the GPS unit will slot in a quick bite to eat at In-N-Out Burger instead of risk a long line at Pink’s Hot Dogs. This capability would be similar to Oz Project’s drama manager where it might remove or add a character, adjust a character’s objective, change an environment, etc.

So where is the conflict? A common error of novice screenwriters is to see story as the sequence of events - continue down the street, left at the light, take the first right, etc. Where is the conflict in that? How would I start a fight with a GPS unit? I could do the opposite of whatever direction it gives me, continually forcing it to recalculate? Perhaps I’m being too literal, but if conflict is central to story wouldn’t it be central to real time story? The philosophy behind the Oz project doesn’t mention conflict.

Drama = Character + Story + Presentation

Conflict is the core of any story. Conflict is what grabs audiences, it’s what makes interesting characters interesting, it’s what drives stories.

Nothing moves forward in a story except through conflict.

- Robert McKee

Each scene is designed around a conflict. Scenes build to larger conflicts and form acts. Acts build to an overriding conflict that drives the entire movie. If there is no conflict there is no scene and no movie. When examining a scene a script doctor will ask first - what is the conflict you’re trying to show? Either you pump up the expression of the conflict or you cut the scene. There is no place for transition scenes that fail to drive conflict.

Granted, screenwriting is stricter about conflict then other mediums. A novel might allow for a transition scene, but I believe real time story will be closer to screenwriting then a novel. Plus, given our short attention spans it would be safer for real time story artists to follow the cardinal rule of screenwriting - never be boring.

With the GPS recalculation model of real time story, I’m afraid the developers have gotten carried away with enabling interactivity and forgotten about story and conflict. It’s an easy thing to do, real time story and especially interactive story is a rather complex thing. But whatever we do, we can’t forget about conflict.

60 Days of WoW

Posted: April 12th, 2009, 10:15pm CEST by justingibbs

Seeing one virtual world after another fail is kind of depressing and really, how much can you learn from failure? It’s not all failure, some virtual worlds like World of Warcraft are thriving. What did WoW do to separate it from the rest of the lot? A strong context is certainly one aspect of its success, but how exactly did they build that context and reinforce it through the integration of story?

Virtual Worlds 1.0 = 3D chat

I like some people jumped into virtual worlds with both feet. I thought finally the time was right, but in the end I would argue that the majority of virtual worlds 1.0 were little more than 3D chat. You could personalize your avatar and virtual room in Google Lively but neither feature moved it beyond 3D chat and Google closed its experiment after less than a year. If you stumble upon a newbie in many of these virtual worlds and you’ll most likely hear - what’s the story or how do I start the game? As a product manager I dreaded hearing such questions. It meant that at a very basic level users didn’t get it, other than it being nifty they didn’t see any point. They have expectations though, they just weren’t being met.

Successful Virtual Worlds incorporate story

Not all virtual worlds failed to answer the newbie questions however and became some wildly successful - Club Penguin, WoW, Pirates of the Caribbean. These virtual worlds had either strong context (story) or goal architecture, or both. Many people have studied the goal architectures but I haven’t seen as many focus on the integration of the story. And integrating it is no easy feat, Disney Imagineers have practically made it a study in itself. So much so that competitors copy them; Six Flags has been trying to add story to avoid bankruptcy.

Six Flags also acquired Dick Clark Productions, which produces the Golden Globes and American Music Awards, and Mr. Shapiro positioned the company as a mini-Walt Disney that offered families a similar experience, but at lower cost.

How does WoW integrate story?

So how exactly does WoW integrate story? I’m going to dive in and spend 60 days in WoW to try and learn just that. I’ve always had friends who were obsessed with WoW and told me to join, but I’m simply not a gamer. I was also biased, I thought the future of virtual worlds lay in the personalization features Google Lively and others were incorporating. Comparably, MMOs seemed old school. Boy have I learned that to be wrong. So I enter WoW not only as a novice but as someone outside their core gamer audience. Let’s see if it can pull me in. But more than that my goal is to see how they incorporate story.

To start a start-up, a real time story start-up?

Posted: April 9th, 2009, 3:33am CEST by justingibbs

I saw Eric Ries speak about The Lean Startup at the Web 2.0 conference last week and I have to admit, I’m beginning to dream of my own start-up focused on real time story. Of course what’s holding me back isn’t just the huge amount of work but a paralyzing fear that today real time story doesn’t offer a significant enough value proposition over traditional story. While I’m completely confident in real time story in the future as technology advances, I’m a little suspect of it in the near term. But that’s exactly what Eric’s The Lean Startup is all about.

Customer Development

Eric includes as part of The Lean Startup, Eric includes the Customer Development model started by Steven Blank. Like it’s name says, Customer Development stresses finding a customer before you try and build a business. That’s in stark contrast to the traditional Product Development Model where it’s expected a customer is already there and waiting and it’s simply a matter of execution.

Below is a diagram of the first few phases of Customer Development.

Customer Discovery overview

Hypothesis

So if I was to ever get my start-up going I would need to first come up with the hypothesis.

Audiences will find the interactivity in these stories more entertaining than traditional forms of story.

I’m completely confident in this hypothesis given enough time. Virtual worlds will make it possible to create real immersive story and who wouldn’t want to be surrounded by a story? But immersive story and story worlds require a highly responsive environment and outside of video games today’s platforms are a bit laking in this department. So what we’re left with is interactive story. So maybe my final hypothesis should be:

Audiences will find the interactive story more entertaining than traditional forms of story.

Of course interactive story is tougher sell - tougher to show a value proposition compared to traditional story. Some may remember the Choose Your Own Adventure books in the 80’s; they were interesting but never caught on. Computers however offer much more interactivity than books, but after years of trying pioneers in the field still haven’t cracked that nut. Of course I have some ideas that could just crack that nut and testing them out would be the reason behind the start-up. And it isn’t only my hubris, some new forms of distribution have opened up.

Distribution

Outside of book form, real time story and more specifically interactive story has been tied to the computer for distribution. This has presented a problem as Steve Jobs is famous for saying.

We think basically you watch television to turn your brain off, and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on.

- Steve Jobs

Of course Steve Jobs made that comment years ago and speaking specifically about TV on computers. And although the years have shown more people looking to the computer for entertainment it is by no means mainstream. The Internet is still positioned in most people’s minds as a tool - send email, keep in touch with friends on Facebook, read the news, etc. But new services are offering new ways to access entertainment and might be opening up people’s minds to new things.

The Internet is coming to your TV with the likes of Roku, boxee, and the like
iPhone and its many apps are opening up mobile entertainment (especially when stuck in line at the DMV)
The Kindle is redefining peoples ideas of what a book is

Even if my start-up gets everything right about interactive story I believe it’ll still take a lot of luck and the right positioning to prove successful. A lot of that positioning will also come from the service it rides on top of, luckily today there are a plethora of options.

My biggest fear

Even given my ideas for interactive story and new options for distribution, my most daunting fear is something Andrew Mayer of MediaShifters said at the recent Facebook Developers Garage in SF - users aren’t innately curious. He was speaking about casual games and how users never stumbled upon some of the great content they added to games. This goes counter to what most people expect but when you think about it we’re not curious at all times, only certain times and places. This goes the heart of my start-up however. When you plop down in front of the TV the last thing most of us want to do is interact, that goes back to Steve Jobs quote. Will these new distribution services ultimately change that or will mainstream audiences looking for drama still prefer mindless entertainment?

A real time story start-up

Launching a real time story start-up is certainly fraught with risks, but what start-up isn’t. The opportunity to learn the techniques and tricks that make real time story successful is quite tempting. And it isn’t like others haven’t already done so - Echo & Shadow, Alteraction, Storytron, etc.

Can I build real time story on the boxee API?

Posted: April 7th, 2009, 3:54am CEST by justingibbs

Seems like boxee beat the Roku in the API department. All I want to know is will either support real time story? I’ve come to the conclusion that the Web is positioned mostly as a tool in people’s minds. That is changing but not that quickly. That’s why the Roku and boxee present such great opportunities for real time story and now that their opening up their platforms we might get to test Steve Jobs famous quote.

We think basically you watch television to turn your brain off, and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on.

- Steve Jobs

Roku opening up to developers

Posted: April 5th, 2009, 9:56pm CEST by justingibbs

I was pleasantly surprised to see at the Web 2.0 Expo that Roku is opening up its platform to third-party developers later this year. This is from the flyer.

Roku’s award-winning digital video player - open to outside development later this year.

Roku is opening its platform to third-party developers later this year

Netflix and Amazon have already launched, but they’re just the beginning

The Roku Development Kit will enable you to build your own channels and applications to run directly on the Roku video player

Build Web 2.0 Apps for the TV

Roku’s digital video player is the best-selling way to connect Internet content directly to the TV

I spoke with David Westerhoff, Director of Software Engineering, briefly about the app platform and real time story. Encouraged to see what developers come up with once the platform is released I of course mentioned real time story, liking it to Choose Your Own Adventure books. I assured him that the standard Roku remote offered more than enough interactivity and that it was more an issue of getting the content to the box. Currently Roku only streams content from Netflix or Amazon but to do real time story you’ll need a way to access artist generated content. Possibly pulled from various YouTube videos or blogs. A lot still needs to be figured out, but it offers a promising platform for real time story. It catches people while they’re relaxed on the couch, ready to be entertained.

Design flaw - unrealistic avatars

Posted: March 31st, 2009, 4:03pm CEST by justingibbs

Although Google Lively has been gone for 3 months we can still use them as a design example. One mistake they made was all those creative and cute avatars. In addition to a stylish guy, you could be a big headed cat or pig. And why not, it’s a virtual world you can be anything. It gives users another way to express themselves. All sounds good right, but it turns out to be a bad design choice in general. Users like realistic looking avatars. More than that, some get offended when you masquerade as another gender. Why the offense? I have a few ideas.

For all the hype about being anything you want in virtual worlds, it seems the majority of users see them as an extension to the real world.
In the ends virtual worlds 1.0 are little more than 3D chat and the reason people chat is to meet other people. They don’t want to meet characters you’ve created, no matter how inventive.

Peter Edward, director of the PlayStation Home Platform Group, exalts the value of realistic avatars.

Peter Edward: One of the advantages is the realistic avatar. People can relate to it straight away. It gives you the opportunity to either create something that looks like you, or it looks like your alter ego or reflects your mood. It makes it more welcoming to people who may not want to get into the whole orcs and mages thing.

Giving users uniform avatars to start with also highlights any customizations they make and most likely helps community building as well. So if it’s just the realism people want, easy connection, or uniform palate - in general virtual world builders should go with realistic looking avatars. That is unless your world is contextually heave like Club Penguin.

The defining feature of virtual worlds 1.0 will be the lack of context

Posted: March 30th, 2009, 6:41am CEST by justingibbs

Google Lively closed It seems we’re entering the later stages of virtual worlds 1.0. Google Lively was shut down 3 months ago. John Zdanowski, long time CFO of Second Life recetnly stepped down; that’s after founder Philip Rosedale and CTO Cory Ondrejka left late last year. That isn’t to say Second Life is dieing, rather I believe it’ll be one of the few survivors of 1.0. Many of the start-ups begun in it’s limelight however will not fare as well. These companies won’t fade because Second Life or any other was victorious but because none of them captured the mainstream user. And to blame might be one of the defining features of virtual worlds 1.0 - a lack of context.

1.0 starts with a theory

Virtual worlds 1.0 was been driven by technology, most notably a graphics. Pre 1.0 virtual worlds didn’t have the graphical quality needed to attract larger audiences but with the birth of There and Second Life it seemed almost anything was possible. The theory was that if you could give users a truly rich 3D graphical environment they would come in mass. These new graphically rich worlds like Second Life managed to capture the attention of the press, then the general public, but the users never really materialized. There was more famous for flaming out than ushering in the future.

Make it easier, give them more, and self expression

Even before Second Life’s hype started to fade, upstarts began nipping at its heals. They promised ease of use, easy installation and access through web browsers, tie-ins with other web services such as Facebook, and an opportunity for self expression. In addition games were pumped into virtual worlds - anything and everything to keep the few users entertained. The virtual worlds seemed on the cusp of mainstream success, they certainly knew what users wanted. Sally Schmidt of Circle 1 Network laid it out at the recent Engage! Expo.

She then broke down the five key strategic points into the 5 Cs: Creativity (dressing up avatars, decorating homes, designing clothes), Collection (free goods, paid goods, points), Caring (feeding a virtual pet, charity), Community (chat, events, message boards), and last but not least Competition (levels, comparing points wit other players). Her conclusion was that each of the big sites encompass all five key points, but only strongly emphasize a few. For instance, on Stardoll the draw is obviously in the creativity of designing your own clothes and styling your avatar. On Neopets, your role as pet owner promotes caring.

In the end it’s still little more than 3D chat

Yet despite their attempts the mainstream users still didn’t come. However those in the industry try to paint it, Google Lively’s quick departure was a sign - the new, easier to use virtual worlds weren’t catching on either.

Ease of use and installation certainly broadened the market but the addition of games probably did little. How could these primitive games compete with other games already online? Tie-ins with social networks also added little and self expression seemed almost unwanted. Of course the latter point was already well known. When I worked at Yahoo! one of the mythical projects was to give users customizable avatars. Granted the first examples were 2D, but what shocked us was how little users seemed to care. Some liked customizing their outfits and such, but soon became bored. There was a market, but it was much smaller than any of us had predicted.

Virtual worlds 1.0 still didn’t offer a value proposition. They were nifty but didn’t offer any must have features. If I wanted a social network I’d just use Facebook as my friends were already there and 3D avatars offered little. In the end virtual worlds 1.0 is basically nothing more than 3D chat. And we all know what chat is famous for - sex. It was something Google Lively constantly had to deal with and defined other platforms.

The other popular service that was anything akin to what Lively had to offer was the immensely popular (and profitable) IMVU, which thrives off their always flirtatious, frequently risqué, and occasionally obscene userbase.

- That Was Quick: Google Shuts Lively Down

What did work

Virtual worlds 1.0 hasn’t been all failure - kids worlds proved popular. Was this because kids naturally just got it? Do we now have to wait for these kids to grow up; not unlike how manga grew up with their audience to where adults read comics on the way to work?

One thing that separates most kids worlds from adult or tween worlds are their strong sense of context. They don’t commonly pitch themselves as a virtual world, but as exciting play areas. Club Penguin isn’t about games, it’s about penguins first and foremost.

When you think about it, context is one thing the majority of 1.0 virtual worlds never had. They pitched themselves as a tie-ins to Facebook or AIM, places of virtual economies, where you can dress up an avatar. It simply didn’t click with users. I know cause whenever I ask friends what virtual worlds are they go blank or mention seeing Second Life on The Office. Ask a parent about Club Penguin and you’ll get a much different answer.

“Context determines meaning” and virtual worlds 1.0 as a whole had little or no context. What is a virtual economy? What is a tie-in with Facebook? What is even a virtual room? It’s like a movie with out a theme or genre - it’s nearly impossible to remember or find a categorical home for it in your head. Some would argue that Facebook itself is difficult to explain, but at first Facebook was simply a way to connect and stay in touch with friends. The mini-feed and everything else are more difficult to grasp at first, but Facebook itself has something the mainstream can get behind - connect with friends.

Virtual worlds 2.0

Of course out of the ashes of 1.0, virtual worlds 2.0 will rise. Granted it’s been a technology driven push to 1.0, but I’m certain that context will be a big part of 2.0. Some may argue that 2.0 is mobile, ubiquitous in-world connection, etc. but I strongly disagree. Much of this can be built faster in 2D and I might add, done better. As we’ve learned with virtual worlds 1.0; the value isn’t in the customizable avatar, self expression, or rudimentary games - it’s the context. When I want to enter a world I’ll visit a virtual world. If I want to play a game with friends I’ll visit a casual game site. Sure it would be nice to have the same avatar across services, but it isn’t necessary.

Of course having context is another way to pigeonhole yourself. Club Penguin simply doesn’t appeal to tweens. Start-ups in Silicon Valley are built to dominate markets, not simply become a hit in a hits driven business. The expertise of Southern California are better suited to such a business, however I have faith in Silicon Valley to evolve and tackle this new challenge. At least Silicon Valley can build the technology to power artists to create the context. And if Silicon Valley ultimately fails, well there’s always a market for enterprise and serious games.

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-03-29

Posted: March 29th, 2009, 11:31pm CEST by justingibbs

The future of virtual worlds will be about story - [tinyurl.com] #
Finding the right social media message isn’t that far removed from Steven Blank’s Customer Development model #
Heading to Facebook Developer Garage tonight in SF. Wonder if the topic of story will come up at all? #
Waiting for Facebook Developer Garage SF to kick off #
Facebook’s growth coming most recently from over 35, almost no growth for under 18 #
The hype around virtual goods might be waning - [tinyurl.com] #
Oh boy, seems like Bluehost is down #
A game with a story we all know - [www.cnn.com] #
Watched Fat Girl - French are great at showing something unique but can’t seem to take it anywhere, tossing in an open ending doesn’t fix it #
Debate - go out tonight or work on the screenplay? It’s a never ending battle #

OnLive the perfect real time story platform?

Posted: March 28th, 2009, 2:05am CET by justingibbs

All the buzz at the recent Game Developers Conference in San Francisco was about OnLive.

The news on everybody’s minds is OnLive, a games service which is roughly comparable to a streaming movie service like Netflix On Demand or what have you. The hardware is to be free, and it will support any USB- or Bluetooth-compatible controllers.

Sounds and looks great.

But some question the ability of the Internet and OnLive’s servers ability to deliver those games minus lag and skipped frames.

After the demo, we spoke with a more technically-orientated booth guy, who said that between 3 and 4Mbit/s is what they’re aiming for with their 720p60 stream, and when I asked about tension with ISPs, he hinted cryptically that they had that under control. I just hope Comcast and the like haven’t “overbooked” their cable and fiber the way airlines do flights.

- Game Developers Conference 2009 Round-Up

If the doubters are right and it just doesn’t seem to cut it for hardcore gamers, I’m sure real time story would work fine. Story unravels quickly, but much slower than bullets crisscrossing the screen. If the lag makes game play poor it might be just the right pace for real time story story. OnLive might want to look into it!

What do social media and movie characters have in common?

Posted: March 27th, 2009, 3:01pm CET by justingibbs

Social media is likened to a conversation so if you’re a social media strategist your job is basically to converse with customers because the “company” itself can’t. You can go about it a few different ways.

Conduct the conversation as yourself on behalf of the company
Take on the persona of the company
Create a fictitious company representative

Whatever strategy you take, Paul Worthington suggests that companies create a company guide for social media.

The new reality of online customer conversation means brands will need a strongly defined sense of self in order to succeed.

Worthington goes on:

Before opening yourself up to the conversation, before engaging outside, start with who you really are, what you as an organization really believe in, and what gets you out of bed in the morning.

Forget mission and vision statements. These are banal at best. Forget ‘shareholder value’ — No one ever got out of bed for increased shareholder value (but if you have something powerful to drive you, you have a better chance of creating plenty of it).

All good advice and something that strikes me as being very similar to creating a character in a screenplay. Maybe the analogy can be a useful one.

It’s not just what you say

The one thing you’ll hear over and over in screenwriting is that dialog is the last thing you write.

Write dialogue last and remember that the real drama of a film is underneath what is being said and done.

- Creating characters and dialogue

So think about the actions more than the particular message. How quickly do you respond to messages on Twitter? Do you have a profile on MySpace and Fackebook or should you just have one on Facebook? Have a blog? You get the point.

True character is revealed through crisis

The screenwriting guru Robert McKee explains in his seminal work, Story, how true character is created.

TRUE CHARACTER is revealed in the choices a human being makes under pressure - the greater the pressure, the deeper the revelation, the truer the choice to the character’s essential nature.

- Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting

Seems about right, we hear about great uses of social media most when there is a crisis - like when Hulu pulled “It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia”. It’s similar to mountaineering, you hear more about the daring rescues than first accents.

A character is not a real human

Always remember to keep things simple - you’re not portraying a real person, even if you’re playing yourself.

A character is a work of art, a metaphor for human nature. We relate to characters as if they were real, but they’re superior to reality. Their aspects are designed to be clear and knowable; whereas our fellow humans are difficult to understand, if not enigmatic. We know characters better than we know our friends because a character is eternal and unchanging, while people shift - just when we thing we understand them, we don’t. In fact, I know Rick Blaine in CASABLANCA better then I know myself. Rick is always Rick. I’m a bit iffy.

- Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting

We want reality but we don’t want reality. You get the point.

We remember great characters

As humans we’re built to remember people - by sent, facial recognition, etc. So in theory the more you act like a character, the more likely you’ll be remembered and cut through the clutter.

Viral loops great, but not as great as positioning

Posted: March 26th, 2009, 11:55pm CET by justingibbs

Update: Just noticed that Eric Ries posted about the show himself - check it out

Living in San Francisco it was easy to stop by the Facebook Developer Garage last night, put on by Kontagent. It was a great show and much more crowded than I expected. Of course they had a great lineup of speakers. I found Eric Ries presentation, with its emphasis on positioning rather interesting. Much of the material can also be found in an early post on his blog Lessons Learned.

He started his presentation by going over the levers of engagement.

Synthetic notifications - sent directly from the company
Organic notifications - sent from an action one of your friends did (automatically notify a person’s friends whenever they upload pictures)
Positioning - “the battle for your mind” as Eric puts it

Then he covered viral metrics and the basics of building viral loops. Viral loops have been all the rage the last few years, with articles like “The 10 steps to creating a viral loop.” But as Eric warns, some of this might be coming at the expense of positioning. With everyone following the 10 steps or whatever, all they’ve done is ensure that their product is the same as every other - the exact opposite of positioning. Some might say who cares, we can track virality and we’re growing by leaps and bounds. Granted it’s a little tougher to track peoples minds but if you’ve lost that battle, you’ve lost the war.

In his blog post Eric suggests that you focus more on your positioning as it is the most powerful of the levers (synthetic being the least powerful) and then use the viral loop to drive it home.

To win the positioning battle, you could try and make your product better than the competition, or find a different positioning that allows you to be the best at something else. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that your competitors offerings are “good enough” and that you cant’ figure out how to beat them at their own game. So you decide to try to reposition around a different value proposition, one that more closely matches what your product is best at. You could try and drive home that positioning with an expensive PR campaign, superbowl ads, and whatnot. But you don’t have to - you have a perfectly good viral loop that is slowly but surely exposing the entire world to your positioning messages.

Silicon Valley is about technology first, everything else second. Ask someone about their new start-up and they’ll most likely tell you about its technology. After we realize that great technology itself isn’t going to guarantee success we gravitate toward the latest marketing trends, but we shouldn’t forget the tried and true realities of marketing of which positioning is one. How did Avis compete with the biggest competitor in rental cars, purely with positioning - “We Try Harder”.

Technology trends from the perspective of a screenwriter

Posted: March 26th, 2009, 9:30pm CET by justingibbs

Years ago the question was, “Why do I need to start a blog, what would I say?” The blunt answer was, “just start one and you’ll find your voice.” I found mine after a few false starts, but it never hurts to do a sanity check every once in a while. It’s beneficial for you and your readers who are sacrificing their most prized possession - their attention.

Drawing up the next few posts I found a common theme - screenwriting. What can I say, I have a lot of story knowledge having failed to become a screenwriter.

Fail faster to succeed sooner.- David Kelly, CEO of IDEO

So with that in mind I’m going to refocus my blog around screenwriting. Not the art of screenwriting but how the principles of crafting a story can be applied to tech. In the past I’ve blogged about social media, virtual worlds, cloud computing, etc. but that doesn’t make me any different than the next guy. The unique voice I have is my screenwriting knowledge.

A decade ago I listened to Richard Newton, the former dean of engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and a lifelong champion of innovation, at a small private function in Silicon Valley. One of the things he said has stayed with me: Innovation opportunities going forward will be at the cusps of different disciplines–biology and computer science, information technology and health care, semiconductors and medicine.

- Barriers To Innovation

I’ve joined the 10 percent and growing

Posted: March 24th, 2009, 4:08pm CET by justingibbs

I’ve joined the unemployed, now part of the 10.5% and growing in California. I knew it was a risk to join any start-up last year, especially one in the virtual world space like Vivaty. I would still do it all over again as I learned more than I would have guessed about a field that has captured my attention the last 2 years - virtual worlds. However we all know the industry isn’t doing well, even removed from the larger economy. The Virtual Worlds Conference encapsulates the most recent chapter in virtual worlds - Virtual Worlds 1.0.

The latest chapter

The first Virtual Worlds Conference took place in New York (March 28-29, 2007). The hype around Second Life was probably at its pinnacle. The second conference in San Jose (October 10-11, 2007) was probably the pinnacle for the conference. It looked like a real conference, with all the big players sporting huge booths - The Electronic Sheep Company, Millions of Us, IBM, etc. But more than that the keynote was from the creator of CSI, Anthony Zuiker, who announced the integration of the show and Second Life. It was as if virtual worlds had arrived. But that was merely exuberance. The integration was a total failure. Over the next few months the buzz around Second Life faded. A year later the Virtual Worlds Conference would move to LA and many of the booths were gone. Then the conference changed it’s name to Engage! to seemingly escape the virtual worlds label and to expand its audience. It did little help, word from the latest Engage! conference in New York (March 10-11, 2009) was that organizers nearly canceled it for lack of attendance.

The excitement around virtual worlds is gone, it’s left the building. Of course it will be back, but this tour (one of many) is over.

Virtual Worlds 1.0

Working at Vivaty I become convinced that virtual worlds are a context play or at least they will be going forward. Virtual worlds simply don’t work as social networks - they add little if any value over 2D. I was at Yahoo! when we introduced 2D customizable avatars, they were great but users found they had little use for them. Virtual worlds 1.0 is now defined and it’s potential known - outside of little kids worlds and MMOGs there is little upside. Sally Schmidt of Circle 1 Network laid it out the five keys to virtual worlds 1.0.

She then broke down the five key strategic points into the 5 Cs: Creativity (dressing up avatars, decorating homes, designing clothes), Collection (free goods, paid goods, points), Caring (feeding a virtual pet, charity), Community (chat, events, message boards), and last but not least Competition (levels, comparing points wit other players). Her conclusion was that each of the big sites encompass all five key points, but only strongly emphasize a few. For instance, on Stardoll the draw is obviously in the creativity of designing your own clothes and styling your avatar. On Neopets, your role as pet owner promotes caring.

Virtual worlds are inevitable

Eventually 3D will be pervasive as it is in the video game market today, but that transition took years. This all reminds me of a question I heard years ago - Why do grown up men read comic books in Japan? Because they grew up on manga and the medium grew with them. It could have happened here in America too if it wasn’t for something called the Comics Code.

Virtual worlds 2.0 will be less about the technology

So we can wait for the kids of today playing with Club Penguin to grow up and expect the characteristics of virtual worlds in everything or we can continue to try and find that thing that one thing that jump starts the growth in virtual worlds - what makes them 2.0. My guess that whatever that is, it will not be pure technology. Certainly it will require new leaps in technology but won’t be a technology play.

Movies did not flourish until the engineers lost control to artists - or more precisely, to the communications craftsmen. The same thing is happening now with personal computers.

- Paul Heckel from The Elements of Friendly Software Design

Games industry can crush us

Virtual worlds are worlds, not simply spaces. What’s your theme, what’s the story here? Those are the questions users are asking; they think the 3D is nifty but what story are you offering? It’s the difference between Six Flags and Disneyland. Six Flags has to keep up with the arms race in ever bigger and more extreme rides, where Disneyland has created a story world. For the last few years Six Flags has been trying to become more like Disneyland.

Six Flags also acquired Dick Clark Productions, which produces the Golden Globes and American Music Awards, and Mr. Shapiro positioned the company as a mini-Walt Disney that offered families a similar experience, but at lower cost.

- Six Flags in Negotiations to Stave Off Chapter 11

For the virtual worlds industry it’s even more dangerous to play in the arms race, our competition is the games industry and they can crush us in an instance. If people just want pure entertainment they’ll play a game. And as we’ve seen with Arcadia, they don’t need game worlds either. Virtual worlds are different, they’re about story or at least they will be.

As for me

I’m going to regroup and try to find my next job in something more entertainment focused, but hopefully still in the virtual world space. I should also have ample time to finish that screenplay.

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-03-22

Posted: March 22nd, 2009, 10:31pm CET by justingibbs

What do you mean the Obama administration cannot do much about the big AIG bonuses - weak sauce Obama, weak sauce. #
While I wait for One Coin Comics to become a reality I thought I’d just start writing an interactive story, “Jenny Everywhere goes to work” #
My move to the city almost done, now I have to concentrate on taxes - hey someone has to pay for the bonuses AIG just handed out #
Obama is a chump for letting AIG get away with the bonuses. Who cares if it’s in their contracts, fire them and there is no contracts. #
Checking out ComicPress for my new interactive story “Jenny Everywhere Goes to Work” #
Just learned that Celtx also has an easy to use comic template - should come in handy working on my interactive story comic #
Loudcrowd - new virtual world that is heavy on the style and context - great personality #
Waiting for the book in the mail, but loving podcast of Steve Blank’s talk - [tinyurl.com] #
90% of start-ups fail because they didn’t find a market or customer - Steve Blank #
Are virtual worlds just a hits based business? #
Jeff Zucker calls Jon Stewart’s attacks on CNBC “incredibly unfair”, I would call it basic reporting, something CNBC lacks #
Interactive story company, Six to Start, wins at SXSW - [news.bbc.co.uk] #
Common problem with startups - they don’t know what problem they’re trying to solve [tinyurl.com] #
Why Bill O’Reilly , why? - [tinyurl.com] #
Checking into Pivote open source project, looks very cool [www.pivote.info] #
With Pepsi pushing Sierra Mist at the expense of Mountain Dew, I find myself drinking a lot less soda #
Off to the Academy of Sciences today, then it’s back to writing my billion dollar screenplay. #

Want the consumer to buy again, make something worth buying

Posted: March 18th, 2009, 5:01am CET by justingibbs

A common theme we hear during the economic meltdown is that we need to get the consumer buying again, that the economic recovery depends on the consumer. True or not I can’t escape the fact that in theory people only buy what they need or truly want. So if you want to get them to buy more just produce something worth buying. But there’s the rub, for too long people were buying stuff they didn’t really need. Flush with cash and feeling rich they’ve been feeding superficial desires or simply keeping up with the Joneses. Now money is tight and they’re questioning every purchase and not buying as much. Does one really need a new car every 3 years? Does every mini-van also need a DVD entertainment system?

Those who subscribe to the market theory might believe that yes at that time they did need those things. And since they’re no longer buying, they obviously no longer need them. At any rate as Warren Buffett has stated, people’s buying habits have changed.

Not only has the economy slowed down a lot, but people have really changed their habits like I haven’t seen.

- Buffett says nation will face higher unemployment

So now not only do we need to get the consumer buying again, we need to change his habits back to what could be considered unhealthy behavior.

Buffett said the nation’s leaders need to emphasize a consistent message, and they should support President Barack Obama’s efforts to repair the economy because fear is dominating Americans’ behavior.

- Buffett says nation will face higher unemployment

Whatever we do we have to get the consumer buying again. But I still can’t escape that in theory I buy what I need or truly want. What I don’t want is to be ripped off. I recently flew to Vancouver and had the worst experiencing flying. As Seth Godin pointed out about the airlines, they simply do a terrible job of servicing the customer. And it isn’t just the airlines that have forgotten how to make a product I want to buy. My credit card company charges an extra foreign transaction fee. These same type of predatory business practices have made at least me and maybe others gun shy about buying. Rip me off and I’d rather just keep my wallet closed. I’d rather just not fly than get charged extra for my bags.

Maybe we should worry less about trying to conjole the consumer into buying and get back to nature, build something people want and are willing to buy.

5 Step plan to succesful virtual worlds

Posted: March 13th, 2009, 4:23pm CET by justingibbs

Could we have found the 5 simple steps to a successful virtual world? We just might have. Sally Schmidt of Circle 1 Network laid it out.

She then broke down the five key strategic points into the 5 Cs: Creativity (dressing up avatars, decorating homes, designing clothes), Collection (free goods, paid goods, points), Caring (feeding a virtual pet, charity), Community (chat, events, message boards), and last but not least Competition (levels, comparing points wit other players). Her conclusion was that each of the big sites encompass all five key points, but only strongly emphasize a few. For instance, on Stardoll the draw is obviously in the creativity of designing your own clothes and styling your avatar. On Neopets, your role as pet owner promotes caring.

The 5 Cs seem pretty obvious and nearly all of us in the industry know them. However seeing them laid out may leave some of us wishing there was more. Second Life could have nailed these 5 points years ago, but they want more. What attracted many of us to the virtual world industry is most likely not contained in the 5 Cs. But the same could be said for us who joined Yahoo! in late 1999. We had our head in the clouds and business was booming. Nothing seemed out of reach. Then came the crash and reality set in. It was mail, community, news, etc. All great stuff but most likely not what we had glimpses of in 1999. What we envisioned was something like Google Earth, YouTube, Hulu, iPhone. But all of these came in the second wave, the second generation of Internet products.

That analogy begs the question - what will be the tenants of virtual worlds 2.0?

One trend I predict will play out over the next year is that virtual worlds will gravitate back to being about entertainment - entertainment platforms. Many virtual worlds have adopted social network features however I think this is quintessential virtual world 1.0. Another likely 1.0 tenant is being a games platform -where you enter a virtual world to run from one casual game to another. Unless these games evolve into more social game play I think this form of entertainment will be better met by purely game based services. One tenant I’m sure will be part of 2.0 is real time story. It’s just beginning to claw its way into existence but should evolve quickly once there’s an easy to use platform.

As for other possible tenants I’m not sure yet. Do you know of any? Any wild guesses?

Virtual worlds are about storytelling, but who tells it and how loudly?

Posted: March 10th, 2009, 8:09am CET by justingibbs

The more I work on virtual worlds the more I see our profession has in common with Walt Disney Imagineering (the people in charge of designing the theme parks) and urban planning. It’s easy to see the similarities with the physical space, but it’s more than just that. It’s about creating - an experience largely based on storytelling. But who does the storytelling and how much storytelling do they do?

With Walt Disney Imagineering it’s clearly Disney. The only real part we have in the creative process is feedback - we vote with our feet as they say. Build something like the Rocket Rods and it won’t last long. With urban development the public has a lot more input. In most cities urban theorist create a master plan, mapping out development decades into the future - where schools will be built, new mass transit will run, etc. The idea is to create a harmonious city but also to do a little storytelling. San Francisco is proud of it’s heritage so when they wanted to build a highway through the city in the 60’s citizens formed a group to fight the plan - SPUR (San Francisco Planning + Urban Research Association). They won and San Francisco is one of the only major cities with no highway cutting across it. If it was a just about efficiency they would have gone for the highway, but they didn’t want what happened in Boston, where the new highway cut the city in two, to happen in their city.

Then there is cities like Las Vegas. Many compare the city to Disneyland, being run more like a corporation than a traditional city. When I lived there the rumor was that a new law restricting water use prevented the Bellagio from having the famous fountains and lake in front of the hotel. So the city government simply took the law off for a day, passed the Bellagio building permit, and put the law back in place.

Now lets tackle the second part of the question - how much storytelling is going on? San Francisco tells a story but I’d argue that it is quite varied and appeals to a wide audience. Las Vegas too tells a story but is more focused - gambling, clubs, food, adult entertainment, special shows, etc. Disneyland even more - children and fantasy.

From all of this we can pull some interesting conclusions.

The more storytelling you do the more focused it becomes - it’s difficult to appeal to the widest audience if you’re also strong on story
If you’re story is strong its difficult to control its development within a democratic process - you can’t have strong story if you turn everything over to the users and hope for the best

All this begs the question of how strong of a story does a virtual world need to succeed? Metaplace, like Second Life seem to be aiming for story but are going about it in a democratic way. Club Penguin and WoW are much more in line with Walt Disney Imagineering. In the end, which will prove more popular with users? And as a virtual world developer do you limit the number of audiences you appeal to or try and stay wide open while risking story depth?