An excellent TED presentation by Dan Pink on how money doesn’t work…
are people concepts?
Are we evolving to absorb the language of marketing in to our ideas about ourselves. Are social networking, and transparent life streams making us more careful about crafting personas and living our unique brand concept?
“…They’re not presenters, yet they’ll hand over serious money to be shown how to “present” better: how to style their clothes, how to style their websites, even, in some cases, how to style their minds. It’s partly the global recession, which makes having a clearly defined public persona more vital in getting, or keeping, a job. Or it may be that the ideas and language of marketing are now so inescapable that people don’t think of themselves as just people any more. They’re concepts.”
http://www.moreintelligentlife.com/content/peter-york/big-sell
For most ordinary people, they follow the trend and do what everyone else is doing. A few set the trends and lead the way.
start with a picture
Use Google images, find a picture which suits or hints at the characters face.
Then to form a character brief, a back story or to help bring someone to life, ask yourself questions like this;
- What is your name?
- How old are you?
- Where are you now?
- What was life like when you were 5
- And when you were 10 and 15, 20 …
- Are you married? in a relationship?
- Do you have children?
- What are their names?
- What makes you happy?
- What makes you sad, angry?
- What are you passionate about?
- Who influenced you most?
- What stories define your life?
- What stories do you tell?
- What secrets do you keep?
- Do you have an incomplete story?
- Who are your friends
- Where did you grow up?
- Where do you live now?
- Are you rich, poor, healthy, ill?
- What do you do?
- Do you have a job
- Have you had other jobs?
- Have you travelled? where?
- How do you stand, walk, gesture etc
- How do you speak, what accent do you have?
- What mannerisms do you have?
Ask the questions slowly, with time to ponder, collate and compile a picture of the person in your mind. You don’t need to literally answer every question, and in 5 or 10 minutes you can create a rich and deep background, allowing you to play the character with great depth and personality.
liquid modernity
"Liquid Modernity" is Bauman’s term for the present condition of the world as contrasted with the "solid" modernity that preceded it.
Individuals have to splice together an unending series of short-term projects and episodes that don’t add up to the kind of sequence to which concepts like "career" and "progress" could be meaningfully applied. Such fragmented lives require individuals to be flexible and adaptable — to be constantly ready and willing to change tactics at short notice, to abandon commitments and loyalties without regret and to pursue opportunities according to their current availability.
creating feelings is a design task
BMW TV ad, my emphasis.
We are a car company.
But we don’t just make cars.
We make time machines, build Snowploughs, and create works of art.
We inspire fans, and fan clubs.
We are efficient and dynamic.
We even shape the future.
We realized a long time ago that what you make people feel is just as important … as what you make.
And at BMW we make Joy.
http://www.bmw.tv/core-services/view-video.mp4?id=1056&type=itunes&formatType=ipod
BMWs may create joy in their owner, they have a darker side and can also create superiority and arrogance on the road.
Seth Godin on publishing
- It’s a souvenir business – sell stuff as a reminder of a great experience
- Only asset you can build on the internet is permission
- Start the conversation, and get permission to keep it going - Find words for the readers not find readers for your words
- Drip ideas in to blog… to spread ideas and start conversations
- Who is having the conversation?
- Author to customer rather than publisher?
- Niche/special interest publishers have a reason to have a conversation.
- … start to sell souvenirs quickly once idea is out there - Do it to create experiences/share ideas (not to sell books/stuff)
me, me, me… you say
Acquired Situational Narcissism
“We are all born selfish, but by the age of 4 most of us have come to terms with the fact that we are not the centre of the universe and that other people (siblings, for example) exist.
Where normal narcissists think that they are legends in their own times, acquired situational narcissists are told they are by their publicists, groupies, bodyguards, company minions and partners. Many celebrities suffer from some degree of ASN.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/article575000.ece
More on narcissism generally
150 friends?
“The average person on Facebook has 150 friends ”
Socialnomics by Erik Qualman
How many could the average person list if you had to write them down from memory?
http://genecloud.wordpress.com/2007/01/09/design-language-rules-of-5-50/
designing for the experience or for the business?
The challenge of creating a great experience within the frame work of the business model, may be getting harder.
“In a fixed-cost world, the designer can focus on just one thing: making the player’s experience as engaging and interesting and fun as possible.
For a F2P game, however, designers have to balance making free content fun enough to engage first-time players but not so much fun that they would not yearn for something more, something that could be turned into a transaction sometime in the future.
Every design decision must be made with a mind towards how it affects the balance between free and paid content. Thus, the true cost of piracy is that the line between game business and game design has become very blurry.”
Soren Johnson
fuzzy game score
A mix of very precise scoring with fuzzy subjective guidance.
| 10 | Masterful |
| 9.5 to 9.9 | Incredible |
| 9.0 to 9.4 | Outstanding |
| 8.5 to 8.9 | Great |
| 8.0 to 8.4 | Impressive |
| 7.5 to 7.9 | Good |
| 7.0 to 7.4 | Decent |
| 6.0 to 6.9 | Passable |
| 5.1 to 5.9 | Mediocre |
| 5 | Meh |
| 4.0 to 4.9 | Poor |
| 3.0 to 3.9 | Bad |
| 2.0 to 2.9 | Terrible |
| 1.0 to 1.9 | Abysmal |
| 0.1 to 0.9 | Worthless |
| 0 | WTF? |
acquire & keep users
“A company’s success on Facebook revolves around three factors: ability to maximize viral channels (to drive new users), the ability to create an effective internal engagement loop within an application, and access to an open communication channel with Facebook’s platform people.”
http://www.allfacebook.com/2009/09/the-zynga-influence/
- Have something to drive new users (Attract)
- Work to keep new and existing users engaged and happy (Engage and Extend)
- Good relationship with the platform owner to stay live and ahead of the curve
do you have a coherent, valuable micro transaction design?
“What are you selling? Are you selling content, expansions, accessories, customization items, functional items?
What 10 items are going to be driving your sales on a daily basis? This needs to be decided while your game is in the production cycle. Trying to determine this late in development or changing the direction of your game to accommodate this will often ruin the consistency of your game design. Plan from the start and know the role virtual goods are going to be playing in your game.
How are you going to convince players that they need to purchase your virtual goods/content? Will it be via your website or game launcher? What messaging will you use? Will you offer them sample cash shop items via a quest in-game? “
i is popular
“I” is the most popular word at the start of a tweet, and is the 2nd most popular word used on Twitter.
Only ~10% of tweets contain a question
This compares to general advice on good blogging, which recommends that readers prefer less “I”, and the human brain response well, and better remembers intriguing questions.
Are we becoming more narcissistic?
Source Oxford English Corpus
boredom feeds your imagination
“…we also live in a world where every minute is filled with television, computer game and other distractions. There is no time to be bored any more and that means our imaginations are beginning not to work as well as they could. People whose imaginations have withered can be rather dangerous folk, because they cannot understand how other people think or feel, and they tend walk safe and well worn roads, rather than exploring where new ideas might lead them. They miss the magic. Without imagination, the world becomes a very dull place.”
John & Caitlin Matthews in StoryWorld
… and add a pinch of gaming
Interesting quote & suggestion for how ‘old’ media companies can transform themselves – not sure that I buy the idea that everything can be solved by the addition of being a game, although some interactivity, rewards and a social aspect would help lots of things.
Plenty of people want to a simple ‘experience’ without having demands of interaction placed on them.
http://www.bruceongames.com/2009/08/28/some-free-advice-for-michael-grade/
“New media has the enormous technical advantages of interactivity, connectivity and non linearity. Gaming adds to that the powerful reward mechanism for the successful completion of tasks. Old media looks truly pathetic compared to this. So whilst new media grows from strength to strength they are doing so at the expense of old media. Old media is in big trouble and it is getting worse for them by the day.
But there is hope. The only thing that ITVplc have that is of any real value is their brands. They own a big pile of IP that is extremely well known in Britain. These brands can be scrubbed down, rejuvenated and adapted for the new media. It really isn’t rocket science. Gaming and social networking are the two obvious mechanics that are just sitting there waiting to be applied.
So here is the recipe. ITVplc need to set up a game publishing division. A small budget of perhaps £100 million should be enough to get this off the ground. Then they need to make a variety of games centred on their brands. All sorts of games. Social games, self development games, educational games, MMOs, casual games, telephone games. And across different platforms. Very rapidly indeed they would become Britain’s biggest game publisher. And more, because unlike broadcast, games are not constrained by geographic boundaries. With games the whole world becomes their oyster.”
does multitasking wither your capabilities?
Is multitasking causing a change in people’s capabilities? By multitasking, do you make yourself less capable… of multitasking, and anything else that requires concentration, flow or focus.
"The shocking discovery of this research is that [high multitaskers] are lousy at everything that’s necessary for multitasking," Professor Nass said.
"The irony here is that when you ask the low multitaskers, they all think they’re much worse at multitasking and the high multitaskers think they’re gifted at it."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8219212.stm
“But at the very least, he said, multitaskers should be told that they are bad at multitasking.”
learned behaviour or lazy?
“…children ages 11-14. The young people who used their phones more often- with the setting that completed words automatically (predictive texting), completed tests quicker, but with a larger number of mistakes.
…results showed predictive texting may be teaching children to act fast, while placing less emphasis on specificity and accuracy.”
http://www.psfk.com/2009/08/kids-who-text-frequently-work-faster-sloppier.html
And this behaviour transfers in to other areas of life.
