This seems like pretty good advice for all presentations – along with use lots of pictures, no more than 4 bullet points and don’t read out the words on the slides…
“If you had five minutes on stage what would you say? What if you only got 20 slides and they rotated automatically after 15 seconds? Around the world geeks have been putting together Ignite nights to show their answers.”
A great article on level design, the Temptress and Storyteller.
http://docs.google.com/Present?docid=dg3w5bqn_5995dwkxf9&ncl=true
“People prize what they don’t understand at least as much as what they do” Randall Sullivan on the creators of the Georgia Guidestones, in a Wired article
Wyatt Martin “if you want to keep people interested, you can let them know only so much“ – the only remaining contact with R.C. Christian creator of the Guidestones.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones
JJ Abrams also in Wired
”We’re smack in the middle of the age of immediacy.”…
”Perhaps that’s why mystery now more than ever, has a special meaning. Because it’s the anomaly, the glaring affirmation that the age of immediacy has a meaningful downside. Mystery demands that you stop and consider – or at the very least, slow down and discover. It’s a challenge to get there yourself, on its terms, not yours.”
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/j_j_abrams_mystery_box.html
Movies/TV are a series of mystery boxes, revealing their meta stories over time, withholding information to maximize the mystery and stimulate the imagination – jaws/aliens etc
“One of the reasons we like crosswords is that they let us have an intellectual triumph on a small scale”
Amy Reynaldo, Wired
“compression is the tendency of rewards to become less effective with repetition”
Seth Godin, Permission Marketing
In the same way that we adapt to familiar fragrances and start to no longer notice them, you can become immune to the thrill of rewards with excessive repetition.
Add some mystery to the rewards;
http://genecloud.wordpress.com/2008/05/04/223/
Think about them as treats, that you use more sparingly;
http://genecloud.wordpress.com/2008/01/09/are-the-rewards-like-good-treats/
The Paradox of Choice at work in decision making
“More time does not create better decisions. In fact, it usually decreases the quality of the decision. More information may help. More time without more information just creates anxiety, not insight…”
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/04/i-need-more-time.html
“If people realise I am thirty-five,” he said, “they won’t allow their imaginations to run wild. They’ll see me as an adult acting, rather than a kid playing. Most people in the audience want to forget the rules, but they need a little help. I have to create an imaginary world for them: if I do it well, they will walk in to it with me.” Philippe a Cirque clown
Cirque Du Soleil : The Spark, Igniting The Creative Fire That Lives Within Us All by Lyn Heward and John U. Bacon
Players want to suspend disbelief, give them no cause to step outside of the world you have created for them.
“Blank Page Syndrome: when presented with infinite choice, it’s sometimes hard to get started”
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000407.html
Without a boundary it is too easy to drift inefficiently, to strike off in different directions, to take your first idea, to freeze and stare at the blank page or to spend way too much time or money on something.
Cirque Du Soleil : The Spark, Igniting The Creative Fire That Lives Within Us All by Lyn Heward and John U. Bacon
“Oh, we’ve got budgets and deadline, all right,” she said. “Without them, I don’t think we’d be half as creative as we are. They force us to come up with solutions we’d never think of otherwise. Constraints on time, money, and resources can be incredible motivators!. Some of our most inspired ideas have arisen from the most Spartan situations.”
“So how do you turn these random ideas in to an act?” – “Deadlines!” He laughed. “Of course, they always come too fast, but without them, your mind is not focused. With them, on the other hand, your panicked mind starts coming up with crazy ideas it would never otherwise. If you have two days to design a transition from a trapeze act to a trampoline, you will think of something!”
“Man has been in the hunting game all throughout his existence. Primitive man’s main job was to hunt. Survival depended on it. Early man had to hunt for food and clothing, as well as shelter and protection.”
There are great parallels between hunting and playing games.
Hunting requires skill, knowledge and an investment of time. It demands concentration, effort and an understanding of the environment you are in. It has risk reward choices, offers thrills, fun and is rewarding on a number of different levels.
“…it’s not just the killing that is the thrill, it is the hunt. A hunter has used his/her skills to find or track his prey” … “It’s exciting to find the wild game, but it now finalizes the deal when the prey becomes yours; your trophy, your reward, your meal, your memory, your payoff.”
“…this goes back to early man. It’s inbred in humans.”
“gut is a sucker for a good story”
Risk by Dan Gardner
“ …Kahneman and Tversky later wrote, the Rule of Typical Things ‘generally favors outcomes that make good stories or good hypothesis”
When the evidence appears to support your assumptions or forms a good shadow story, your gut jumps at the answer and latches on. Matching the short hand structure of a story helps resolve complexity very quickly.
Yes. Your sub conscious gut listens to everything you hear, and it takes most things at face value. Your brain has evolved to form snap judgements, using a rule of ‘appearance equals reality’ to speed up reaction times. Very useful when making life or death decisions about predators stalking you through the savannah grasses.
Your inner voice or ego chatterbox, twitters away full of undermining self criticism. Yet your sub conscious gut listens… and believes it just like any other input. (Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway® by Susan Jeffers)
While your sub conscious believes what it hears, your conscious mind will often try to temper and modify your gut’s opinions.
Game rewards can sit in a structure & have a purpose of generating emotion and loyalty for a game. Loyalty is a slightly different, more conscious and perhaps more positive version of addiction.
Is there a good loyalty encouraging structure for your game’s rewards?
“Finding the right reward model
…loyalty programs provide a good basis for understanding the basic levers of incentives and rewards…
- The frequent flyer model — Participation -> richer experience — …reserve exit row seats in advance, get a United representative on the phone quickly, and — best of all — board before the unwashed masses.
- The credit card points model — Participation -> cash …most, an accrued currency ("miles" or "points") are exchanged for tangible goods…
- The American Express model — Participation -> manufactured exclusivity — "Membership has its privileges." Amex marketing has taught us that simply using the card communicates a sense of status. Invitation-only web services …offer a certain cache to the users as representations of geek cred.”
So much time and energy goes in to designing, implementing, testing and releasing software features that only a minority of people use.
“Only 20% of a mobile phone’s features are used regularly; up to a quarter remain completely undiscovered”
from a study by WDSGlobal
1 billion apps downloaded from the App Store, yet most go used or unexplored. Our appetite is there, and for whatever reason our hunger fades quickly.
“Pinch Media drawing on iPhone analytics data highlights that (only) ~20% of user’s ever return to use an application the day after it is installed. There are many ways to interpret this data: the harshest being that ~80% of user’s are so unimpressed with their application that they never return to it.”
http://www.janchipchase.com/blog/archives/2009/04/1000000000-apps-pfft.html
In some cases breadth of function is important, although no excuse for complexity.
“A lot of software developers are seduced by the old "80/20" rule. It seems to make a lot of sense: 80% of the people use 20% of the features. So you convince yourself that you only need to implement 20% of the features, and you can still sell 80% as many copies.
Unfortunately, it’s never the same 20%. Everybody uses a different set of features.”
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html
Is featuritis driven by fear?
“Fear of being perceived as having fewer features than your competitors. Fear that you won’t be viewed as complete. Fear that people are making purchase decisions off of a checklist, and that he who has the most features wins (or at the least, that he who has the fewest features definitely loses). Fear of losing key clients who say, "If you don’t add THIS… I’ll have to go elsewhere."
Be brave. And besides, continuing to pile on new features eventually leads to an endless downhill slide toward poor usability and maintenance. A negative spiral of incremental improvements. Fighting and clawing for market share by competing solely on features is an unhealthy, unsustainable, and unfun way to live.
Be the "I Rule" product, not the "This thing I bought does everything, but I suck!" product.”
http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2005/06/featuritis_vs_t.html
“Pavlov was on to something. Ding… Recognition is the bell that drives human behaviour”
The Recognition Microscope: Fuel for Human Acceleration
Recognition or game rewards should be;
Ask questions following this sequence of subjects, don’t suggest answers or tell someone what to do;
P – what is the Problem?
H – what is the History of the problem?
O – what are the options available?
N – what are the next steps that you want to take?
E – Exit or End, when will you speak again?
A great quote on creating social game experiences;
“Board games have continued to thrive for a simple reason: Whether for adults or children, they are—like poker nights, softball games, and bowling leagues—an excuse to hang out and interact with friends and family. As Jesper Juul, a ludologist, or game expert, at MIT explains, they create a communal experience that brings people together. Who won the last time and how, some interesting tactic, or a particularly remarkable stroke of luck all produce a shared memory.”
http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/magazine/17-04/mf_settlers?currentPage=1
“Instead of direct conflict, German-style games tend to let players win without having to undercut or destroy their friends. This keeps the game fun, even for those who eventually fall behind. Designed with busy parents in mind, German games also tend to be fast, requiring anywhere from 15 minutes to a little more than an hour to complete. They are balanced, preventing one person from running away with the game while the others painfully play out their eventual defeat. And the best ones stay fresh and interesting game after game.”
“Target fixation is a process by which the brain is focused so intently on an observed object that awareness of other obstacles or hazards can diminish.
Also, in an avoidance scenario, the observer can become so fixated on the target that they will forget to take the necessary action to avoid it, thus colliding with the object.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Target_fixation
A case of priming and visualisation helping to achieve a goal, either intentionally or unintentionally. Overly focusing on risks and potential negative outcomes could increase the changes of them happening.
Do meaningful things
Focus on creating value
Do more than just turning up face time
Change something for the better
Avoid the seductive draw of easy busywork
Do hard things
Simplification failure; the process of allowing a simple elegant concept, to slide with the addition of needless complexity or overly fussy details during a detailed design phase.
Fear of something simple not being enough, encourages people to add complexity and detail.
“zig when everyone else is zagging”
Ian Ballantine from The Element by Ken Robinson
Finding a blue ocean or gap in the market is better than staying where everyone else is or has been.
