We all showcase skills we have by listing the tools we’re proficient using. Usually on our CV or talking with friends and business contacts we say things like “I use X to do Y” or similar. I just realized that this is somewhat strange, for any task a tool might be more or less important. In some extreme cases the tool is the task and knowing how to use it is essential for the job.
But for knowledge workers, when is Photoshop really a critical skill? Graphic design is the real skill, with the addition of experience using software designed specifically for the task. Would a switch to painter really make all that skill obsolete?
This is most striking for programmers. If you know how to code a web app using an object based language, which language tends to be irrelevant. Sure, knowing the language a company uses beforehand is an advantage. But certainly not crucial, anyone new to a workplace has to learn the specifics of that job anyway.
What is happiness to you? To me I’ve always defined it as reaching my goals, whatever they may be.
Turns out I’m wrong. Dead wrong apparently. As Dan Gilbert explains in the video below happiness is comprised of a lot of synthetic happiness. And as Luis C.K. displays in the next video our many many choices leave us stranded in a place of chasing happiness that is really all around us. What we need to do is really enforce more restrictions on our own lives.
For games and products, this translates into restricting what they can do. Think about how strange that is, restricting what players / users can do will actually make the product more fun and usable. Not because it is, but because the choices will make that happiness more available.
Prestige is usually a problem in organizations and development alike. People with too much prestige become complacent some of the time and obstacles for the organization, most often this happens not on purpose but because of the real prestige the individual has earned over years of work.
Because of this problem many companies and developers strive for prestigeless workspaces. They ask for prestigeless applicants and so forth. But this attitude lacks a basic understanding of prestige.
Prestige is a cultural gauge which we use to measure ourselves with. If you as an individual do good things and make good things happen you usually acquire prestige from your surrounding social circle (whether privately or professionally). But if you perform poorly or bring about negative effects you usually lose prestige.
While this system is far from perfect (a single mistake might wipe you out) and for form fair (seeming to deliver gives as much prestige as actually delivering, presuming you can keep the facade up) it is still a social system all organizations should be aware of. No one can be completely free from prestige. And they should not either.
Prestige is usually the most direct form of reward individuals can see as a result of their work.
But we also need to be really wary of prestige, it can lead to horrible evils in any organization. Perhaps it might help if we start thinking about prestige as something less durable. What do you think?
Change is of course always hard, but I’m not talking about personal change here but about change in organization and how companies and industries work. We have a lot of current examples with now with the entire Music and Mobile phone industry plunging off the revenue cliff like lemmings.
New ideas tend to come from people who have a lot of time on their hands. You see, there is something about our minds that just makes us crave new things. This might sound strange as we’ve all had grand mothers and friends who just put up a fight against everything new. But we are slightly skewed as witnesses towards these events, they’re not against new things you see. They are just a bit frightened that what people are pushing for might make what they were doing sound wrong or stupid. Basically, we’re all afraid to be laughed at.
But we still love to learn new things, most of us travel or read or watch movies. And while we often do pick out favorites just to be safe we always got those favorites or find new ones because we learn as we go. Fast or slow, we all learn and move on. But the process takes time.
This is why youth always seem to be full of fresh ideas. Sure, many of them have been tried, not all youngsters check before they start to wave red flags, but certainly not all of them. This is because young people have more free time to indulge and learn new things. Name any period in your life when you learned more than as a student? Can you honestly say that most of what you learned happened in classrooms?!
And this, alarmingly, is the problem. As companies get larger and the people working for them are more senior they get busier and busier. Which leaves less time for learning. While people are promoted because they do excellent work, they usually struggle to keep doing excellent work and thus have even less time to indulge.
Because of this we end up with a pyramid of ideas and power that is completely polarized and slightly ageist. The broad bottom is made up of mostly young people with most of the ideas while the upper parts are made up of mostly older people with less modern ideas. It’s not the fault of any of them. It certainly isn’t intentional. But it’s bad for the company and it leaves the company less open to change. Not because the people in charge don’t believe in change, but because they haven’t had time to live the change that has already happened.
An old saying is that winners work hard and play hard. I would argue that because they work hard and find the time to play they are still agile and current enough to be winners. They have all the experience and still have had time to learn the modern ways of doing things before Google took over the market.
Ah, you’ll now think, or did earlier, what about companies such as Google? How can huge organizations like them stay current?
Well. They don’t. Not completely. But they are fighting this trend by letting their employees use 20% of their time to work on their own projects. A few other companies use similar strategies but Google is the most famous promoter which is why I chose to make an example out of them.
No one can stop change. We have to move with it or be left behind. This includes the Music industry, Mobile phone producers and web start ups equally. Maybe using a bit more time for playful learning can give us a competitive advantage?
Oh, and “free work time” is also the only way to motivate people working creatively apparently:
At least according to developer Eskil Steenberg’s blog. LOVE is a hugely interesting MMO since it’s mostly procedurally generated with the world being constantly constructed and destroyed by players. Also noted for being developed solely by Eskil (except for the music) it looks to be quite an achievement.
So far though the game is only feature complete, which since it’s procedurally generated also means content complete, it does not mean it’s ready for release though. Eskil is probably going to test the shit bejesus out of the product before launch or open beta. I for one will be glued to the site looking for a download button.
What do you think will happen? I sincerely hope for an Apple Tablet, basically a larger, more powerful, iPod Touch with a huge battery. But I don’t really think it will happen. Apple is working on it and when they can get price, performance and form factors together to really blast the market with tablets they will. I just think it’s to expensive today.
iPhone OS 3.0 will launch today however. Which brings a huge amount of updates to the iPhone and the App Store. Let’s see those landscape SMS’ and ad hoc multiplayer games flourish!
In summary the article proposes, based on Popcap games data and theories, that gamers either put effort into understanding complex casuality or they don’t. Hardcore and Casual. Which would explain the difference in appetites as well as time invested and similar data available from this kind of categorization.
Doing things differently, doing things in a new way is hard. The hardest part is that you have to change how you think about whatever it is you are going to do. This is usually called thinking outside the box. Thinking without prerequisites about the project at hand.
This is why limitations are so good. Because they force a new set of rules on the product, however small or large that difference may be, that change the direction in which you take the product.
Are you stuck with some design or problem? Try giving yourself a strange rule to follow. Or find the rules and limitations of your work before you try to create it. Working without limitation just leads you in circles.
