Power of Crowdsourcing example
Hanna is a geek in Sweden. I don’t know her, I don’t know of her. She’s not a huge name as far as I can tell.
But she just did something amazing using Twitter and Spotify. About an hour ago she created a collaborative playlist on Spotify and tweeted the playlist link asking for Christmas songs.
One hour ago. The playlist is now 18 songs and 1.2 hours long. Potentially it could last forever if more people join in.
Thanks Hanna, for showing us a great example of the power of social media and crowd sourcing.
Why change is hard for companies
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:
Brütal Legend demo impresssions
One word: Awesome.
To tell you the truth, I had already planned to buy Brutal Legend just for the story writing and the fact that original games are few and should be promoted. But after playing the demo I have to say that the team at Double Fine has outdone themselves. This is one hell of a game, the gameplay is simple and fun while the narrative is awesome. The game has excellent polish and definitely seems worth the money.
Truthfully, I’m a bit surprised and a bit impressed. I had not suspected that the game would be this fun to play.
Uncharted 2 multiplayer beta impressions
I like Uncharted 1. Let’s get that straight before I say anything else. Because it does make me slightly biased.
But that aside, Uncharted 2 among thieves really ups the ante. The graphics are slightly better, everything is more smooth and the free running/climbing is really more integrated into the world.
The multiplayer beta is just what it sounds like, a demo that only showcases multiplayer. And its a lot of fun. Gameplay is engaging even though it’s quite slow compared to other shooters. The levels are pretty large and since you can climb you have to think vertically unless you want to get shot repeatedly by the other players climbing the ruins.
There is a modern standard leveling system and a matchmaking system that we really don’t know much about since there aren’t that many players playing it.
So far though, the beta has me convinced that the game itself is holding up to the hype. Still, Uncharted is just as much about the narrative progression as the game mechanics. And we haven’t seen them yet.
The amazing power of discussion
Sometimes we need to put our ideas into words just to understand them ourselves. This is because the limitations in our language to describe ideas force us to make them more structured and less fuzzy around the edges.
We don’t always do this however, which is a bit sad since we only communicate a fraction of our ideas.
I think about this often when I’m talking with friends. Because it is only when I’m talking to another person that I really flesh out ideas enough to make them understandable and usable.
Last night I had a great conversation with an old friend and I am pleased to share with you a few of the ideas we discussed here. I’ll post them later tonight or tomorrow but I will say that we solved fear of death, the reason for religion and why the last Harry Potter book was a bit of a anti climax.
Strange reading habits
It seems most of you are only here to find out who I am.
Fair enough. I’ll make a better presentation of myself soon.
LOVE pre-play impressions
Sitting here watching the love tech alpha on my 37″ LCD screen.
It’s just a flythrough of the world that loops over and over again, showing of scenes form the game and the engines dynamic day and night cycle.
It’s really different from other games. It’s astonishing that it’s made by one person. Really impressive, check it out if you’re on a PC.
LOVE MMO technical alpha available
Help Eskil get his bugs smoothed out and speed the release of LOVE.
Just download the tech-alpha demo here and start it up. It will send machine info to Eskil to improve compatibility and let him know how much server load he can expect for beta testing.
The seamless music experience of Minigore
Minigore is a small promotional iPhone top down shooter created by developer Mountain Sheep. It was launched to get a publishing deal to an adventure game based on the characters, gameplay and art style that sets Minigore apart.
So far so good. That Minigore is one of the best looking and most polished feedback titles in the App store doesn’t make it any less good.
But what I really wanted to talk about is the seamless music experience. Minigore takes advantage of iPhone 3.0’s API for the iPod player. Which means it won’t stop your music when you launch Minigore. On the contrary.
The music plays through the loading screen as well as the menu and into the game itself. The game also understands that music is playing and doesn’t play its own soundtrack.
Compared to playing Minigore there can be no more persuasive argument for creating seamless experiences. Whether through sound, interface or social functions. Seamlessness really does add enormous amounts of emotional goodwill to your product.
Don’t believe me? Try it yourself, it’s 99 cents and worth every penny.
Monopoly city streets
The word wide Monopoly match is finally running smoothly without slowdowns or lag. The game is a fantastic experiment on the google maps platform. I’ve been wondering why it hasn’t been used more for games up til now, let’s see if that changes.
There is only one problem with the game. Chance has such a small effect on actual play that the main strategy in Monopoly (buy everything as fast as possible) is not only dominant but effectively the only one. Still pretty fun though, buying your own neighbourhood.
