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Posted on 05.09.09 by Alexandre Maron @ 20:12
There are things in life that are necessary, but not exactly exciting. Let’s look at the good old moment when an urban, hip and well informed couple wants to go out for dinner and have to decide where to go. Well, if you are in London, you could go to Yelp. Choose a cuisine… Then, betwen a plethora of options, choose a restaurant… And take a look at what is people saying about the place. Three straight forward steps. Simple, but have nothing special and sometimes not finding the right place could be frustrating. Now. Let’s go back one step. Lets break it down in pieces. Well, we need to find a restaurant. We may define the kind of food, where and how much we are willing to spend. Three variables? There maybe more, but let’s stay with these ones for now. Does it have to be this way? Is there any way we could do the same thing and make it, hum, sexier? Make it funny? Fun? Let’s see how Urbanspoon answered this question… Cool. I know that if you are a passionate Iphone user, you may already know this app, but the point is: this is one of the most perfect examples of the Play Factor. But we can’t forget that an Iphone app is going to a specific kind of audience. So, the website of Urbanspoon is still a very conventional one, although tey have a version of the application there.
So they have in mind that they need to be able to offer the right experience for the right customer. Filed under: Definition and New Ways to Play and Social Media and Videos Agree? Disagree? Want to report an error? Comment: None |
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Posted on 04.02.09 by Alexandre Maron @ 01:13
Big story of the week for Hollywood execs is the fact that Wolverine’s movie leaked and anybody with a peer-to-peer software is able to download it. So here comes the execs with those good old stories. The copies will hurt ticket sales! We are doomed!! Things like that. For me it is very simple. Wolverine is a big action estravaganza. People that chose to see a movie like this in a computer screen, in a terrible copy, with crappy sound and poor picture quality, taken with a camera from a movie theater in some obscure corner of the world, would not pay for a ticket anyway. This is people that don’t care about going to a theater. Plain and simple. Or else. Could be a really curious fan that wants to see the movie as soon as possible and, surprise, will go to watch on a theater anyway. Crap! He will go again, one week later, watch it on Imax. And, oh!, will buy the special edition in august too. So, enough with the screams! The thing is. All these fireworks just hide the really juicy fact in this curious case: it is not the final movie, but a high quality copy with unfinished effects and soundtrack. It is the kind of thing that journalists and executives have the chance to see all the time, but not the crowd that would go to a theater. Hell! I don’t download this kind of stuff and this time I even was curious to see how this copy looked. People will download it just to see how an unfinished movie looks. Plain simple. This case has an edge, a challenge embedded. This copy has something completely different. Works as a souvenir for the fans. People will download it and, if the movie rocks, since they couldn’t see the finished effects, they will run to theaters on may 1st. This is such an interesting situation that, if I wasn’t such a nice guy I would even think that Fox leaked this on purpose. But if the movie is terrible. Well. Fox is in serious trouble, because that first week crowd may not appear in such big numbers, after bad reviews start popping everywhere on the internet. In the end, whoever makes good stuff can have good results from positive buzz. But your product better be good, dude, or you are in serious trouble. New world, different rules. Filed under: Definition and External Content and New Ways to Play and Rules of the Game Agree? Disagree? Want to report an error? Comment: None |
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Posted on 04.01.09 by Alexandre Maron @ 06:43
Design is an absolutely relevant part of any product. I feel that launching a media product without design is like going to an UFC competition without any training at all. You will have you ass kicked big time. Well, even with training you can get your ass kicked. But i digress. Off course that bad content with good design is just a ruse. But it’s almost the same thing the other way around: good content with bad design is just content that will not be seen. Good design influences (or at least should) everything in your product. It is part of that idea of asking your audience to a dance. But enough of me, for now. We will have plenty of time to talk further about design in the near future. Just take a look at this video from TED talks: Filed under: Definition and External Content and Rules of the Game and Videos and design Agree? Disagree? Want to report an error? Comment: None |
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Posted on 03.14.09 by Alexandre Maron @ 12:09
How did i get here? Why do i have a passion about playing? You didn’t ask this question, but since I am writing a blog on the subject I think that I should talk about this. Firstly, it has an obvious link with my personal experiences. I collect games since I was a kid. I love playing for the sake of playing. And don’t care a lot about winning (although I like to win, of course), but I love to see people having fun around me. I am 36. I saw a great part of the evolution of the world we live in now. When I was a kid, I played pong, then Atari, then computer games, then Nintendo, PS2, Wii, DS, PSP, Iphone games… When I saw the first ATMs, in the eighties, in Brazil, it seemed to me like really simple arcade games. Only I was playing with money. When internet banking started to really work, I looked at that and thought: geee, it looks like Sim City. Then came Friendster, Orkut, My Space and… Facebook. Now we organize our social lifes as they were… games. As if we were playing The Sims (the most popular computer game EVER). But, ok. Come on. It is just the games inside our life, right? But what if we finally admitted the fact that play is a part of what we are? Animals play all the time. If you have a cat or a dog, you know what I mean. A long time ago, I read a book, an old one, called Homo Ludens. And boy, it made me feel so bang on the subject. We need to play. It is part of us. Simple as that. I didn’t want to be a real game designer, but I wanted to make my work as editor of magazines a good thing. Because of that, I became a deep lover of design and always looked for ways to make the pages of my magazines pretty and engaging. But I am not a designer. So it becomes a search for the person that will be able to translate that vision and go forward with it. Add something. Do something special, amusing, interesting. Some times it worked. But not always. Last year, while I was making a new magazine called Época São Paulo for Editora Globo, in Brazil, I was reading every local magazine possible: many different Time Outs, Los Angeles Magazine, Chicago, Washingtonian, New York and those many New York Times magazines. That was when I saw a great cover article about the subject that I love: play. It made me have long talks with some of my friends about our relationship with this urge. How we look for fun in so many different ways. Now I am intensively researching the subject, looking for different ways to approach play and a circle closed. Looking at TED lectures I found Stuart Brown’s session and he starts it talking about that article from the NYT magazine. And the session, of course, is amazing. I think it will help to put some light on what I am trying to do. Filed under: Definition and External Content and New Ways to Play and Videos Agree? Disagree? Want to report an error? Comment: None |
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Posted on 03.05.09 by Alexandre Maron @ 02:05
Is it possible to build a framework of concepts, tools and techniques capable of make media content more engaging? Is there an identifiable play factor, a layer of playability that could be embedded in the content, using techniques developed for games, interaction design and social media? What I can say is that it is not branding. Branding comes before and helps you develop the “rules” of your game, the type of play. But there is no doubt that it is a tool for branding. Filed under: Definition and General Statement Agree? Disagree? Want to report an error? Comment: None |