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Posted on 05.27.09 by Alexandre Maron @ 00:56
I was talking earlier about how Ebay (among others) made a business of turning auctions, highly addictive play like events, into an even sexier activity. Yesterday I saw an add at the underground here in London of a website called Swoopo. They took the Ebay concept to another level. It works like this: people put objects for auction for insanely low prices and the bids go up in 10p increases. But to make a bid you pay 50p and a piece of this money goes to the seller. The bidder buys tokens (50 bids, 100 bids) that will use in auctions. The auctions happen in short periods of time and if someone makes a bid inside the last 20 seconds of the deadline of an auction it gets a time extension. This mechanic tends to get lower prices and the seller will make extra money from the bidding. So, the more interesting an item is, more bidding it should generate. So, an auction becomes, more than ever, a strategy game where timing and pacing is very important. The creators turned the activity in a bona fide game. I don’t know if it will work. But the concept is amazing. Filed under: New Ways to Play andRules of the Game Agree? Disagree? Want to report an error? Comment: None |
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Posted on 05.26.09 by Alexandre Maron @ 10:05
A very common mistake when you are doing any kind of research is what i call the hammer approach. There is a saying that when a person has a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail. So I like to put some serious effort in not saying that everything is a game or that games are in everything. But ont thing I can say with no fear of being wrong: most of the success stories of the last decade had some component of the Play Factor. eBay Social Networks YouTube And there is more. Just look at how your most favorite websites work and you will see the Play Factor in them. The best sites and best media products have this component. And they have different concepts. Not evey people love to bid. Some only like to browse products. Not everyone feel well about colecting stamps in a social network environment. We look for the ones that fit with our tastes. That is why we love them. Filed under: Interfaces andNew Ways to Play Agree? Disagree? Want to report an error? Comment: None |
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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 andNew Ways to Play andSocial Media andVideos Agree? Disagree? Want to report an error? Comment: None |
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Posted on 05.03.09 by Alexandre Maron @ 16:48
This is not the central point of my research, but I will always talk about how we use interfaces that reminds us of games. These are more metaphors and not always pratical or workable concepts. Have a look at how everyone, everyone that matters, at least, used mashups with maps and shiny graphics to keep track of how the Swine Flu (ridiculously renamed Novel Flu H1N1 by WHO, CDC whatever).
Filed under: Interfaces andThe World as a Playground Agree? Disagree? Want to report an error? Comment: None |
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Posted on 04.02.09 by Alexandre Maron @ 04:38
Didn’t you look for jokes yesterday? I love April Fool’s Day. I just browse everywhere looking for practical jokes in media outlets that are, most of the time, serious. The Guardian (that dropped the paper in favor of turning into a Tweetercentric site) made a list of some cons spotted through the internet. And I have my personal list:
Google launches Cadie, an intelligent system that will help them in the near future in keeping the company as the most innovative. Well, there’s a learning curve… Amazon announces the REAL cloud computing. They are taking computer up-up-and awayyy!! CrunchGear became part of a line of cereals (crunch, got it?) of General Mills!! Kodak shows its pretty Eye-Camera. Wow!! What a gadget! Gmail shows it’s new amazing functionality: auto-pilot. The, hum, intelligent system answers your messages for you! As an example, they show how it would answer the classic nigerian prince spam.
And there is obviously a lot more around. Life is playground. Filed under: New Ways to Play andThe World as a Playground 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 andExternal Content andNew Ways to Play andRules 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 andExternal Content andRules of the Game andVideos anddesign Agree? Disagree? Want to report an error? Comment: None |
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Posted on 03.29.09 by Alexandre Maron @ 18:10
Busy week. Next one I will deal with some final assignments and I think this website will start to see some real development and calrification of the issues at hand. For now, just a nice slideshow I found on slideshare, about mobile journalism. It is slightly out of topic in a way (although it fascinates me and even helped me develop a website in Brazil called Urblog) , but serves to remind us about how we can break down, restructure and redesign almost any experience as a game of sorts. And sometimes, we don’t even know that we built one. Mobile Journalism
View more presentations from Xu Xiaoge.
Filed under: New Ways to Play andSlideshow Agree? Disagree? Want to report an error? Comment: None |
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Posted on 03.16.09 by Alexandre Maron @ 03:24
It is hard to think of better examples of Play Factor application than deep media products. You know them. TV shows like Lost, The Office, Battlestar Galactica, Gossip Girl. Movies like The Blair Witch Project, Matrix, A.I., Batman – The Dark Knight and Watchmen. Book series like The Da Vinci Code, The 39 Clues, music artists like Trent Reznor or the band Radiohead. And games. Oh, come on, they had to be there too, right? You can start with the Alternate REality Games and now wich some big titles like Halo and Dead Space. But it doesn’t stop here. If you just stop to look at Deep Focus and 42 Entertainment projects for a few seconds you will see the possibilities emerging. They are everywhere, as the South by Southwest Conference can show us. And they use all the possibilities of the Play Factor. They try to engage the audience in various ways. They even are capable of engaging different demographics in the same fictional universe through different channels. But more importantly, they make people interact, play the products and with the products. But, please, there is a difference between a product that is adapted for more than one media and a real deep media experience. Gone With the Wind the book became Gone With the Wind, the movie. Great. We are talking about a TV show like Lost. It has a mythology that transpires to the real world and make it’s audience enjoy it at various levels of complexity. Being complex, naturally chalenging it’s audience in subtle and sometimes in very direct ways, the show becomes more than a show, and the game, and the books, and the websites. The Play Factor is obvious here. Filed under: New Ways to Play andRules of the Game andSocial Media Agree? Disagree? Want to report an error? Comment: 1 Comment |
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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 andExternal Content andNew Ways to Play andVideos Agree? Disagree? Want to report an error? Comment: None |
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