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Posted on 03.14.09 by Alexandre Maron @ 11:04
Filed under: New Ways to Play andVideos Agree? Disagree? Want to report an error? Comment: None |
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Posted on 03.14.09 by Alexandre Maron @ 10:42
We are more sophisticated by the minute. You don’t expect that with all the technology, all the interfaces surrounding us, all the stimulae we would keep doing things the same way, right? We change and evolve. We look at old things and make them different and new. Let me give you an example: the good old building blocks. Everybody with a heart liked them as kids. They are colorful, have shapes, texture and we can move them around and build things. We can play with them and we can play games with them, if we develop the right rules. Wood blocks. Beautiful and simple. A few years ago, in a toy store at New York, I saw these blocks here. Simple as they were, they blew my mind. They were just an amazing idea. See? There is a game component, some rules about assembling. But the whole thing is more like a sandbox where you put things together and just ave fun with the result. Really, really interesting. But, as I said, I saw it years ago. You couldn’t think that things would stop there, right? The MIT guys agree… Now, think about the possibilities. Think about the fact tha play is a lot more than just games, puzzles, sudoku and crosswords. Playing could be something more subtle, a small challenge that people don’t even realize that is happening but that is able to move them. Look at the building blocks and open your mind for new ideas. Shuffle them and think again. 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 03.12.09 by Alexandre Maron @ 04:09
One of the first lessons some companies learned (or not) when playing with new media is that this is a different kind of beast where, instead of a monologue, you have a conversation (ok, I heard it som many times that this phrase annoys me). Even when you don’t want to. A few years ago, GM launched a campaign asking internet users to make video ads about one of its cars, the Chevy Tahoe. Oh, you can imagine how excited they were. How modern to make such a campaign. The, hum, “problem” with these kind of ideas is that when you give power to the people, it is difficult to take it back. The users started making ads about how the Chevy was a terrible car that was bad for the environment. L-o-t-s of ads. If you want to give control away. Give it and go with the flow. If you do it the wrong way, backlash is coming certainly. This was one history for the books about do’s and dont’s of the new era of advertising. But it seems that some people don’t read these books. Or don’t have a good memory at all. Skol, a beer brand from INBEV in Brazil, launched a campaign that was supposed to be hip, modern, smart and oh! so cool. They hired two of the best comedians of the new generation in Brazil and made videos where these guys told jokes about Carnaval and made a call to everyone: send your jokes and stories and we will tell the best ones here. One guy liked the idea and developed his videos. But not exactly what Skol’s marketing people had in mind. He made a video telling sad stories about drunk people driving and killing bystanders or just beating their relatives. But he told all of that as they were really funny stories, copying the aesthetic of Skol’s videos. It became a huge hit instantly. And it didn’t take long before he was “gently” asked to take the videos out. He told the story in his blog and changed the video. He took off all the graphics linking his video to Skol but kept the text. The result is even stronger, if you have the context. Even though you don’t understand portuguese, just take a look at the three videos and get the spirit of the story. Here is the video from Rafinha Bastos. This other one is from Danilo Gentili. This is the video from Ronald Rios that talks about how drunk people can do bad things. He tells terrible stories as if they were really funny. Notice that he took all the graphics off, to break the visual link to Skol’s campaign. What Skol’s guys didn’t seem to understand (like GM’s marketing guys didn’t see in 2006) is that the internet and social media doesn’t work their way. This is the first stop in our journey about knowing what game you are playing. In the metaphor I am trying to develop in this research, you need to know if you are playing Game of Life, Risk or Monopoly. If you are playing with Legos or woodblocks. If you are painting together with a group in a room, or just looking at a naked model. You need to understand the game you are playing, the play and then develop or read the rules. With that in mind, the next step is to call the right people, to the right place to play. When you start to understand that, things become more and more clear. But you still have a long way to go. (With thanks to Trabalho Sujo) Filed under: Rules of the Game andSocial Media andVideos 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 andGeneral Statement Agree? Disagree? Want to report an error? Comment: None |
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Posted on 03.02.09 by Alexandre Maron @ 13:51
We will talk a lot about social media, social networks and all around it, because these subjects are intrinsically related. The play factor is something that you do for an audience, to make them (your readers, spectators) engage with your content. To make them talk with and about you. So, the dunbar number is a very important component. You should see it as a limit, a concept and a challenge. The idea is that a human being in uncapable of having networks of friends beyond 150. Oh, well, you can have more friends than that, of course, but we are talking about having a real relationship with this network. (To tell you the truth I doubt that I am capable to even relate to half of this number. But I digress.) Even then, he/she, on average, will answer messages from, let’s say, 7 to 10 of them. This is seen as cognitive limit and should not be overlooked. There is an interesting article on The Economist about the subject. Filed under: External Content andSocial Media Agree? Disagree? Want to report an error? Comment: None |
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Posted on 02.27.09 by Alexandre Maron @ 11:08
The initial approach of my dissertation project is to look at the dynamic between the media manager/editor and his or her audience as a game comprising manager and reader-spectator in the roles of two “players”. The idea is to dismantle this relationship to its core pieces and try to rebuild it as something with a “play factor”. To this end, I will examine what is the crucial content and what are the physical and conceptual tools that will make this relationship work. The book The Art of Game Design, written by Jesse Schell and published in August 2008, came to my attention in a review in the website of the magazine Edge. The review is titled The Best Book on Game Design Ever (published on 4 of August, 2008). Edge is not only a video-game magazine, but also discusses the culture around games, the origins of the best creations, and the history of the industry. A favourable review from them is a good indicator of the quality of any book. The second example of positive reference about this book came from Amazon. Editors of magazines, as well as the managers of the magazines’ brands, have to develop relevant guides, websites and books. They face the mission of putting a “play factor” inside the products to build communities and make the audience talk about (and interact with) their brands. Most of the times, the products sell journalism, but the managers also have to be aware of how marketing and entertainment are involved in a media product. They need tools that respond to the special needs of a new kind of audience. In the last decade, with the technological development of personal computers and video-game consoles, games evolved considerably as a media form in terms of themes and storytelling possibilities. With the creation of products as The Sims, which is single-player and doesn’t even look like a regular game, and the massive multiplayer games, which consist of collective worlds that exist and evolve even when the player is not there, the experience of gaming has changed and started to influence other media. At the same time, some of the tools, or logical structures, of these games started to appear in the form of user interfaces in other areas of the internet. Internet banking and social network websites look more and more like games, where the player is managing some kind of resource (be it money or just fame). Game designers – most specifically multiplayer game designers – and social network managers seem to have some of the crucial knowledge to develop the tools that our media products need; the ability to build communities using engaging and interesting ways to gather and maintain audience interest. The success of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, with its communities, social networks and iPhone apps, is a good example of the possibilities of these techniques (David Carr, How Obama Tapped Into Social Networks’ Power). Filed under: Bibliography Agree? Disagree? Want to report an error? Comment: None |
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Posted on 02.22.09 by Alexandre Maron @ 17:19
It is easy to acknowledge, today, all the chages that the social media tools are making on the market as a whole and the media in particular.We live in a world where a whole generation that grew up surrounded by video-games, internet and TV has come to take command. Everything now works through interfaces that were deeply influenced by oour gaming background. So, banking, bloggin, commenting, buying look a lot like playing a game. And it is not a coincidence. It happens in part because we are playing animals. We look for engaging ways of doind thigs. We want to play all the time and we enjoy when it happens in various levels. It could be the thriller that PLAYS with our expectations, the game tha we PLAY, the music that (stupid as it’s lyrics may seem) make us have fun trying to reproduce a combination of sounds (woma-woma-nizer, woma-woma-womanizeeeer…). We KNOW that things changed, we see the changes but most of us don’t have a clue about how to take advantage of all that. Most of us know that we need to “have a conversation” and not a monologue anymore. We need this and that. Cool! But how exactly are we going to do that? Whatever that “that” is? So, this project aim is to develop a set of tools and framework techniques that will help the manager, the editor or whoever is ih charge in the hard task of engaging their audience. I want to do that through a series of tasks. 1. Bibliography – Reviewing, quoting and commenting on relevant books. This will not be a conventional list of texts, because we don’t live a conventional life anymore. I am reading about social media, game design, architecture, interaction design and the list could go on and on. The keys to this research are spread across a vast landscape. 2. Cases – Well. Let’s look at who is doing what and how. What works and what doesn’t. And the examples could come from anywhere. Music, movies, TV shows, websites, newspapers, books, magazines… Your help is appreciated. 3. Field work – I plan to visit people and talk to them. Get their points of view and put them here. I want to visit organizations too, of course. And they will come from many places. 4. My thoughts and comments (of course) – Oh. I will just stop and say what is in my mind. I hope I will miss lots of points publicly and, please, let me know if you see that. As i said above, your help is appreciated. Deeply. IN the next posts, I will try to explain what exactly I am trying to do. What is the play factor. Does it work, is it really usefull at all? Stay tuned. Filed under: General Statement Agree? Disagree? Want to report an error? Comment: 1 Comment |
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