They’re a gift that lasts forever, because your friend will remember what they learned and how they felt… and they can keep it on their bookshelf or hard drive as a reminder in case they forget…
Amazon chose This is Strategy for a Kindle deal today. It’s only $4.
Also, the Strategy Deck continues to surprise people with its elegant effectiveness. And it fits in your pocket.
Hank Green has written a two-book series about social media, alien intelligence and peer dynamics. I listened to the second book without realizing it was a sequel, and that’s the way I recommend you try it out. The audio is brilliantly performed, by the way.
Helen Philips delivers a near-future AI novel that will give you a new way way to think about what we’re building and who we are becoming.
Cathy Heller‘s new book is out in a week or so, and like Cathy, it’s honest, moving and generous.
David Meerman Scott continually raises the bar for what marketing and PR involve today.
Luvvie Ajayi Jones has written a breakthrough book about dancing with imposter syndrome that’s also vulnerable and funny.
George Dyson’s book Analogia has been on this list before, but it’s worth repeating. The same goes for The Gift by Lewis Hyde and the Bandwidth series by Eliot Peper.
And, just for the next two days, the audiobook of This is Strategy is half price if you use code NOVEMBER.
Power users are tempting. They know what they want, they’re happy to share their preferences and they show up.
But power users can also be a trap, because their specific needs might not match the market you seek to serve. When you pick your customers, you pick your future.
Brooke Husic is a power user. She’s a creator of extraordinary crossword puzzles, wicked smart and culturally aware. As part of the founding team at Puzzmo, she was one of the early testers of Bongo.
Sitting next to her, I was amazed to see her beat my high score easily. She played SKIVE, a word neither of us know the definition of (it means avoiding work).
If you need to know a word like SKIVE to play well, the game isn’t as fun for some people. This is what Zach Gage calls the Scrabble problem–it rewards abnormal vocabularies. In 2015, Nigel Richards won the French Scrabble championships, and he doesn’t speak French! Instead, he memorized the French dictionary.
Zach’s insight, which I instantly embraced, was that we’d give bonus points for common words. Now, Brooke is playing on the same terms as everyone else.
PS today’s Bongo is fun. Here’s my best word to get you started. Play with your family while you’re cooking dinner. That’s what it’s for.
Before buying a house, it makes sense to spend a day on foot, walking around the neighborhood. You’ll notice things you might have missed in a car.
Before starting a business, spend a few shifts working the cash register at a similar establishment.
And before going into marketing, go make some sales.
In the USA, tomorrow is Thanksgiving. Once again, the free Thanksgiving Reader is available for you to print and share and make a part of your family gathering. Here’s to connection, hope and possibility.
The money we exchange for a service or item isn’t based on how much it cost to make, how hard it was to produce or how much the producer likes it.
That’s hard to hear, because when we make something, we spend most of our time thinking about those very things.
Price is based on the purchaser’s worldview and situation, not the producer’s. The price paid will always be less than the value it creates for the purchaser. And the price is never more than the amount the purchaser can exchange.
If the price tag asks for more than that, no purchase happens.
A painting that cost $4 to produce in 1880 might sell for $40,000,000. That’s because the buyer believes they gain more than that amount in status, satisfaction or future asset value. If they didn’t feel that way, they wouldn’t buy it.
A donation to a worthy cause doesn’t happen because the cause needs the money. It happens because the donor believes the story they’ll tell themselves about the donation is worth more than what the donation costs.
And a life-saving medicine that costs $4,000 won’t be purchased by someone who doesn’t have the resources to exchange for it.
This is one reason why it’s so profitable to sell luxury goods to billionaires who seek status. They regularly over-invest in their quest for standing, valuing it more highly than most people would, and they have the resources to spend on it. It doesn’t matter that the banana and duct tape artwork was cheap to produce or easy to replicate.
At the other end of this spectrum is a trained artisan, or a vendor at a craft fair. They show up, do the work and care a lot about what they’ve produced. But if the shopper doesn’t internalize a story about the product, or doesn’t have the resources to allocate, the sale won’t happen.
There are two valuable lessons here:
The empathy we bring to imagining what our customers need, want and dream of is always part of our work.
Mastery of a craft does not guarantee its commercial viability.
A market is a category. A market is a place with competition. In a market, people have habits and budgets and social pressure to engage. There are buyers and sellers.
In many cultures, there’s a market for all the items that go with a quinceanera, a birthday party for a 15-year-old girl. While girls in other cultures might want or need the sort of attention that comes with this extravaganza, there’s no existing market for it.
It’s tempting to be a market pioneer, to be the one who shows up with the first charge card, the first personal training firm or the first home computer. But it’s a challenging road.
It can be thrilling work, but because creators focus on needs not markets, they often fail to account for just how difficult it is to activate those needs and turn them into a thriving market.
If you’re in market-creation mode, it helps to call it that and be prepared for how difficult it might be.
Atmospheric conditions on Earth limit visibility on a perfect day to less than 200 miles.
Time works the same way.
When we’re doing the same thing, in the same way, our perception of what will happen next can feel crystal clear.
Plant some apple seeds in your backyard, and you’re pretty sure you’ll have an apple tree in a decade (not an oak or maple) but it’s hard to be sure exactly what it’s going to look like.
The most useful work we create causes a change to happen. And the more profound the change, the less predictable it is.
If you need perfect visibility into the future, you’re limiting the impact and power of your work.
In our work to make things better, it’s easy to overlook two things:
Improvements, connection and possibility rarely come down in a lightning bolt from Mt. Olympus. Instead, they’re the product of the grass roots, of small groups of people finding opportunities and keeping promises.
Better happens incrementally. The first steps aren’t dramatic, and in fact, might even be less effective than what came before. But small steps repeated again and again transform our culture when no one is looking.
The best way to make things better is to begin. Create the conditions for others to join you. Persist.
Making something fun is a good place to start if you’re building a casual word game like Bongo.
But it’s not enough. Lots of things are fun, for a while, but that doesn’t meant that they’re worth the investment of time and money it takes to build them.
From the user’s perspective, a casual word game works when it offers a combination of:
Accomplishment
The creation and release of tension
A stretch or tickle of the brain’s processing power
Connection to friends (new or old)
Status from achievement
Satisfaction from accomplishment
A flow state
And from a business perspective, online casual games need:
A compelling reason to share
Benefits from the network effect
Stickiness (otherwise, you need new games or new audiences all the time)
A reason for someone to subscribe or click or otherwise create commercial value
A persistent and scalable engine for ongoing promotion of the game
Often, when we set out to design something, we skip most of this, and rely on intuition instead. “I’ll know it when I see it.” If this is working for you (as it does for jazz musicians and clothing designers I know), I’m hardly going to argue against it. But for most professionals, most of the time, saying it out loud is an effective way to not only measure the quality of the work, but to engage and coordinate with a team.
I wrote This is Strategyto remind myself and the people I care about that there’s an iterative process that can make our work more effective. In the case of Bongo, I spent months coming back, again and again, to “what’s it for?” Andrew Daines and the team at Puzzmo worked with me to stay clear about this as the game developed.
You can’t answer that question without also asking, “who’s it for?” Because nothing is for everyone, and identifying the dreams, desires and expectations of the audience is essential to discovering if you’ve actually solved a problem.
Tic Tac Toe isn’t much of a game, because the winning algorithm is too obvious and there’s very little tension, and so, little reward once the tension is released.
And Tic Tac Toe might become accidentally viral, but it’s not likely to happen.
In Bongo, I began with assertions about who it was for. Not hard core videogamers, certainly, nor for the people who can solve a crossword puzzle in 2 minutes. I don’t mind if either group plays, but the core group would be people who aren’t quite that competitive, and who might not have a vocabulary in the top 1%. Beyond that, though, was the nature of the network effect.
Almost all crossword-type games have a single correct answer. The constructor thinks of a puzzle, and every game, the players have to guess the answer.
I find this personally frustrating (because what if my answer is good too!) and it also diminishes the power of sharing. If I’ve solved the puzzle, then sharing it with you is simply bragging. Bragging goes a long way, but I was searching for something more generative.
Part of the breakthrough of Bongo is that there isn’t a right answer. There’s simply a better answer, until, finally, no one can find a way to improve it. This means the creator of the game doesn’t have to know the highest scoring play, and probably doesn’t.
Since the game is constantly iterating, there’s a really good reason to share your score. Just as Wikipedia gets better when others edit an article, you can work with your friends and improve while you’re playing.
Note that this isn’t tacked on at the end. It’s part of the “what’s it for” at the very beginning.
The next challenge was the rise of AI and the destruction of the status of winning because some folks are solving word games in six seconds now. I wanted the game to be resistant (if not immune) to this sort of shortcut, so everyone playing felt like they had a chance to do well. And so the scoring of each tile changes daily, and the bonus word and the blank increase the number of permutations dramatically.
A key tactic that supported the point of the game came from Zach Gage. Instead of rewarding the last 1% of obscure vocabulary (as Scrabble and crosswords do), we give a bonus for common words instead. There are dozens of other methods we used to continually reinforce the delight of the game. I’ll let you discover them as you play.
If you’ve made it this far on this long post, here’s a punchline: A key part of bringing strategy to creativity is that it removes, “because I feel like it/said so” from the conversation. Once you have a clear strategy of who and what it’s for, anyone can chime in and make it better.
Here’s my best play from yesterday’s game. Another non-winner, but I had fun.
And my best word so far for today’s Bongo is CRUX (406) – 1074.
November 22, 2024
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