Sprints and marathons are both foot races, but they have very little in common. The training is different, and so is the technique.
Which one are you signing up for? What about the thing you sell?
Are we trying to get there faster, or do we promise to go further?
Media isn’t a magazine or a website. It’s a system. We can learn to see the system and contribute to it with leverage.
There are three elements to consider in a media system that’s worth a professional creator’s time:
Systems are changed by technology. When desktop publishing arrived in the 1980s, it changed elements of the system of book publishing. It was now possible to create complex designs, detailed reference books and illustrated books with more impact and less expense.
I saw books from Dorling Kindersley and Workman and realized that readers (and thus the system) needed more of them. It was a good time to become a creator of books.
The technology shift in audiobooks (every phone is a player) transformed the entire system around audiobooks. Buying Audible was a no-brainer for Amazon. Once you had a phone, you needed more audiobooks and a good way to get them.
But it’s easy to miss the signals. When the web showed up, I was one of the first users and was already running an internet company. Yet I was sure that there was no business model and missed a huge opportunity.
A few years before the web, book publishers were excited by DVD ROM, a new storage technology that would let them publish large, data-driven software projects. Other than a project I did with Fisher Price, we mostly wasted our time–I thought the media would develop, but it faded in the face of the web…
YouTube transformed the system of creating and sharing videos as a professional. When Hank and John Green began creating videos, the system was at an inflection point, allowing their effort to pay off.
There have been popular casual games since the newspaper started carrying the crossword in 1913. But limited by the available space in the newspaper, the medium was fairly small. Once again, the smartphone is a game changer, but so was the rise of the attention economy and the growth of development tools.
Lots of games have shown up online, some built with the basics of HTML/CSS/JS. Games which want to keep track of your progress might require adding backend languages, databases, and a cloud platform. More complex interactive games may need game engines (Unity, Phaser), or a front-end framework (React / Redux which is what Puzzmo uses). None of the game creators built all of these from scratch… the system evolves as software enables forward motion.
A challenge in working with media systems is the delay. There’s a moment when the system needs more creators, and then, months or years later, the arrival of new content from those creators. This leads to a cycle of shortage and surplus, and the whipsawing can make it difficult to sustainably create useful content.
Netflix and the streaming wars set off a frenzy in creating a certain kind of content, but as that content came online, the amount of attention (and money) available to support it began to spread ever thinner.
It’s also possible to go too soon, to decide that there’s a business model when there actually isn’t one, and to build a pioneer homestead on the edge of the desert.
Thanks to Wordle, the New York Times is now a casual games company with a small news division. They’ve taken the business model and head start that they had from crosswords and multiplied it. But Puzzmo and others are betting that there’s room for something even better, and their traction is proof that they might be right.
Bongo is an expression of how much I love designing casual games (video games give me a headache) but it’s also possible to do this work because the system was ready to support it.
There’s a new game today. I hope you get a chance to check it out and share it. Here’s my best word of the day.
Emotions are often tied to events and events feel absolute.
But events are rarely absolute. They’re almost always relative.
How does this compare to what I was expecting?
How does it compare to what others like me are experiencing?
How does it compare to yesterday?
When we change the comparison, the event itself is changed as well.
It’s often difficult to find the relative, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
And you can be the first on your block to play it. It’s free. Click here to see today’s game.
Over the next week, I’m going to do a few bonus posts to explain how we thought about the creation and game design and marketing of this new project. The last eighteen months of development have been delightful, and I hope you get a chance to try it out.
For today, a little history:
My first game design was on a mainframe in 1977. My first commercial games were at Spinnaker in 1983, working with personal heroes like Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke and a brilliant team of game designers and engineers.
In 1989, I developed GUTS for Prodigy and Robert Gehorsam. It had millions of players, making it the most popular online game of its time. And in the 1990s, Yoyodyne used games to make email marketing work.
Bongo, I have no doubt, is the most fun of all the games I’ve been a part of. Zach, Jack, Orta and the team at Puzzmo are the world’s best puzzle collaborators and we’re thrilled to share this with you now.
More on this as we go, but for now, the simple rules of Bongo:
The SHARE button makes it easy to copy your best word to your social media account so friends can join in.
It’s easier to play than it is to explain, give it a try.
Here’s a video if you want to watch me doing my best to solve a Bongo (some people are way better at this than I am…)
Next time: Thoughts on media, systems and business models…
Our culture is filled with man-made traps, situations worth avoiding. They have three elements:
Because of the third element, the organizer or beneficiaries of a trap can spend time and money to make it ever more seductive and to conceal the nature of what you’re actually signing up for. They’re taking a long term view, but humans, particularly humans in a jam, tend to look for only the short-term relief a trap offers.
Begin by identifying the traps that are set for other people, traps they don’t see but you learn to notice. Soon, you’ll start seeing the traps that are being set for you.
Who is “I” and how does that “I” have the power to change the mind in question?
What actually happens is this:
If you are brave enough to have your mind changed, experience can do that. But it’s rarely as conscious an intentional act as we give ourselves credit for.
It’s not just for little kids, and it might not be a bug in our culture. Whining might be a feature, something that all humans have a desire to do, regardless of our age or position.
Let’s define whining as a complaint about a situation that’s not easily addressed, often a situation that’s relatively minor or caused by a mismatch of expectations with reality.
While there are stiff-upper-lip codes in some cultures, it takes a lot of work to create and maintain a society where whining is absent and largely self-regulated.
Some organizations, like the Navy SEALS, build their cohesion on not tolerating whining, while others, like aggrieved sports fans, bask in it.
We evolved to live in community, and whining serves a valuable function. When we’re in distress, whining is a call for connection, a way to tell the others that we need some hope or encouragement.
And whining is relative, not absolute. Any self aware first-class traveler has to know that whining about the lack of warmed cashews on the plane is impossible to justify in a world with so many challenges and so much unevenly distributed distress. And yet, when we create the conditions where whining must be avoided, we create stress, especially those that know they can’t justify their whining.
Whining comes from mismatched expectations, from loneliness and from weakness. Whining is a hard-wired way to ask for connection and empathy.
Naturally, whining has downsides, for the whiner and for those around him.
Whining can create a doom loop, an endless cascade of expectation that keeps us from finding joy and possibility. If we get hooked on the solace that comes from whining (either from others, or from our selves) then we start looking for things to whine about. We will minimize our leverage and agency and opportunities, and sink into victimhood.
And, like the boy who cried wolf, the villagers get tired of hearing it after a while.
Understanding the patterns and benefits of whining creates an opportunity for marketers and anyone doing customer service.
If whining is a plea for connection and compassion, the transactional nature of modern customer service doesn’t do the trick. Whine to the doctor and get a prescription? Well, it might help with the ailment, but the patient might really benefit from sixty seconds of empathy instead.
When the harried customer service rep is given the authority and training to pause for a second and have a conversation, acknowledge the problem and take responsibility, not only does the problem often go away, but the connection that follows is even stronger than it was before the incident.
It’s difficult to have empathy for someone with every advantage who persists in whining, but it might be that their weakness and loneliness can only be effectively addressed with acknowledgement, not scorn. Making that connection opens the door for constructive action.
And when we talk to ourselves, perhaps we can have some grace for our own whining, and at the same time create the conditions and habits to avoid a downward spiral of more of the same. There’s a difference between, “he’s whining,” and “he’s a whiner.” We can do the first and avoid the second.
There are lots of cultural lotteries around us. The next pop song, the book that everyone is talking about, the blog post or video that goes viral… it even applies to who gets into a famous college or is selected by the AI screening for a good job.
The usual advice is: Fit in. Copy what came before. Use the fonts, the rhythms and the code words of previous lottery winners. Helpful guides will share the instructions for exactly how long your viral video should be, how it should sound and when you should post it. This goes beyond the cues of genre–it’s the desire to fit in all the way. Culture is partly built on this adherence to what won the lottery last time.
The thing is, though, that all useful bestsellers are surprise bestsellers. They have titles like To Kill a Mockingbird or The Celestine Prophecy (which make no sense until you read the book) or reviews like those the Great Gatsby got at first, or are biographies of people no one cared about (like The Power Broker). It’s movies like 2001 or Memento. Or perhaps a singer like Rickie Lee Jones or Tones & I. It’s the business card that doesn’t fit into a Rolodex (because it doesn’t belong in a Rolodex.)
Someone is going to win the lottery, but with so many people buying tickets, it’s probably not going to be you.
Perhaps the best strategy for lottery tickets is not to buy one.
Your odds go up when you do useful and remarkable work for people who care.
Well, not always. That’s why it’s so important.
We don’t expect an actor to tell the truth. That’s their job.
Musicians and other performers are playing a role.
And social niceties encourage us to put on a smile and share appreciation, even in situations where it might not be fully honest.
On the other hand, organizations like the SEC insist that a CEO actually say true things. “Just kidding” is hard to rely on when making investment decisions. And we expect that the medical and judicial systems we depend on are built on inspectable, consistent truth-telling.
Social media has rewarded people for bringing a post-reality mindset to places where sincerity is expected. In other words, it’s profitable to lie. Inconsistently, often, and with brazen disregard for the consequences. And it feels wrong for important reasons.
Altering the venues where it’s expected that truth will be told is tempting to do and hard to live with.
Facts are important, but facts don’t create learning. Stories do.
A story fits into (and changes) our understanding of the world. Good teachers are storytellers, and storytellers are teachers.
Notes, then, aren’t recitations of facts. They’re story prompts. A good note reminds you of a story that you already understand.
