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.
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:
A business model. There are magical cultural effects that happen when volunteers produce content that is embraced by others. Being a folk musician in 1824 might have been thrilling, but it doesn’t pay the bills. Some media systems naturally support a business model and others don’t.
Assets to be built. This is related to the business model. Can the creator compound their effort over time, rewarding later work based on the effort put into earlier work? If not, then there’s a good reason to wait.
Systems that are changing. Static media systems (like book publishing in the 1920s) certainly offered creators an opportunity to produce valuable work, but they were scarce. When a system is in flux, there are more chances to contribute.
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.
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:
There is a new puzzle every day
You need to find five horizontal words given the letters in the tray. When you begin, multiples of a letter are stacked in the tray, and you don’t have to use all of them.
Words can be three, four or five letters in length. Common words are given bonus points once played.
The points on the letter are multiplied in squares with a 2x or 3x.
The pastel asterisk is a blank and you can make it any letter you choose.
And the vertical grey snake is a bonus word, it reads from top to bottom.
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:
They’re seductive. Traps offer a benefit and they make it easy to walk in.
They are hard to get out of. Changing your mind isn’t enough.
Someone else benefits more than you do.
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:
A person cares enough to have experiences
Those experiences change the way that person sees the world
After that, the “I” takes credit for it
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.
November 18, 2024
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