I’m so glad that “casual gaming” - well - exists. For the longest time people regarded simple, visceral gameplay as outdated and obsolete. I think it was an extremely happy accident that technological limitations in the golden days of the arcade actually forced developers to stumble upon a lot of critical elements of fun gameplay.
What’s great is that in the past couple of years, casual gaming companies like PopCap are really analyzing which aspects of classic-style arcade gaming are best left behind as nostalgia, and which ones really form the primordial essence of videogaming fun.
In this GamaSutra article, PopCap’s general manager Dave Rohrl breaks down the casual gaming experience into critical timespans - discussing about how the players’ impressions at ten seconds, sixty seconds, and twenty minutes, etc., factor into the overall acceptance of the game.
What’s interesting is that the old wisdom about “what will make another quarter into this game machine?” almost perfectly translate into today’s widsom about “what will make someone spend another 15 minutes of their day playing this casual game?”.
Filed under Cool Stuff
Iceberg On Demand is an Irish web startup which will enable users to build Enterprise-class web applications - via a Web 2.0 UI, natch - without writing a line of code. What’s really clever is that they’ll allow you, as a - well, developer’s not the right word, is it? - to sell applications that you have built using the service. The final end user pays a per-seat fee which is presumably to be split with the application’s creator.
This is, without a doubt, a useful tool. But I think what the company will find is a problem of perception. In my experience, “enterprise” software is almost invariably more clunky and awkward than “regular” software, yet it often costs orders of magnitude more. My conclusion: Companies like spending a lot of money on “enterprise” tools. Illogical? Yes, but humans are funny that way. Just as people feel good about themselves when they spend $5 on a bottle of water, companies feel good about themselves when they plunk down a good chunk of change for an “enterprise solution”, when a kid in Croatia could have cooked up a better custom built solution for $150.
Nonetheless, I wish these guys luck. While the blue chips may never bite, the tiny startups who can’t afford to play psychological games with their money, will - intelligently - eat this stuff up.
Filed under Marketing, The Internet Biz, Web 2.0
Dance Dance Immolation. Wow, talk about hardcore gaming.
Filed under Cool Stuff
This is so cool. Ever use a web site and wish there were an easy way to programmatically access the site’s data, but - alas - there’s no API? Dapper.net is a service that lets you input any web site, basically point and click at the information you want to make accessible via XML, or another type of feed, and - voila, it’s done.
A while ago, I had an idea for a web site that revolved around movies. But, I needed a way to automatically update it with a list of movies currently in theatres. I couldn’t find a way to do that via any sort of web service, but now with Dapper, I just made one… Check out my Movies In Theatres Dapper feed. Nice!
Filed under Web 2.0, Web Development
I was shocked to find out today, after an extended absence from tracking her blog (or most blogs - I’ve been too busy to keep up with my RSS feeds), that Kathy Sierra, of “Creating Passionate Users“, was the victim of death threats, and has suspended work on her blog. This is so unfortunate, for a great number of reasons. Obviously, her personal safety should be everyone’s #1 priority, but her voice and style have always been unique and inspiring. By silencing herself, she is leaving a gaping void in the world of technology marketing. I only hope she can find the courage and necessary support to continue spreading her message and style, regardless of the medium. Best wishes, Kathy….
Filed under Marketing
How do you make Good Software? Well, good software is defined by many factors.
- Does it meet the needs of the customer?
- Does it have an elegant design?
- Is it robustly coded?
- Is it secure?
- Is it free (or nearly free) of bugs?
If your software hits all five of these targets, I’d say it’s Good Software. So, how do you accomplish this? Well, let’s go through that list again, this time listing who would be in charge of each factor:
- Marketing (or Account management)
- Designer
- Developer
- MIS/Security Engineer
- Quality Assurance
Anyone who’s been around the block in the software development world has probably witnessed strife between any given pair of these principals. It’s kind of a fun thought exercise to picture the conflicts. I won’t list them all.
So, how do you avoid these conflicts? Well, my advice is - you don’t want to! And you certainly don’t want to try avoiding them by having people play multiple roles. There’s a common saying that software QA’ed by engineers is not QA’ed at all. The same can be said about any pair of activities in this list. That’s not to say that an engineer can’t have design skills, or that a marketing person can’t know a thing or two about security. The point is that one should embrace the creative tension between all of these groups because, as James Surowiecki describes in The Wisdom of Crowds, a large enough group of people each with a differing perspective on a complex problem will invariably come up with a better solution than a single expert ever could.
By having team members wear too many hats, each will inevitably make tradeoffs in his or her head before giving the larger group an opportunity to explore the possibilities. A developer doing his own QA will decide certain features are too risky to build. A marketer also doing design will be reluctant to simplify the software’s design for fear of neglecting customers’ feature requests.
The correct strategy is to hire enough people to fill each of these roles individually, have each person push their particular approach to the product as hard as they possibly can, and let the wisdom of the larger group decide where the tradeoffs (security vs. usability, marketing schedules vs. QA) need to be made. Of course, communication is key, but that’s a whole other topic entirely.
Filed under Web Development
That’s right, it officially starts July 3rd, but I was lucky enough to see it at Hasbro’s charity premiere on Thursday.
First things first, as a kid I LOVED Transformers. They were pretty much the only toy I cared about. And as for any other toys I had - if they weren’t something that turned into something else, I wasn’t interested. I even collected all the Go-Bot Rock Lords - robots that turned into, yes, rocks.
But, I digress. The point is, I’ve been a huge Transformers fan for over two decades now. So, I had some fears about the movie. Clearly it wasn’t going to be like the old cartoon, or the original animated movie. And the teaser shots made it clear that the robots didn’t quite look like the originals. - they were far more alien-looking. Could Spielberg and Bay really capture the essence of Transformers that made them so exciting as a kid - yet appeal to a wider audience 20 years removed from the initial phenomenon? In other words, could the movie be awesome?
In a word: yes.
Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under Cool Stuff
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