Fear and Creativity

BrainPickings is a recent fascination. Each article is a wonderful curation of ideas and different points of view. I just enjoyed the article they posted on Fear and Creativity.

In it they quote Shaun McNiff’s Trust the Process: An Artist’s Guide to Letting Go

“The empty space is the great horror and stimulant of creation. But there is also something predictable in the way the fear and apathy encountered at the beginning are accountable for feelings of elation at the end. These intensities of the creative process can stimulate desires of consistency and control, but history affirms that few transformative experiences are generated by regularity.â€

One of the things that helps that conceptual empty space is finding new and creative things, which is becoming harder and harder to do.

I really enjoyed finding this wonderful math and video savant called Vihart. Her video on the math of sound is spectacular.
[ http://www.youtube.com/embed/i_0DXxNeaQ0 ]

as is her rif on Pi

Innovation in Africa

In Africa and other developing regions electricity is not always a guarantee so these bicycle mounted phone chargers from globalcyclesolutions.com are making a big difference. The dynamo isn’t new but this is a new application and it has spawned quite an enterprise. It’s interesting that their two products right now are a mobile phone charger and a Maise Sheller that “Can fill a 90-kg sack of maize in 40 minutes and 10-15 sacks per day”. Innovation doesn’t happen in a vacuum, it happens in context to the world around us, in other words innovation is often quite a local phenomena.

I do feel that local entrepreneurship and innovation are tremendously valuable in the developing world right now and can really help lift up communities.

There is a documentary called “Young World Inventors” on kickstarter right now that is worth supporting that covers inventions and inventors in the developing world.

Hostages, Users, Evangelists and Experts

I have never really been a user of Facebook or Linkedin, but more of a Hostage. I didn’t use them because they made me feel warm inside or helped me kick ass (as Kathy Sierra would say), I used them because everyone else was there. Hostages are a very important type of customer to consider because in many ways they are a hidden variable that can make or break a business. I say a hidden variable because most companies talk about active users as if it is one homogeneous group of active users. The problem with hostages is if they form a large part of your customer/userbase your business is at significant risk as soon as a viable competitor appears as there will be, as they say, a large sucking sound.

A level above hostage would be a User, I’m probably a user of gmail and twitter. These are tools that I continue to use even if viable competitors come out. Users are the bread and butter of most businesses, and would probably be even considered loyal.

Evangelists are the pinnacle of the userbase of any product, the ones that will actively persuade friends and family to use or buy something.

As I think about this there is maybe a fourth kind, someone who actively seeks to make other peoples experience better with product once they are their. It’s different from evangelist, probably less visable, but maybe more important. It’s the person that helps on the messageboards, that provides moral support or even just thoughtful commentary. You might refer to these people as Experts maybe.

Google Shifting From Content To People

Google has made some small announcements recently that I could be an indication of a significant long term shift in how they execute their strategy. Google’s stated mission “to organize the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful” has been humming along for the last decade or so by organizing and rating content, hence the Page Rank. In other words the page was their basic unit of currency.

Google recently announced that it will begin ranking and tracking individual content creators and has now launched a tool for online reputation management for individuals.

Google has been famous for its missteps in the social space and I wonder if that wasn’t because as an institution it valued content more than people. These small changes could signal a cultural change at Google which could be significant especially for many of the measurement companies in the social media space.

It will be very interesting to see if Google will enable people to monitize their equity or value in a similar fashion that it has enabled people to monitize their content.

Traackr has recently posted about the big moves by SalesForce and Google in this space which also provides a little extra colour in this emerging space, namely the acquisition of Radian6 by SalesForce and PostRank by google.

What attributes do you value about tweets or status updates?

I’m in the process of designing a survey to get an understanding of what people value about certain behaviors on twitter and would love to get some ideas about questions to ask. I have some particular pet peaves and pet preferences that prompted me to think about this question but I’d love to get some input to broaden the conceptual frame I’m working from here.

Here are the behaviors or attributes I value on twitter:

I’d love to hear your ideas of what you value or appreciate and will use it to add to the survey qestions, I will update the blog when I send it out and plan on publishing the results.

Outside Innovation Starts With Inside Innovation

Outside innovation is a systematic process for sourcing, evaluating, and driving ideas through to funding and measuring success but it starts with understanding your internal innovation process.

Innovation is an important topic for most companies, it is the essential source of new products, new markets, and even new business models. Outside innovation has been a topic that many companies have been exploring involving customers and partners in the innovation process and holds the promise of enormous returns for small investments. P&G has been a leader in open innovation and sources over 33% of it’s products from outside parties like educational institutions, customer communities, and the social web. Outside Innovation though is not easy and can only be a sustainable success when it works in concert with internal business processes and internal stakeholders.

Successful outside innovation then relies upon understanding your internal innovation process and ecosystem and then creating appropriate interfaces to outside parties. Understanding internal innovation itself can be a challenge as it is often a tacit process and a shared understanding amongst specific teams so it is useful to have a framework to use as a starting point. In this case the generic innovation process serves as a good starting point.

The generic innovation process:

When thinking about involving outside parties in these stages it is important to understand each require different kinds of thinking, behaviour, motivation and measures of success. When externalising this process through outside innovation participants are not under direct control and require intrinsic motivation to participate meaningfully in each stage. Companies that approach open innovation with a customer free-for-all are often flooded with unstructured ideas and feedback with weak ties to business goals. The goal of the outside innovation process is to provide a systematic way to help channel and motivate participation appropriately to support the goals of each stage of the process.

The open innovation process is continually iterative and helps identify successful participation at each stage by identifying particular individuals who are intrinsically motivated by specific stages of the process. This provides a framework for inviting users that enjoy and are particularly suited to each kind of challenge or activity. This combined with appropriate internal participation will help create a direct connection between internal innovators work, business goals and external activity.

The starting point for formulating an open innovation process in your own organisation is identifying the innovation leaders that already exist and identify your own internal innovation processes. This will form the foundation for understanding the existing internal innovation process which is the first step in being able to integrate outside innovation.

Cross-cultural video gaming

The video game industry might have a market that spans the globe, but that’s not to say that the same game will sell in the same form in, say, Germany and Malaysia. There’s a lot that goes into localizing a game for foreign audiences – from translation and rewiring hotkeys, to cultural preferences and visual understanding.

Localization is increasingly becoming the norm as developers and publishers realise that foreign markets do not simply represent an ‘icing on the cake’ bonus to core revenues but can potentially yield major sources of income in their own right.

Broadly speaking, the electronic gaming industry was established in America and re- born in Japan in the ‘80s, and as far as cultural differences go, these two heavy-weights dominate the discussion (as well as the market). Although somewhat oversimplified, the cultural differences of the gaming industry therefore tend to be pitched on an East vs West basis.

Below are a few challenges worth considering when thinking about localization.

Cultural Preferences

Different cultures may have different preferences when it comes to aspects such as story, gameplay and graphics. American games, for instance, have a notoriously hard time attracting the Japanese gaming audience, and vice versa. In Japan gameplay is likely to be more linear, and there’s a tendency for characters to be stylised, cute and cartoon- ish, reflecting the manga and anime styles that are such a big part of Japanese popular culture. In the US and Europe, characters are more likely to be realistic in form and gameplay has tended over recent years toward the open-ended, go-anywhere, ‘sandbox’ style of play.

These are generalizations of course and not applicable in every case. It may also be more trouble than it’s worth to radically alter the structure of a game but visual and stylistic tweaks can sometimes make the game more cross-culturally attractive.

Grand Theft Auto III notably sold 400,000 copies in Japan, an unexpectedly high number, yet this pales in comparison to the 9 million sold in the US and Europe. It may nonetheless point to the fact that cultural differences are becoming more diffused, however Microsoft’s Mike Fischer still thinks “it becomes more and more important to have development that is local and unique to each culture.â€

Thought should also be given to aspects such as sex, violence and the portrayal of drug use that may cause offence. The very presence of any such elements, the degrees to which they are present and the way in which they’re portrayed may also have a practical

bearing on legal requirements and age-restrictions that might apply within a certain territory.

Getting the translation right

Once you have the cultural tweaks down, there’s another aspect to consider: language.

Pretty much everything inside and outside the game, from dialogue to menus to the player manual and back-of-the-box blurb must be translated or, in some cases, partially rewritten. Menus and dialogue boxes have fixed dimensions but some scripts or written languages have a tendency to take up more or less space than others. German, for example, has a tendency to use longer words than English and so the same information may sometimes have to be expressed differently. If dialogue is dubbed, this will also have to match the timing of the graphics.

If subtitles are used instead of dubbing this is less of an issue. Subtitling cuts out the necessity for extra voice actors but can detract from the gameplay experience, the preservation of which is after all of paramount important to the localization process. Whichever method is used, quality translation and interpretation is essential and native language speaking professionals should always be used where possible.

There are many challenges involved in localizing video games but the potential benefits make the process more than worth all the effort. And if you’re a game designer, it’s worth taking into account these considerations before you get started with even the brainstorming stage of your game creation process. To ensure that your game has the potential for a global audience, it will help to build these cross-cultural internationalized elements into your game structure and design from the outset, to allow for easy localization further down the track.

About the author Christian Arno is the founder and Managing Director of global translations service Lingo24, specialists in website translation and creative localization. Launched in 2001, Lingo24 now has over 150 employees across three continents and clients in over sixty countries. Follow Lingo24 on Twitter: @Lingo24

We All Like To Play

[ http://www.youtube.com/embed/gQUrdhoGpOo ]

Part of VW’s TheFunTheory Project. 66% of people chose the stairs over the escalator.

Via Fiona Long’s eclectic PostApocalypticWomble

Angry Birds: 2010 best serious game award!

A frequent issue with serious games (games not designed with the sole intent of entertaining) is their failing at being fun. Angry Birds, that one wouldn’t think of as a serious game, successfully meets both challenges of being engaging and educational.

The empirical method

Do you remember your high-school mechanics: forces, acceleration, parabolas, center of mass…? Many notions learnt (and understood ?) by means of equations, with a few illustrating schemas and baseball or football as labs.

What are the necessary qualities to perform at Angry Birds ? Ability to anticipate a trajectory, a collision and the following chain of interactions between the structure elements depending on their arrangement and respective forms and weights. Which amounts to saying that succeeding at Angry Birds requires a good command of the mechanics lesson, at least in an intuitive/empirical way.

Hacking the physics course

As a player is making progress into the game, he is confronted with challenges of increasing difficulty. Breaking levels can take a few to several attempts. The process by which a player is moving from failure to success can be decomposed into 4 steps :

This method is presicely the hypothetico deductive method, theorized during the 20th century. A method that science teachers are striving to instill to their students. Should Angry Birds enter the classroom then ?
As it is, Angry Birds is not an alternative to a proper course because it does not teach how to solve a physics problem. However little effort would be needed to surface the world’s equations, variables and constants. Allowing players to hack into the world physics and making it part of the gameplay would make of Angry Birds a powerful teaching tool.

Conclusion

Looking at Angry Birds under the angle of serious gaming inspires me two observations :

Josselin Perrus

Aka Nils Oj on the web. Trying to connect the dots: play, games, narration, UX design, social issues, activism

Twitter : @nonils

Is putting a blog behind a pay wall a good idea?

I’m planning to put my content behind a paywall soon and was interested in getting some feedback. I’ve been posting since 2003 and over the years the motivation to participate has wained. I’ve found that posting original content online has risks associated with it both professionally and personally which no advertising model could support. Also an ad supported model requires a great deal of traffic and popularity which has always been a distracting aspect for any blogger when it becomes part of the success criteria.

In many ways the paywall is insurance against the uneven returns on originality which is sporadic. I also hope to encourage more creators of interesting original content to guest post on this blog who I will be able to assure some return on their great effort. For example see this deep and thoughtful article on scaling game narratives from a friend I met on twitter.

The future of content for this blog will be focused on original work about narrative, creativity, and innovation including games, psychology, modern-anthropology, creativity, innovation, and cultural trends.

Anyone interested in finding out how this direction goes, guest posting or commenting in the future please let me know either in the comments or email me at karl at karllong dot com.