This is a script for a comic/illustraded freeverse thing that I don't have time to produce, and probably won't remember thinking of in the morning.
It's pretty goo for a rough draft, so whatever.
Big, white panels, stacked vertically, square borders.
Fanatics.
[panel depicts a largish group of football fans raving, and scoffing beer and dogs. ]
Fans for short.
--
[students stand apart in dress coded cliques]
Our society increasingly teaches us to identify people by what they are not.
--
[panel is sliced up like a pie, depicting isolated individuals. Girl in wheeelchair, panhandler, depressed person, etc.]
We push people away becasue tyhat kid isn't in our grade, that peson isn't of our heritage, that family isn't from our church, that guy doesn't follow our show.
--
In this world of isolation, it's no wonder the fan convention was risen so strongly.
[Ren-faire types selling swords to guys in armor, who eat fried chicken from a paper bucket]
It is good to be among your own people.
--panel borders grow fainter over the thing under panles are unbordered into the white background
[diverse gamers crowd a tiny table]
It is good to know there will always be room for you at that table.
--
[Fat balding man in midriff revealing sailor mercury cosplay]
Everyone needs a place where they can let it all hang out, for a while.
--
We feel safe from judgement here.
[TKD and Karate experts face off in a ring]
For we know that even when there is conflict
--
[Jedi duels with a Klingon, leaping the bat'leth, while swinging his saber over a ducking adversary.]
There's a common passion that drives us.
--
[Goku and Ichigo cosplayers shaking hands or something.]
Our fellow fans are our brothers.
--
We are not just fanatics.
[Pastiche of the Warriors of the World album cover, feturing all the above panels behind the flag carrier]
We are the warriors of the world.
So, yeah. I must sleep.
Wednesday, August 7, 2013
Monday, March 18, 2013
It's Opposite Day in Riccitello Town.
I've been thinking about some posts about certain topics, like Penny Arcade on the weed debate (discussion? If this is politics, why is everyone being so calm about it?) here in Washington, or my personal epileptic trees on what happened to the trademarks for the G1 My Little Pony characters, but something awesome distracted me.
So, John Riccitello is "resigning". It was a good day.
That is to say, he is leaving the company before the board finally tires of his lying ass and fires him, IMHO. The only way this could be a better day for me would be if he was literally committing seppiku, to atone for his crimes, against software development.
Reading his farewell address is particularly sweet. You see all those unpleasant things he is saying? (Unless you are one of the EA shareholders who his is desperately trying to assuage, EA being strong is not good news for the game industry.) Remember that in Riccitello Town, it is always opposite day.
One of three things is true: He is a pathological liar with no imagination, he lives in a particularly warped delusion, or he is some sort of Bizarro-World prophet. Whatever the reason, whenever he says anything, just assume that the exact opposite of that is true. See why I so enjoy reading this letter?
Those of you who haven't been forced to spend the last five years, listening to me rant about how EA is bad for the games industry, it's customers and also bad for it's long-term shareholders, might be wondering why I feel such joy at this turn. Basically, I told everyone I know that this day would come, and the sweet, hot power of raw vindication is flowing through my veins. It's pretty awesome.
Riccitello's version of EA is basically the Emperor's New Clothes Scam; it's only a matter of time before someone publicly questions the authoritative "truth" and the whole house of cards comes undone. You see, under Riccitello, EA ceased to be a massive hype engine dedicated to selling the video games it's developers delivered (a "game publisher" to use the parlance), and became a massive hype engine dedicated to selling it's own stock (a "Blue Sky" racket).
Now, this isn't a Blue Sky job in the strictest, most-traditional sense, as the EA name actually does include a lot of assets, which it's stockholder's nominally "own". However, EA does not generally leverage most of these assets to make money, it leverages them to create the illusion that it might use them to make money in the future, while using the resulting investment capital to acquire more assets to waste.
They literally buy up successful or well-liked developers, scuttle the development team, and then back-burner all the juicy IPs they just dropped a few million on. A development studio is basically three parts, leadership, the dev team's contracts, and the IP and consumer goodwill left from it's past projects. If you buy out the leadership, fire the dev team and then just hoard the IP, you're not investing capital, you're wasting money.
Owning an IP, even if you are just putting it in the wine cellar to marinate in nostalgia for a few years, comes with costs. You have to renew and defend your trademarks or they will slip into the public domain, and getting them back out would be even more expensive. Without dev teams to milk games and t-shirts out of them, your brands cease to be an asset, and still remain a source of liability.
This is like a man selling off his only flour mill, to help him buy up half the worlds entire supply of grain, and to rent silos to store it in. There are fundamental questions about what he actually plans to do with it, and the only guarantee is that you will not like the answers, especially if he owes you money.
Granted, there are a few IP that EA has a proven track record for making and selling: their own. EA Sports (including FIFA and Madden) and Battlefield often turn tidy profits, to help the Juggernaut distract investors from the fact that only these, it's highest profile successes, are often very successful at all.
In fact, the few major financial "successes" that EA has earned with it's acquired IP, have typically been "franchise killers" games that sold well in the first few weeks, that EA assures it's shareholders are the most important, but suffered early sales fatigue due to poor reviews and bad word-of-mouth. We're talking about games so bad that even people who didn't play them are leery of trusting the brand again, and the word "sequel" itself has been tainted. (Remember when a sequel implied "more of a thing that was well known for being good" and not "corporate leeches bought the name of something you once loved, to defraud you in a legal fashion"? EA didn't do that alone, but they hammered more than their share of nails into this coffin.) Expect to see the names "Maxis" and "SimCity" join the list, of once valuable names rendered nearly worthless by the EA digestive tract.
It might seem unfair to heap the ill doings of a massive corporate monolith at the feet of one man, but a company's tone is set from the top, as they say. It is deeply impossible for a competent CEO to manage a company this deeply dysfunctional for half a decade and fail to even begin to address it's issues. With Ricitello at the helm the monster grew only more monstrous, until it began to collapse under it's own hideous weight, and people finally see that it is not a fearsome giant, but a piteous, shambling mutant.
The finally galling fact is, that there's a certain amount of sour grapes in my schadenfreude. Ricitello had access to incredible amounts of money and power. He had the resources and connections to do incredible, great things for game development as an art, and as an industry. I would kill to have that kind of power for a single year; he had five, and he caused nothing but harm to the people and the economy I dream to see grow strong.
What can you say about a man who had everything you ever wanted, and then pissed it away without even managing to accomplish any particularly selfish ends? He could have paid himself just as much in salary and bonuses running a successful and positive publishing outlet. He'd still have his recently destroyed good name, and his lucrative executive career, too. Was he evil, or just really, really stupid?
This post ends, not with a "Fuck Yeah!" or a "Screw you, Riccitello!"
--but with a, "What were you even trying to accomplish?"
So, John Riccitello is "resigning". It was a good day.
That is to say, he is leaving the company before the board finally tires of his lying ass and fires him, IMHO. The only way this could be a better day for me would be if he was literally committing seppiku, to atone for his crimes, against software development.
Reading his farewell address is particularly sweet. You see all those unpleasant things he is saying? (Unless you are one of the EA shareholders who his is desperately trying to assuage, EA being strong is not good news for the game industry.) Remember that in Riccitello Town, it is always opposite day.
One of three things is true: He is a pathological liar with no imagination, he lives in a particularly warped delusion, or he is some sort of Bizarro-World prophet. Whatever the reason, whenever he says anything, just assume that the exact opposite of that is true. See why I so enjoy reading this letter?
Those of you who haven't been forced to spend the last five years, listening to me rant about how EA is bad for the games industry, it's customers and also bad for it's long-term shareholders, might be wondering why I feel such joy at this turn. Basically, I told everyone I know that this day would come, and the sweet, hot power of raw vindication is flowing through my veins. It's pretty awesome.
Riccitello's version of EA is basically the Emperor's New Clothes Scam; it's only a matter of time before someone publicly questions the authoritative "truth" and the whole house of cards comes undone. You see, under Riccitello, EA ceased to be a massive hype engine dedicated to selling the video games it's developers delivered (a "game publisher" to use the parlance), and became a massive hype engine dedicated to selling it's own stock (a "Blue Sky" racket).
Now, this isn't a Blue Sky job in the strictest, most-traditional sense, as the EA name actually does include a lot of assets, which it's stockholder's nominally "own". However, EA does not generally leverage most of these assets to make money, it leverages them to create the illusion that it might use them to make money in the future, while using the resulting investment capital to acquire more assets to waste.
They literally buy up successful or well-liked developers, scuttle the development team, and then back-burner all the juicy IPs they just dropped a few million on. A development studio is basically three parts, leadership, the dev team's contracts, and the IP and consumer goodwill left from it's past projects. If you buy out the leadership, fire the dev team and then just hoard the IP, you're not investing capital, you're wasting money.
Owning an IP, even if you are just putting it in the wine cellar to marinate in nostalgia for a few years, comes with costs. You have to renew and defend your trademarks or they will slip into the public domain, and getting them back out would be even more expensive. Without dev teams to milk games and t-shirts out of them, your brands cease to be an asset, and still remain a source of liability.
This is like a man selling off his only flour mill, to help him buy up half the worlds entire supply of grain, and to rent silos to store it in. There are fundamental questions about what he actually plans to do with it, and the only guarantee is that you will not like the answers, especially if he owes you money.
Granted, there are a few IP that EA has a proven track record for making and selling: their own. EA Sports (including FIFA and Madden) and Battlefield often turn tidy profits, to help the Juggernaut distract investors from the fact that only these, it's highest profile successes, are often very successful at all.
In fact, the few major financial "successes" that EA has earned with it's acquired IP, have typically been "franchise killers" games that sold well in the first few weeks, that EA assures it's shareholders are the most important, but suffered early sales fatigue due to poor reviews and bad word-of-mouth. We're talking about games so bad that even people who didn't play them are leery of trusting the brand again, and the word "sequel" itself has been tainted. (Remember when a sequel implied "more of a thing that was well known for being good" and not "corporate leeches bought the name of something you once loved, to defraud you in a legal fashion"? EA didn't do that alone, but they hammered more than their share of nails into this coffin.) Expect to see the names "Maxis" and "SimCity" join the list, of once valuable names rendered nearly worthless by the EA digestive tract.
It might seem unfair to heap the ill doings of a massive corporate monolith at the feet of one man, but a company's tone is set from the top, as they say. It is deeply impossible for a competent CEO to manage a company this deeply dysfunctional for half a decade and fail to even begin to address it's issues. With Ricitello at the helm the monster grew only more monstrous, until it began to collapse under it's own hideous weight, and people finally see that it is not a fearsome giant, but a piteous, shambling mutant.
The finally galling fact is, that there's a certain amount of sour grapes in my schadenfreude. Ricitello had access to incredible amounts of money and power. He had the resources and connections to do incredible, great things for game development as an art, and as an industry. I would kill to have that kind of power for a single year; he had five, and he caused nothing but harm to the people and the economy I dream to see grow strong.
What can you say about a man who had everything you ever wanted, and then pissed it away without even managing to accomplish any particularly selfish ends? He could have paid himself just as much in salary and bonuses running a successful and positive publishing outlet. He'd still have his recently destroyed good name, and his lucrative executive career, too. Was he evil, or just really, really stupid?
This post ends, not with a "Fuck Yeah!" or a "Screw you, Riccitello!"
--but with a, "What were you even trying to accomplish?"
Thursday, April 26, 2012
Building roguelikes the wrong way
I've been working on a roguelike game in some of my spare time.
Like all my projects, it has no release schedule, but I've put quite a bit of time into it, and into reading articles that advise people on how to make a roguelike.
The problem is, I find myself disagreeing with much of the oft cited advice I'm finding repeatedly in these articles.
One particular gem that I can't escape from is that you should build your visualizer and the ability to move the player character, creating a large empty space with an @ sign that can be moved around with the arrow keys. Many even recommend doing this before implementing things like time, or a player character.
...
This explains so much about the common flaws that roguelikes can't seem to escape from.
A good roguelike is about exploring a mysterious realm and using the things you find there in inventive ways, in order to survive, by the merit of your own wits and strategy.
A bad roguelike is about wandering around in a bunch of empty rooms until you starve to death, because the RNG wouldn't give you anything to eat.
If the convention is to create huge empty spaces and them worry about what's going to fill that space and what it's going to happen in there later, no wonder so many roguelikes end up being about wandering around in empty rooms doing nothing interesting.
I will not do things that way. My first visualizer test, while not yet complete, will include a map with only 1 square (0,0). If I can draw an empty tile, with a character on it (characters will be partially transparent sprites, rendered over a tiled background) then my visualizer works and I can get started on an interface. Once I am ready to introduce combat and movement (which ought to be more intrinsically intertwined than "move into target to hit it") I'll move to a 5x5 map (a 3x3 room surrounded by wall tiles, to test that walls work).
Until you're testing camera movement, level generation and LOS mechanics, anything more would be a waste, and when you're going for minimalist visuals, wasting screen real estate is a very bad habit.
The problem is, I find myself disagreeing with much of the oft cited advice I'm finding repeatedly in these articles.
One particular gem that I can't escape from is that you should build your visualizer and the ability to move the player character, creating a large empty space with an @ sign that can be moved around with the arrow keys. Many even recommend doing this before implementing things like time, or a player character.
...
This explains so much about the common flaws that roguelikes can't seem to escape from.
A good roguelike is about exploring a mysterious realm and using the things you find there in inventive ways, in order to survive, by the merit of your own wits and strategy.
A bad roguelike is about wandering around in a bunch of empty rooms until you starve to death, because the RNG wouldn't give you anything to eat.
If the convention is to create huge empty spaces and them worry about what's going to fill that space and what it's going to happen in there later, no wonder so many roguelikes end up being about wandering around in empty rooms doing nothing interesting.
I will not do things that way. My first visualizer test, while not yet complete, will include a map with only 1 square (0,0). If I can draw an empty tile, with a character on it (characters will be partially transparent sprites, rendered over a tiled background) then my visualizer works and I can get started on an interface. Once I am ready to introduce combat and movement (which ought to be more intrinsically intertwined than "move into target to hit it") I'll move to a 5x5 map (a 3x3 room surrounded by wall tiles, to test that walls work).
Until you're testing camera movement, level generation and LOS mechanics, anything more would be a waste, and when you're going for minimalist visuals, wasting screen real estate is a very bad habit.
Sunday, July 31, 2011
Notch let's people love him
I'm just dropping a link to this, because it ties into what I've been saying about letting people love you.
Notch on S.978
It's quite short, acknowledges the value of fan videos and the need to preserve them, and is well worth the read.
Notch on S.978
It's quite short, acknowledges the value of fan videos and the need to preserve them, and is well worth the read.
Saturday, July 16, 2011
Broney Phenomenon 3: Analysis/Respect
Welcome to part 3 of my series on My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (Henceforth MLP:FiM)This one is taking a lot longer than Introspection, because introspection is cheap, and you have to do it quick before the moment fades, while analysis is time consuming and you have to do real research.
This one is less about my personal experience, and more about the collective experience and it's influence on popular culture, the blogosphere, the Chans, et cereta, and as such there is the matter of disclaiming that I have not seen the entire elephant. I have not read the entire internet; deal with it.
From where I sit, here's how it is:
It's all about respect. People want it, need it, and crave it, and if you give it to them they will, ironically, be more than happy to debase themselves for your amusement (See: reality television, the Jackass series and wannabe actresses trying to get a break).
There are two demographics that modern media tends to treat like predictable, drooling imbeciles, who will buy anything that panders to their desire for pink dresses and fiery explosions. Exposing these people to quality products is like exposing a dead-fall knotted stand of jungle, that hasn't seen fire in a hundred years, to an incendiary grenade.
You'll get a lot of flash out of that, and with a little guidance that flash will turn into a firestorm.
First, the creator must express their respect for the audience from first contact; either in the work itself, or in pre-release marketing (This thought inspires a train that will form a later post on the life cycle of the post-WoW MMO). The creator takes the initiative in this dialogue, and it's important to start things off on the right foot.
Likewise, you have to show that respect from square one, so new prospects don't have to wade through no-effort crap to get to the good stuff. Opening MLP:FiM with a two part episode was a ballsy move; what if kids didn't become invested quickly enough to take an interest in the resolution? Could kids even learn all the major characters in that span of time?
Once you've shown your audience some respect, and earned their respect in return, you have to maintain that respect, and keep pushing out quality product. Even Naruto understands that every third season must contain content, or the fans will stop coming back to see if it's gotten good again (It seems that even DBZ fans oft lack the patience for Naruto's pacing).
You might get a flash following with pandering and fluff, but pandering is cheap, and that audience will abandon you the minute a new panderer appears. While it's possible to pander to an audience that you respect (an act indistinguishable from producing quality products), remember that cheap pandering will cost you the respect of your fans, who will feel betrayed and give you negative buzz.
This is a serious danger point for the way Hasbro is handling MLP:FiM. They got the brony fanbase as a free extra to the audience they wanted to reach --an audience with actual income, rather than an allowance-- but then overtly accepted the adulation of these free fans, and pledged to continue serving them. The potential threat here lies in the nature of the brony demographic, and the way this paradigm alters their reaction to the product.
Bronies, are media consumers, down to their black, culturally conflicted hearts. As such they have an intuitive grasp of context and presentation, that many of them are not even aware of. The physics and furniture in Ponyville are preposterous, but that's okay, because it's a show for children, and they know to turn those parts of their brains off when the show is on. When the show becomes "for grown-ups too" there's a risk that a significant portion of the fanbase will see the unnoticed shift in their expectations as a lower quality product. A lower quality product would be a betrayal of that new promise, even though it is only the promise, and not the perceived quality thereof that the producers have control over.
Thankfully, the movement has gravitated to charismatic, creative leadership, that clearly shows a solid understanding of consumerism, and a long haul philosophy toward sustaining a fandom. Not only do these grassroots leaders make great apologists, explaining this new need for logic back into the proverbial fridge, and making pink Celestia toys (Celestia is a White horse, but marketing knows pink is what catches the eye in the pink aisle) into a joke, rather than an endless flamewar.
They are also the best marketing team Hasbro could ask for. They are consumerist enough to know they can help this fledgling series survive, and Hasbro has allowed them to do just that.
Ponycraft 2 is a viral advertising dream, and with leadership and infrastructure to support the pony video trend it spawned, this has produced more minutes of viewed, free advertising than anyone has the capability to calculate. --and nobody is blocking these spots, they are seeking them out with a hunger for more. When you win over disaffected creatives with nothing to do but build monuments to your glory, you ensure your glory spreads so far and wide it gets banned from many major content distribution sites.
Sadly, much of this content will be porn, or of poor quality, or both. That's user published content; them's the breaks. Thankfully, with consumerist leadership that wants you to succeed your fans will construct infrastructure to help the quality producers to succeed, which helps your free advertising spread faster and be more effective.
"--But Felblood!" I hear some of you cry, "All this happened on it's own! Hasbro didn't do any of that stuff; the bronies did it. What can marketers learn form this act of God?"
I reply, "Who is Hasbo?"
The people at Hasbro have fostered this movement in some way at every turn. There have been missteps to be sure, but after step one (Introduce quality products respectfully) and step two (keep feeding them quality products), they hit step three out of the park.
Let people love you.
Acknowledge their respect respectfully, not just with the quality of your work, but with your marketing and corporate messages. You don't want to create a perceived conflict between the creatives, and marketing and management, as the fans will side with the creatives over the stuffed suits, and blast your company internet wide (causing the unemployment of the folks they were white-knighting for).
Your creative people are respected by the people who consume their works. Let them show a reciprocal respect, by interacting with the fanbase and consuming feedback. So long as it's made clear that your people take suggestions, and not orders, this will add to your pool of grassroots respect and internet buzz, without overly empowering the overly self-entitled crybabies who are the enemy of all positive buzz (these people are what makes "kid's stuff" that has become "for grownups too" such a risky maneuver. See also: Comic Books). Bonus: also tricks your creatives into working for you for free, whenever they blog or tweet.
Encourage fanworks, but don't attempt to control them. Any attempt to tune the signal sends a very sinister message, and destroys the credibility of your free advertising agencies. However, you can still use your position as the actual owner of the IP as a bully pulpit to issue requests from, rather than ultimatums. (This saves you millions in suing your own fans, and is in many respects more effective.)
Actively encourage fans to create responsibly; you want them to build systems that promote quality fanworks over poor ones (to reflect the quality of your product) and that allow users from all of your demographics to have a positive web experience. This means that pornographic fanart should have a place to exist apart from everything else, so people who aren't looking for it can avoid it.
You can't build this yourself, because your control over that system would compromise it's supposed neutrality (Remember that your fans want you to stay in business, too.). However, if you start handing out respectful suggestions for features, these types will often drink up that feedback. --It means that you acknowledge their existence amenably, and feel their work is worthy of further development.
Of course, if you respect your customers, all of this comes naturally. They're probably smart enough to ask you for it, if you know how to listen.
This one is less about my personal experience, and more about the collective experience and it's influence on popular culture, the blogosphere, the Chans, et cereta, and as such there is the matter of disclaiming that I have not seen the entire elephant. I have not read the entire internet; deal with it.
From where I sit, here's how it is:
It's all about respect. People want it, need it, and crave it, and if you give it to them they will, ironically, be more than happy to debase themselves for your amusement (See: reality television, the Jackass series and wannabe actresses trying to get a break).
There are two demographics that modern media tends to treat like predictable, drooling imbeciles, who will buy anything that panders to their desire for pink dresses and fiery explosions. Exposing these people to quality products is like exposing a dead-fall knotted stand of jungle, that hasn't seen fire in a hundred years, to an incendiary grenade.
You'll get a lot of flash out of that, and with a little guidance that flash will turn into a firestorm.
First, the creator must express their respect for the audience from first contact; either in the work itself, or in pre-release marketing (This thought inspires a train that will form a later post on the life cycle of the post-WoW MMO). The creator takes the initiative in this dialogue, and it's important to start things off on the right foot.
Likewise, you have to show that respect from square one, so new prospects don't have to wade through no-effort crap to get to the good stuff. Opening MLP:FiM with a two part episode was a ballsy move; what if kids didn't become invested quickly enough to take an interest in the resolution? Could kids even learn all the major characters in that span of time?
Once you've shown your audience some respect, and earned their respect in return, you have to maintain that respect, and keep pushing out quality product. Even Naruto understands that every third season must contain content, or the fans will stop coming back to see if it's gotten good again (It seems that even DBZ fans oft lack the patience for Naruto's pacing).
You might get a flash following with pandering and fluff, but pandering is cheap, and that audience will abandon you the minute a new panderer appears. While it's possible to pander to an audience that you respect (an act indistinguishable from producing quality products), remember that cheap pandering will cost you the respect of your fans, who will feel betrayed and give you negative buzz.
This is a serious danger point for the way Hasbro is handling MLP:FiM. They got the brony fanbase as a free extra to the audience they wanted to reach --an audience with actual income, rather than an allowance-- but then overtly accepted the adulation of these free fans, and pledged to continue serving them. The potential threat here lies in the nature of the brony demographic, and the way this paradigm alters their reaction to the product.
Bronies, are media consumers, down to their black, culturally conflicted hearts. As such they have an intuitive grasp of context and presentation, that many of them are not even aware of. The physics and furniture in Ponyville are preposterous, but that's okay, because it's a show for children, and they know to turn those parts of their brains off when the show is on. When the show becomes "for grown-ups too" there's a risk that a significant portion of the fanbase will see the unnoticed shift in their expectations as a lower quality product. A lower quality product would be a betrayal of that new promise, even though it is only the promise, and not the perceived quality thereof that the producers have control over.
Thankfully, the movement has gravitated to charismatic, creative leadership, that clearly shows a solid understanding of consumerism, and a long haul philosophy toward sustaining a fandom. Not only do these grassroots leaders make great apologists, explaining this new need for logic back into the proverbial fridge, and making pink Celestia toys (Celestia is a White horse, but marketing knows pink is what catches the eye in the pink aisle) into a joke, rather than an endless flamewar.
They are also the best marketing team Hasbro could ask for. They are consumerist enough to know they can help this fledgling series survive, and Hasbro has allowed them to do just that.
Ponycraft 2 is a viral advertising dream, and with leadership and infrastructure to support the pony video trend it spawned, this has produced more minutes of viewed, free advertising than anyone has the capability to calculate. --and nobody is blocking these spots, they are seeking them out with a hunger for more. When you win over disaffected creatives with nothing to do but build monuments to your glory, you ensure your glory spreads so far and wide it gets banned from many major content distribution sites.
Sadly, much of this content will be porn, or of poor quality, or both. That's user published content; them's the breaks. Thankfully, with consumerist leadership that wants you to succeed your fans will construct infrastructure to help the quality producers to succeed, which helps your free advertising spread faster and be more effective.
"--But Felblood!" I hear some of you cry, "All this happened on it's own! Hasbro didn't do any of that stuff; the bronies did it. What can marketers learn form this act of God?"
I reply, "Who is Hasbo?"
The people at Hasbro have fostered this movement in some way at every turn. There have been missteps to be sure, but after step one (Introduce quality products respectfully) and step two (keep feeding them quality products), they hit step three out of the park.
Let people love you.
Acknowledge their respect respectfully, not just with the quality of your work, but with your marketing and corporate messages. You don't want to create a perceived conflict between the creatives, and marketing and management, as the fans will side with the creatives over the stuffed suits, and blast your company internet wide (causing the unemployment of the folks they were white-knighting for).
Your creative people are respected by the people who consume their works. Let them show a reciprocal respect, by interacting with the fanbase and consuming feedback. So long as it's made clear that your people take suggestions, and not orders, this will add to your pool of grassroots respect and internet buzz, without overly empowering the overly self-entitled crybabies who are the enemy of all positive buzz (these people are what makes "kid's stuff" that has become "for grownups too" such a risky maneuver. See also: Comic Books). Bonus: also tricks your creatives into working for you for free, whenever they blog or tweet.
Encourage fanworks, but don't attempt to control them. Any attempt to tune the signal sends a very sinister message, and destroys the credibility of your free advertising agencies. However, you can still use your position as the actual owner of the IP as a bully pulpit to issue requests from, rather than ultimatums. (This saves you millions in suing your own fans, and is in many respects more effective.)
Actively encourage fans to create responsibly; you want them to build systems that promote quality fanworks over poor ones (to reflect the quality of your product) and that allow users from all of your demographics to have a positive web experience. This means that pornographic fanart should have a place to exist apart from everything else, so people who aren't looking for it can avoid it.
You can't build this yourself, because your control over that system would compromise it's supposed neutrality (Remember that your fans want you to stay in business, too.). However, if you start handing out respectful suggestions for features, these types will often drink up that feedback. --It means that you acknowledge their existence amenably, and feel their work is worthy of further development.
Of course, if you respect your customers, all of this comes naturally. They're probably smart enough to ask you for it, if you know how to listen.
Thursday, April 14, 2011
The Broney Phenomenon 2: Introspection
NOTE: There's one more question that I forgot to mention in the closing of the previous entry, "How can I use this for personal gain/evil?" Personal gain and evil are the two things I know the most about, so there will be a special entry devoted to this, to cap the end of this series.
On with the show.
Today's topic: "WHAT IS HAPPENING!? IT FEELS LIKE MY SOUL IS DYING!"
Those are my own words, and I meant them. My existing conceptions about my own psychology have been sorely tested by these past three weeks. Watching My Little Pony has induced a crisis of faith that shook me deeply. (Believe it or not, I am actually going to recommend trying it yourself later in this article.)
The American culture is a culture built on marketing. From an early age, numerous groups attempt to influence what type of person we will become, and what sorts of ideals we will strive for, and none of them are as insidious as marketing. In this environment, parents wisely try to teach their offspring to be string willed, independent people, who can resist the mind altering onslaught of Saturday morning's marketing blitz.
I thought my parents had been pretty successful in teaching me to be my own person, and to thumb my nose at other people's ideas of who I should be. They made sure there were dolls mixed in with my collection of toy cars and action figures, and taught me that it was virtuous to be beaten by my peers for failing to fit in(something I did quite often as a kid anyway, so it's good that they approved, at least).
I thought I was immune to peer pressure. However, I see now that I was wrong, and even this aggressive campaign of pro-open-mindedness propaganda could not prevent certain prejudices from taking root in my mind, so deeply that letting them go was almost physically painful.
Here's how it went down.
It all started with a funny YouTube link from my brother.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJbAT1wzS8U
From there, it was trivial to find the actual first episodes of the new series Friendship is Magic (It is YouTube).
You know, so I could see the raw material from which the editor crafted his hilarious trailer re-imagining. Surely, it was some artifice on his part that made this look like it could be interesting, right?
So, I didn't exactly go into this with good faith. I clicked on that link the way a gawker runs to the window when he hears a particularly moist motorcycle accident. It was my intention to watch this video so I could laugh at it, and tell other people how bad it was later.
Then something literally incredible happened.
I didn't hate it.
In fact, I enjoyed it, for what it was. I could address the work on it's own terms, and I had a good time.
There was something even stranger, though: I was absolutely horrified by my own enjoyment of this product, and even more deeply horrified by that horror itself.
"If a product is good," I told myself as I buffered up another episode, "why shouldn't a savvy consumer be able to recognize and absorb that good?"
Nevertheless, I could no longer deny my prejudice. I expected this show to be bad, and I was wrong, and that doesn't seem so bad -- bad that expectation had come from a part of my psyche that said that it was okay for me to love GI Joe Resolute (which was also pretty cool) but that My Little Pony was and would always be bad and ineffable. Somewhere inside my mind, there lived and eight year old sexist, and watching this show brought him screaming out of his hidey hole, to throw a massive tantrum.
That's when I decided to kill him.
I've never been a fan of children.
Seriously though, finding this childish pride and prejudice in myself was pretty disturbing. Real men don't need to fret that their actions are childish, or unmanly, and getting hung up on a childish thing like that triggered an infinite loop of childish shame. Clearly this had to stop.
So, I psychically ripped out my cultural shame circuits, and went back to watching my show. "I like it and there's nothing wrong with that, so what else matters!?"
My little brothers think I'm insane.
I've decided to deploy the fact that I like MLP more tactically, in the future. It's one thing to not be ashamed of your media of choice, and it's quite another to tell your co-workers about them. I mean, I don't tell random about my love of Picasso either, but that's about other people's closed-minded hangups, not mine.
On with the show.
Today's topic: "WHAT IS HAPPENING!? IT FEELS LIKE MY SOUL IS DYING!"
Those are my own words, and I meant them. My existing conceptions about my own psychology have been sorely tested by these past three weeks. Watching My Little Pony has induced a crisis of faith that shook me deeply. (Believe it or not, I am actually going to recommend trying it yourself later in this article.)
The American culture is a culture built on marketing. From an early age, numerous groups attempt to influence what type of person we will become, and what sorts of ideals we will strive for, and none of them are as insidious as marketing. In this environment, parents wisely try to teach their offspring to be string willed, independent people, who can resist the mind altering onslaught of Saturday morning's marketing blitz.
I thought my parents had been pretty successful in teaching me to be my own person, and to thumb my nose at other people's ideas of who I should be. They made sure there were dolls mixed in with my collection of toy cars and action figures, and taught me that it was virtuous to be beaten by my peers for failing to fit in(something I did quite often as a kid anyway, so it's good that they approved, at least).
I thought I was immune to peer pressure. However, I see now that I was wrong, and even this aggressive campaign of pro-open-mindedness propaganda could not prevent certain prejudices from taking root in my mind, so deeply that letting them go was almost physically painful.
Here's how it went down.
It all started with a funny YouTube link from my brother.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJbAT1wzS8U
From there, it was trivial to find the actual first episodes of the new series Friendship is Magic (It is YouTube).
You know, so I could see the raw material from which the editor crafted his hilarious trailer re-imagining. Surely, it was some artifice on his part that made this look like it could be interesting, right?
So, I didn't exactly go into this with good faith. I clicked on that link the way a gawker runs to the window when he hears a particularly moist motorcycle accident. It was my intention to watch this video so I could laugh at it, and tell other people how bad it was later.
Then something literally incredible happened.
I didn't hate it.
In fact, I enjoyed it, for what it was. I could address the work on it's own terms, and I had a good time.
There was something even stranger, though: I was absolutely horrified by my own enjoyment of this product, and even more deeply horrified by that horror itself.
"If a product is good," I told myself as I buffered up another episode, "why shouldn't a savvy consumer be able to recognize and absorb that good?"
Nevertheless, I could no longer deny my prejudice. I expected this show to be bad, and I was wrong, and that doesn't seem so bad -- bad that expectation had come from a part of my psyche that said that it was okay for me to love GI Joe Resolute (which was also pretty cool) but that My Little Pony was and would always be bad and ineffable. Somewhere inside my mind, there lived and eight year old sexist, and watching this show brought him screaming out of his hidey hole, to throw a massive tantrum.
That's when I decided to kill him.
I've never been a fan of children.
Seriously though, finding this childish pride and prejudice in myself was pretty disturbing. Real men don't need to fret that their actions are childish, or unmanly, and getting hung up on a childish thing like that triggered an infinite loop of childish shame. Clearly this had to stop.
So, I psychically ripped out my cultural shame circuits, and went back to watching my show. "I like it and there's nothing wrong with that, so what else matters!?"
My little brothers think I'm insane.
I've decided to deploy the fact that I like MLP more tactically, in the future. It's one thing to not be ashamed of your media of choice, and it's quite another to tell your co-workers about them. I mean, I don't tell random about my love of Picasso either, but that's about other people's closed-minded hangups, not mine.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
The Broney Phenomenon: Introduction
This idea will probably be broken up into several sections. I'll start with the high concept stuff, and then get down into my personal observations and predictions as the series continues.
Popular culture is a mysterious thing; scientists are still, quite literally, trying to figure it out. Trends spring up in days, and with a little nourishment, can snowball into an edifice to endure or even define a decade.
A trend will is born in silence, with isolated people discovering an ability to enjoy something new--often something nobody would have predicted--but once those people find that they are not alone, and that there are others who share their enthusiasm, a fandom is formed and the trend becomes visible.
Fandoms are iceberg like things, with only the most prominent parts being visible without careful study. Also, like icebergs, they can be dangerous, if you assume you understand the whole thing, by looking at a part of it; many a marketing push has been crippled by a decision based on an overly small sample of the audience. Each has a unique raver to lurker ratio, based on a million unique factors, but each one signifies a deeper trend in the overarching culture, and can be used to collect valuable data points about the trends in that culture. Many of these factors are yet mysteries to marketing science, and new insights into the matter are valuable (for making money, if nothing else) in the right hands.
In this series, I'll be making observations on the growth and nature of the newborn "Brony" clique, and what they can tell us about the unexpected ways that Lauren Faust's My Little Pony reboot is trending in general, as well as what those trends tell us about society and modern marketing.
For those of you who haven't heard, a lot of red blooded, American males, aged 18-35, of both sexualities, are finding themselves unexpectedly enjoying My little Pony. (That's right, you're not alone.) For many, this has been an earth shattering revelation. One group of these fans call themselves "Bronies," keying off the irony that men normally expected to only be interested in beer, boobs and ballgames are unexpectedly finding themselves liking something that was intended to appeal to little girls.
People are asking, "Why is this happening!?" "What is happening?!" "Is this even okay!?" Nobody is asking these questions more than the bronies themselves. The men in question often find themselves horrified by their own lack of irrational bias, or dismissive pomposity. Leading the following question to often be, "If it's actually good, why shouldn't men be able to enjoy it?" or more succinctly, "Why not?"
I'll address each of those three questions in a subsequent entry.
Popular culture is a mysterious thing; scientists are still, quite literally, trying to figure it out. Trends spring up in days, and with a little nourishment, can snowball into an edifice to endure or even define a decade.
A trend will is born in silence, with isolated people discovering an ability to enjoy something new--often something nobody would have predicted--but once those people find that they are not alone, and that there are others who share their enthusiasm, a fandom is formed and the trend becomes visible.
Fandoms are iceberg like things, with only the most prominent parts being visible without careful study. Also, like icebergs, they can be dangerous, if you assume you understand the whole thing, by looking at a part of it; many a marketing push has been crippled by a decision based on an overly small sample of the audience. Each has a unique raver to lurker ratio, based on a million unique factors, but each one signifies a deeper trend in the overarching culture, and can be used to collect valuable data points about the trends in that culture. Many of these factors are yet mysteries to marketing science, and new insights into the matter are valuable (for making money, if nothing else) in the right hands.
In this series, I'll be making observations on the growth and nature of the newborn "Brony" clique, and what they can tell us about the unexpected ways that Lauren Faust's My Little Pony reboot is trending in general, as well as what those trends tell us about society and modern marketing.
For those of you who haven't heard, a lot of red blooded, American males, aged 18-35, of both sexualities, are finding themselves unexpectedly enjoying My little Pony. (That's right, you're not alone.) For many, this has been an earth shattering revelation. One group of these fans call themselves "Bronies," keying off the irony that men normally expected to only be interested in beer, boobs and ballgames are unexpectedly finding themselves liking something that was intended to appeal to little girls.
People are asking, "Why is this happening!?" "What is happening?!" "Is this even okay!?" Nobody is asking these questions more than the bronies themselves. The men in question often find themselves horrified by their own lack of irrational bias, or dismissive pomposity. Leading the following question to often be, "If it's actually good, why shouldn't men be able to enjoy it?" or more succinctly, "Why not?"
I'll address each of those three questions in a subsequent entry.
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