Sir Sell-a-lot

The other day I bought some shoes. True story.

As I was trying them on, a shop assistant edged their way over to me, like some kind of professionally uniformed crab. Normally I don't like shop assistants coming up to me and distracting me from a good browsing, but I like it even less when they hover around, waiting for the moment I look remotely confused.

I have found this much worse since I've moved to London, with all these empty brand heavy stores. Assistants are part of the brand, so they leap at you, and there's no place to hide!

So, the ultimate brand store should look a little like this:

Yes, the Robot Wars arena.

Notice the Corner Patrol Zones (CPZs). If you enter one, the House Robots are allowed to attack.

Truly this is the ultimate shoe buying layout. Staff don't need to stare at customers to check if they look confused, and shoppers can browse freely!

Thank you Sgt. Bash, for showing us the light.

FTEW

I have been waiting for the Epic Win app for many years. Pretty much since the original 'Sims' came out actually. Something that rewards the dull and fruitless things in life with pointless experience points and irrelevant rewards!



It always seemed strange to me that people would get a computer character to read a book, in the hope that they would learn enough to get a new job, yet they wouldn't read a book themselves.

Unfortunately most things in life take a lot of time and effort to achieve, so a visual way of showing how every step makes you better is actually a potentially powerful tool.

Of course, this is only likely to be the case when you set the app to reward things with a clear goal at the end, but as FarmVille and World of Warcraft have shown, some people will do anything for a virtual reward.

So I look forward to seeing how successful this becomes. I think there's a slight lack of enthusiasm for interactive experiences that reward users in advertising, but if this app manages to make people happy about doing the washing up, why can't an app make them change their brand of washing up liquid?

Super Marmite World

Here is legendary computer game designer Shigeru Miyamoto talking about how he creates worlds for players to experiment in. I often talk about how this should be the basis of interactive advertising campaigns, but unfortunately he has managed to put it into words far better than I could with my previous 72 posts...

"If they have a natural acceptance of the rules and of what's happening in this world that's been created, then that bond between creator and player becomes that much stronger and that much more important."

"And then what happens is as the player begins to understand the world that they're playing in, then they're going to begin to think about ways that they can play within that world; they use their own creativity and their own imagination to tell the story or to come up with their own parts of the story, and at the same time they come up with new ways to play in this world that has been created for them."

"As a developer then, we have to try to predict some of the ways that players will try to play in that world, and give them reactions or responses or rewards for using their own creativity for finding new ways to interact within that environment."

Why did Mario cross the road/bridge of death?

I've just read this interesting article about new feedback loops in game design http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/feedback-loop-article

It's funny how much it all sounds like using Google Analytics on a website, and I'd be quite interested to have a gander at data for something like Super Mario World. Did everyone else die on that damn cheese bridge level?

Anyway, with this stuff standard behaviour for websites designers, and now games going at it, I wonder how long until we start seeing widespread tweaking of TV ads based on people ranting online.

Don't think "There's method in the Magners?", well we think you'll love "How do you get to Magners? Practice!"

Navigate-gate

There's a funny thing in the computer game world, where a trailer for a game looks completely different before and after you play the actual product. (Yes it's a post that vaguely links computer games to advertising - I've found my niche gosh darn it)

Before you play the game, a video of it looks amazing. Characters running around, performing outrageous actions - leaping, diving, shooting - you have complete control of a relentless killing machine.



The strange thing is, when you come back to a video after playing it (which admittedly rarely happens), you suddenly see those movements differently. He's no longer leaping, but some one's pressing 'X'. He's no longer diving, but initialising pre-set diving animation 1. Suddenly you see the strings and you're snapped right out of the moment.

Sometimes this can be how it feels with campaign sites. They can be wrapped in the most creative skin, but it still looks and feels like an average website. You still navigate and move around in the same way you would on a news site, or a site about lovely socks.

I think this is why the digital campaigns that I really remember fondly are those that weren't set up in the usual way. Cloverfield for instance - spreading bits of an introduction to the story across several sites and social media. People certainly got lost and couldn't find all the story, but I bet they felt more involved than they would have reading a full and thorough 'About' section.

Of course, this can't work for 99% of campaigns and usability is quite rightly regarded very highly. But sometimes, for certain brands, helping a user navigate is good, but helping them get lost is better.

Russian Standard

When you're trying to come up with new ideas for digital campaigns, it's easy to look for the latest technology, or the latest social network and try to be the first to take advantage of their sparkly new features.

So it's nice to have recently found two interesting twists on an old idea, from an old peice of technology. The first one looks at it from a new angle, while the second just makes it evil.

The internet's broken pottery

Visiting MySpace these days is a surreal experience. I bit like walking around in a post-apocalyptic Earth. Exactly like that.

Having been right in MySpace's target market during its golden age and then the target of Facebook's early push in the UK, I always thought it was a slow shift of people to the latter, with conversations gradually moving over.

Looking at all the profiles now though, It's like a bomb went off in 2007 and killed everything dead. In social media world, a month seems like a ridiculous amount of time to go without an update, and yet there I am on MySpace, apparently in the first year of university. As are most of the friends I have on there.

The thing is, I don't want to update it now. Mostly because I probably won't venture back on there until 2013, but also because it kind of feels like a Time Team excavation, with everything preserved as it was three or four years ago.

All the conversations, the stories, the fads. What feels like an entire eco-system just stopped, while the rest of the internet kept on, and keeps on updating. So much about being a Planner seems to be investigating the hidden stories behind actions and a social network frozen in time is a gold mine of interesting tales.

And there I was, an idiot, being an idiot. It's reassuring to know that the working life hasn't changed me.