Companies or people who develop technology products generally fall into three categories in terms of adoption of new technologies:

Mature Only – These are the folks who will only develop for technologies that have stabilized and been proven to work on multiple platforms exactly as the published standards require.

Emerging – These people take more risk – doing work using technologies and tools that are reasonably understood, deployed and supported – but are not fully mature yet.

Bleeding Edge – These are the renegades – the ones who look at a technology, don’t know exactly what the standard is going to look like or what the adoption rate is going to be – and they develop for it anyway.

That last one is where all the fun kids play.   But why?  Very simply, it’s to get a jump on the competition.  When the App Store for the iPhone was originally announced, nobody knew just how popular it was going to be – but that didn’t stop people from developing for it.  There were no standards yet, no idea of the reach really, and no metrics for how much money could be made.  Fast forward to 2012, and there are over half a million apps out there, and growing.  It was a good idea, and anyone with even a small amount of vision could see that.

Sounds dangerous you say?  Not really – assuming you play by the key rules:

1. Do your homework.  Understand where the pitfalls are, and don’t commit to developing heavily for a part of the standard that isn’t nearly complete.
2.  Talk to people.  Learn about what others have managed to do while staying within the already understood standards.
3. Be creative.  This is the time to figure out how to do something awesome with a technology that people haven’t yet seen.
4. Be smart.  Don’t implement a new technology for the sake of doing it.  Make sure it is solving a fundamental problem.
5. Create value.  It might be a game, or a utility, or a website for productivity or fun – but as long as it is something that people NEED, it will have an audience.

HTML5 is an excellent current example.  The standard isn’t done, the support isn’t there, and different browsers implement it differently.  Building a website or a game in HTML5 is absolutely a difficult task.  Is it impossible?  Definitely not.  There are plenty of examples, and those examples come from people who are looking to be EXPERTS with this technology just as soon as it becomes the standard for websites and applications across the web.  And that has value.  And that’s really the name of the game.  Over here at Brandissimo we’re jumping right in – building a massively multiplayer online game world, entirely in HTML5.  Crazy?  Biting off more than we can chew?  Taking too big a risk?

Do we sound nervous?

When Joey helped Ross make a list of pros and cons about dating Rachel, it was an epically bad decision… but of course we all watched.  We wanted to see the fallout.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0583625/?

From a character saying “I’ll be right back” in Friday the 13^th to Nemo going to touch the big butt, making bad choices makes for great film and TV… but in a game it’s a little more tricky.

As a game designer, you want to encourage players to make the right choice, or at least make the right choice for the game (unfortunately, we have no control over who our players date or the hairstyle choices they make).  When designing casual games—whether it’s iOS, Facebook, or online—our job as game designers is to get our player to make the smart choice that leads to deeper engagement.  Let your character make a bad choice in a TV show and your ratings can soar; do the same in a game and it’s game over.  You gotta suck it up and purchase that power ring if you want to defeat the boss in Infinty Blade.  One medium rewards bad choices while another medium fails through bad choices.  That’s the big challenge with transmedia story-telling.

But all is not lost.  As developers, there are a few tools we can use when solving this unique problem.

Be creative.  Your end goal is user interaction. You want them to click the button, go down the path, fight the monster, nurture the egg.  The key is finding a good motivator that works for your particular story.  In our work with the National Football League, we rely on team affinity as a motivator.  “The Broncos are down by 1 and your team needs you!”  Find the right creative story that makes the user feel like it’s up to them to be the hero.  Turn the simple act of clicking the button into a satisfying experience. For the NFL’s game world, we wanted to encourage head to head social gameplay, so every Tuesday all our PvP games reward twice as much XP as single player games.  It’s really helped increase our PvP games.

What, you don’t have time to call your mother?  We all know that guilt can be a big motivator.  It’s also a key component when creating an emotional connection, and emotional connections are what keep players engaged. Give the user something to feel for. “If you don’t click this button, something bad is going to happen…”  Pressure works.  If your user is inactive, something negative will happen.  “You don’t want your baby zebra to go hungry… do you?” (Zynga’s Dream Zoo has nearly perfected driving engagement through little bits of guilt and encouragement.)

Time is on your side, yes it is.  (No, really, it is).  Offering a limited amount of time to complete an action drives a player to pay attention to the action.  If I have a ticking clock of 30 seconds in which to perform my action—no matter how mundane the action—I’m going to think twice about passing up that opportunity.  Use time as a way to help motive your players to prioritize their actions. Adding a ticking clock gets the heart pumping and causes players to lean forward and pay attention.  The countdown we have for NFLRZ Training games makes this one of the most popular games on the site.  http://nflrz.nflrush.com/play/game/training

While it’s not true for all games or all linear content, the common thread that runs through each medium is redemption.  For the most part, it’s our basic human nature to want a happy ending.  The reason we love watching our heroes fall is the delight we feel when they redeem themselves.  In a game, we want the opportunity to dig in, play hard and be rewarded for our efforts.  In games, we can have failures… as long as we are also rewarded for victories.  Losing makes winning all the more sweeter.  As game designers, it is up to us to find the right balance.  That’s all for me for now.  I have to run.  I only have 3 minutes left to click that button or something terrible is going to happen.