GA : Guy Kawasaki's – Art Of Innovation
Guy Kawasaki’s is one famous guy whom a lot people sit to listen on the aspects of Innovative Products. Being a tech writer, his reviews on the products and the follow-up he goes with the minutest changes in the system is pretty amazing, through his experience with the market on Innovative Products, he once in 2006 wrote this blog post about “Art of Innovation”, which happened to be flicked on to my eyes by a friend of mine, thanks Xavier. Pretty much a good checklist on if you are wanting to create a New IP Game, I think the points are very much in sync whether its a Game Development or any other innovative product. Keeping every aspects as Guy Kawasaki noted in sync is not a pretty task, well you can compare any of the successful products in the market, when that product got released into the market, they would have had all of these statements true. There can be exceptions, but no one of us are Gods to define a perfect equation to success. It’s always a person’s perspective.
Guy Kawasaki’s Blog LINK
I am trying to see Guy Kawasaki’s ideas of innovation into a Game Developer’s Perspective.
- Jump to the next curve. Too many companies duke it out on the same curve. If they were daisy wheel printer companies, they think innovation means adding Helvetica in 24 points. Instead, they should invent laser printing. True innovation happens when a company jumps to the next curve–or better still, invents the next curve, so set your goals high.
When you have a concept of a FPS/TPS/RPG/RTS game, you should be thinking of what the current generation games provide to the gamers, at what quality and what more can you give. To summarize, “WHAT, WHAT and WHAT”. How you can better than the compitetors value and make your game more valued than them, is the jump on the next curve, its not only in games, in console hardwares, software market, even on the non-digital market. People will always compare with yours to your competitors because they are the people who sheds in the money to buy your product. And so jumping to the next curve is really important!
Sometimes, you set the next curve, ahem should I sing the James Cameroon Story with Avatar, well he did set in flow a new production pipeline as well as an innovation of capturing not only human motions as well as human facial emotions utilized for the actors to transform to any of their counter part digital characters.
- Don’t worry, be crappy. An innovator doesn’t worry about shipping an innovative product with elements of crappiness if it’s truly innovative. The first permutation of a innovation is seldom perfect–Macintosh, for example, didn’t have software (thanks to me), a hard disk (it wouldn’t matter with no software anyway), slots, and color. If a company waits–for example, the engineers convince management to add more features–until everything is perfect, it will never ship, and the market will pass it by.
An innovation is a never before made thing, so of course systems that comes with it are not perfect, let it be crappy, but as long as the features that you want in it are not breaking-the-system, let it be crappy and you needn’t worry. The toughest part a producer and his core team is to identify what features are crucial and really needed and which can be crappy but happy if it works the way you wanted it.
Most of the times people tend to be crappy in the major features of the competitors to be crappy in yours! For a really new mechanics or gameplay yes crappy is good, but not for an extension/same genre of a game. That means if you are planning for an FPS game the major features that the audience likes are to be there (no crappy in that!), and if you introduce new features then the new features can be crappy but working perfectly as you instructed the player to do is good enough.
- Churn, baby, churn. I’m saying it’s okay to ship crap–I’m not saying that it’s okay to stay crappy. A company must improve version 1.0 and create version 1.1, 1.2, … 2.0. This is a difficult lesson to learn because it’s so hard to ship an innovation; therefore, the last thing employees want to deal with is complaints about their perfect baby. Innovation is not an event. It’s a process.
Thats another on the dot point! Learn from the past experience, rectify it in the present and make more mistakes for the future, but don’t repeat the same mistakes again. This is tough because with the first game you have made a new game system with a set of rules to follow on the various parts like story, art direction, game play, etc. to follow on the sequel and make sure you don’t try to do what didn’t sync when the first one was in production is something that is really really tough to identify.
- Don’t be afraid to polarize people. Most companies want to create the holy grail of products that appeals to every demographic, social-economic background, and geographic location. To attempt to do so guarantees mediocrity. Instead, create great DICEE products that make segments of people very happy. And fear not if these products make other segments unhappy. The worst case is to incite no passionate reactions at all, and that happens when companies try to make everyone happy.
Don’t be afraid to polarize people, let some people have good aspects on your game as well as some people have bad aspects on your game. Satisfying everyone is not possible. Identifying who needs to be satisfied and you make sure that at any cost you would satisfy the target is something that you will have to take care if you want to have a better product, especially when it comes to entertainment.
- Break down the barriers. The way life should work is that innovative products are easy to sell. Dream on. Life isn’t fair. Indeed, the more innovative, the more barriers the status quo will erect in your way. Entrepreneurs should understand this upfront and not get flustered when market acceptance comes slowly. I’ve found that the best way to break barriers is enable people to test drive your innovation: download your software, take home your hardware, whatever it takes.
This step is more of a marketing strategy, promoting your product more with demos and giving live demonstrations of your game, videos of gameplay, screenhots, its more of creating an anticipation for your product. It can even create a hype too, but as well as innovation is considered if your game has a unique and innovative gameplay, it would be noticed and that way your product wouldn’t go un-noticed.
- “Let a hundred flowers blossom.” I stole this from Chairman Mao. Innovators need to be flexible about how people use their products. Avon created Skin So Soft to soften skin, but when parents used it as an insect repellant, Avon went with the flow. Apple thought it created a spreadsheet/database/wordprocessing computer; but, come to find out, customers used it as a desktop publishing machine. The lesson is: Don’t be proud. Let a hundred flowers blossom.
Yep, don’t be proud that a couple of people got it right on the first let a hundred people play the game and then see how many goes with the system and how many doesn’t! How many likes and how many doesn’t, how many tried it in the way you intended and how many tried it differently. Eventually, its the hundreds combined voice that we can regard as the result of the product.
- Think digital, act analog. Thinking digital means that companies should use all the digital tools at its disposal–computers, web sites, instruments, whatever–to create great products. But companies should act analog–that is, they must remember that the purpose of innovation is not cool products and cool technologies but happy people. Happy people is a decidedly analog goal.
LOL, my favorite part, what we do to make sure that what we do digital is checked analog. What ever be the game that you make, eventually its gonna be played / liked / loved / hated by the gamers. So, its really important that not only we keep in mind the target people, we give the target people to play and check whether our assumptions are right or wrong before the game is released. Play tests help in these where the actual age group people/children and called into to the studio for a rough playtest to identify whether what we thought about their brain workings are true or not! Eventually its they who should be happy in buying the game.
- Never ask people to do what you wouldn’t do. This is a great test for any company. Suppose a company invents the world’s greatest mousetrap. It murders mice better than anything in the history of mankind–in fact, it’s nuclear powered. The problem is that the customer needs a PhD to set it, it costs $500,000, and has to drop off the dead, radioactive mouse 500 miles away in the middle of the desert. No one at the company would jump through those hoops–it shouldn’t expect customers to either.
LOL, funniest one but its the truth, if you, being the developers can’t play it then forget about the public playing it. If you don’t find the fun in the game, forget about the gamers finding fun while playing your game. This is most crucial part and critical too. A bad gamer by hard can make a really good game if he knows how the fun factor in games works or at least has an idea, and another basic foundation thats very much summarizes the above statement, consider you are making the game for yourself, now do you enjoy the game?
- Don’t let the bozos grind you down. The bozos will tell a company that what it’s doing can’t be done, shouldn’t be done, and isn’t necessary. Some bozos are clearly losers–they’re the ones who are easy to ignore. The dangerous ones are rich, famous, and powerful–because they are so successful, innovators may think they are right. They’re not right; they’re just successful on the previous curve so they cannot comprehend, much less embrace, the next curve.
These people can be a part of the other polarized people too, who were a part of the previous curve or pushes/looks down on your attempt. Leave it on its way, if you have set your targets that makes your product a better one to the competitors, then wait and show the improvements of your maturity in your next game.
That was a long post, but I loved reading and commenting it as a Game Developer’s Perspective.
Good Day
CHEERS!
