Intelligent Design

I’m happy to announce that the piece I wrote about Mario 64, titled “Mario 64: an exercise on freedom and style” is now published as part of the Well Played 2.0 book!

Well Played 2.0 in the second book in the Well Played series, edited by Drew Davidson. In these series, different authors analyze the experience of playing different games. I chose Mario 64 because it is a game that opened my eyes to the magic of 3D adventures. In the piece I attempt to explain why the game feels so timeless and reflect on the reasons why it holds a special place in my heart. Hope you enjoy it!

Read it here.

It happens to me way too often. You know the feeling, right? It’s that “have I actually been here, or was that in a dream?”. Tycho puts it into words, except for him it happens with games. Like so:

Speaking specifically to the Lairs, there were moments where the obvious “structure” of the levels you’re supposed to traverse in game terms melted away into completely organic environments, which I could then navigate intuitively. That happened in Uncharted 2 quite often, and it alters your brain function. i think that if I try to recall these places in the future, I might recall them as places I’ve been.

Let’s pretend for a minute that we’re not scared of the picture of the future that Facebook is painting for us.

Pretend that you don’t mind the privacy issues or the fact that Facebook is easily one of the world’s biggest repositories of personal information.

Pretend that the Facebook future isn’t creepy. It’s exciting.

And then embrace the Facebook Card. Wait, the what?

The Facebook Card is surely coming. It needs to be in the works as we speak. I demand that its existence be more than merely a product of my imagination. The premise is simple: Facebook Credits have a potential of becoming an equivalent of PayPal. Everybody uses Facebook, so we are all only one click away from using Facebook Credits. If the point of sale at your local Starbucks is wired to the Facebook system, all you need to do is swipe your Facebook Card and pay with FB Credits. It’s no more complicated than using a gift card or a debit card.

First step toward the FB Card is then its approximation to the PayPal model. The Internet is quickly adopting Facebook Connect, linking your profile to comments on blogs and letting you “like” news stories all over the web. It would only make sense then that a checkout option for online purchases became Facebook Credits. Recharge the credits from your Facebook page and use them to pay for goods all over the web.

But, you might think, PayPal already does this and it has not managed to get widespread implementation on the “real” world – the physical world. However, Facebook is more than just the credits – it is already a very real, tangible part of our everyday life.

The number one reason to believe that Facebook could succeed in creating the new form of real-world payment is that, as I mentioned before, we already have a Facebook account. Give any user $5 in FB credits just for making their first purchase and you already have a big enough incentive for a big chunk of your user base to adopt, or at least try out, the payment system. Some companies, for example, are already  offering deals that grant Facebook Credits in exchange for follows and re-tweets.

Next up is Facebook Places. This feature is already integrated enough with mobile such that it is quite simple to “check in” to a location and reap a reward in the form of a discount or a recurring visitor deal. If my Facebook Card is linked to Places, then it can auto-check me in when I pay with it, give me the discount automatically and even tag me in a post in the process – granted that I gave it all of these permissions in advance. In turn the Facebook Places database will become much richer and its user base largely increased. Tasti D lite already does this with their rewards card, which automatically checks you in to Foursquare and Tweets on your behalf when you make a purchase.

After that come the marketing opportunities. As a customer, the targeted offers you encounter online will become exponentially more relevant. Retailers will be able to ask Facebook to target their ads at people who shop at specific locations or specific times, who spend an amount of money in a specified range, who travel a lot, have spent money on several US states, are tagged in pictures in specific European cities, have at least X friends in a determined age range, have children, are married, have been in a specific number of relationships, held their current relationship for at least a year of have spent at least 6 months without entering a relationship, users who log in mostly on weekends or that tend to drink draft beer in bars. You name it.

In other words, Facebook will be able to correlate your personal information, shopping data, location data, personal connections, close and not-so-close friends, page and article likes, tagged pictures and posts, games you play and much more and offer deals and ads that are relevant to one or more of these experiences.

I see the Facebook Card as the logical next step – the enabler for this outbreak. It is the perfect coming-together of Facebook’s latest initiatives: Credits and Places. It is also a platform to greatly enrich their databases with relevant user information that can be leveraged into revenue. And, on top of that, it is a direct line into becoming a solidified constant in our lives.

Can you see it coming?

Embrace it! Isn’t it exciting?

I would potentially shed a tear of joy if I got an official-looking letter from Hogwarts in the mail and, after opening it, it contained an invitation to The Wizarding World of Harry Potter.

Even if I still have to pay for the ticket, if there is no deal or discount attached, if all it is is a letter with the announcement that the park is now open – I would still get the chills. Because a lot of us once upon a time wondered what it would be like to get a letter like that – what it would be like to set foot in the Hogwarts castle.

Universal – get on it!

A letter from Hogwarts

A recent 4-month stay in Barcelona has made me think a lot about designing for different markets. Different cultures demand different designs and it is not rare to find that some things are done completely different in Europe than in America. However, even though designs are different, they each make perfect sense for the culture they were designed for.

A place where a lot of these cultural differences become evident are theme parks. I knew from a visit to Disneyland Paris some years back that European theme parks were not the same as American ones – and I commented that to my friends on our way to Port Aventura, which is about an hour drive from Barcelona.

Some of the things that stand out the most. You’re not supposed to smoke in most of the park’s spaces, though everyone still does and nobody cares. They sell beer to guests and don’t ask for ID if you look like you’re old enough. Staff is extremely relaxed and not too concerned with everyone staying properly in line or standing exactly where they should.

Oh, and the Cookie Monster does not hesitate to pose with a beer glass.

Cookie Monster shares a drink with my friends.

The Disney Legends

The IAAPA Attractions Expo held many surprises for me, but none as gratifying and mind-bogglingly amazing as a panel session very aptly titled “Disney Legends: working with Walt”.

The Disney Legends themselves were Marty Sklar (story man), Blaine Gibson (artist), Bob Gurr (mechanical wizard), Richard Sherman (composer) and Harrison “Buzz” Price (numbers man), all sitting side by side and brilliantly moderated by Bob Rogers.

The whole point of the session was for them to share their stories about working with Walt Disney (as in the man, not the company), though of course we were all hoping for them to deviate a little bit into sideplots in order to get the best stories that these men could tell. All of them having helped build what Disney is today, it wasn’t surprising to find them all to be brilliant storytellers and effortless entertainers. (more…)

Lee Sheldon stopped by the ETC today and he told us:

Some stories are fit for a Haiku and some for an epic novel

Uncharted 2 pre-orders are here and Amazon, Best Buy and Game Crazy join GameStop on the pre-order bonus frenzy. Pre-order bonuses have been around for a while now, but it became popular relatively recently to offer in-game content as incentive to pre-order a videogame. Whether it’s a limited edition power, a special weapon, an extra level or a temporary bonus, in-game content has become the ultimate reward for customers ready to put down some cash in advance for an upcoming game.

Pre-orders bonuses are, at least at first glance, a win-win-win situation. The retailer pays the developer (I assume) to include the customized content; in turn, customers buy more advanced copies from said retailer, ensuring an early revenue from the game; and finally, players get to enjoy an extra bit of content from a game that they, in some cases, were going to purchase anyway.
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