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Empire Avenue – Stop me from Selling you. Please.
I spoke a while back about why I sell people on Empire Avenue. Now that the game has matured I’m trying to adopt a bit more casual of a gameplay style… still want to make the big bucks but want to focus my time on producing content rather than winning the game. To achieve that I’d really like to spend less time updating my portfolio. Normally I do this each morning — trimming the dead weight and finding sweet dividend paying seeds to plant. This is time consuming even considering how the new interface changes (the Dublin release) have improved my workflow. So please here’s two simple tips that makes…
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Guilt based motivation
Engaging consumers — whether they be readers, viewers, or application users — is always a tricky business. One underutilized tool that I touched on in a previous post is guilt. I’ll go into some more detail here in a more general manner (the other post was specific to games). Guilt is a prime motivator of my own activities, especially my online activities. Contents creators should try and leverage this when possible — though respectfully, after a while guilt just turns into annoyance. Some examples of what has been effective: If someone I know has a book published or other content created I buy it. My definition of “I Know” has…
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Creating Emotion in Games – Guilt as Gameplay Mechanic
The Day My Horse Died There’s a drive from several studios in the videogames industry to start building emotional experiences, hoping to hook player’s into storylines and franchises by using more sophisticated storytelling methods. Many of these, like the detailed movie-eque conversation systems that the Mass Effect franchise use have achieved significant strides in this area. But even in a longer developed industry like movie making, ‘creating emotion’ is still very difficult. Drama can become melodrama — a scene that should make a person cry, might evoke laughter instead if mistimed. And at the end of the day some people just like different things than others — when I went…
