Category: Philosophy


How Chemicals In Your Brain Make You A Jerk On The Internet

Filed under: Gaming, Philosophy by Malgayne — 16 Comments
August 23, 2010

I’ve recently picked up a copy of Jonah Lehrer’s How We Decide, a book I haven’t yet completed but (so far) highly recommend.  The book itself is about behavioral psychology and neuroscience, but I found it specifically enlightening in regards to the study of community management.

Anyone who does business with people online is familiar with John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.

Courtesy, of course, of Penny Arcade.

People are jerks on the Internet.  This is not news, and a lot of digital ink has already been spent discussing and rehashing this concept, in ways both humorous and otherwise.  It’s one of the immutable laws of the Internet, and no one who has ever worked with an online community would think to tell you otherwise.  The question that is more important to community managers, of course, is why—and about this I believe Mr. Lehrer may have something to say.

Mr. Lehrer refers to an experiment conducted by a Harvard scientist named Joshua Greene.  In the experiment, which is intended to shed some light on why people make moral decisions the way they do, participants are asked to respond to moral questions while hooked up to a brain scanner.  The first of the questions is as follows:

You are the driver of a runaway trolley.  The brakes have failed.  The trolley is approaching a fork in the track at top speed.  If you do nothing, the train will stay left, where it will run over five maintenance workers who are fixing the track.  All five workers will die.  However, if you steer the train right—this involves flicking a switch and turning the wheel—you will swerve onto a track where there is one maintenance worker.  What do you do?  Are you willing to intervene and change the path of the trolley?

According to Mr. Lehrer, roughly 95% of participants in this study agree that they would throw the switch—that changing the track is the right thing to do.  Some even go so far as to claim a moral imperative—that not changing the track is a moral failure on the part of the trolley driver.  A second thought experiment is then posed:

You are standing on a footbridge over the trolley track.  You see a trolley racing out of control, speeding toward five workmen who are fixing the track.  All five men will die unless the trolley can be stopped.  Standing next to you on the footbridge is a very large man.  He is leaning over the railing, watching the trolley hurtle toward the men.  If you sneak up on the man and give him a little push, he will fall over the railing and into the path of the trolley.  Because he is so big, he will stop the trolley from killing the maintenance workers.  Do you push the man off the footbridge?  Or do you allow five men to die?

Lehrer notes that in this scenario, despite the fact that the mathematics of the situation—five lives or one—are identical, almost no one is willing to make the decision to kill the one and save the five.  The experimenter reasons that these represent two different classes of moral decision, calling them “personal” and “impersonal” moral decisions.  In the former scenario, all I really do is flick a switch and turn a wheel.  In the second, I must physically pick up and fling a stranger to a horrible death.  I am physically using my body to do harm to his body.  In the former, there is a layer of abstraction between myself and the horrible act I have been forced to commit.  In the latter, I am forced to look my own actions (and the victim thereof) in the eye.  What was a moral imperative, suddenly becomes murder.

The interesting thing about this is that, as Greene points out, this distinction is not a vague or fuzzy one—it’s actually hard-wired, directly into our brains.  When the subject is presented with the second choice, an entirely different set of neurons lights up.  The decision is made in a different part of the brain.

Before I started working for Wowhead, I worked for the ZAM Network—at the time, a holding company that owned a number of different MMO sites, including Allakhazam, Thottbot, and the MMOUI network of sites.  When Wowhead became part of the ZAM Network, no announcement was made right away—the team wanted to be able to spend some time time discussing how exactly the announcement would be made.

This is the Internet, though, and nothing stays a secret for long.  Within an hour after the paperwork had been finalized, the info was leaked on a tech blog that Wowhead had been purchased.  In response, we wrote a hurried announcement for the front page of the site, talked a little bit about why Wowhead had taken this step, and provided an email address for people to contact.  My first job working on Wowhead was to monitor the emails coming in to this address.

Over the course of the next two weeks, we received hundreds of emails.  Many of them were complimentary, curious, or just had simple questions, but a good number of them were written in outrage—people were furious, angry that Wowhead had “sold out”.  My (self-assumed) responsibility was to read, understand, and respond to every one of these emails.

As I wrote these responses, I noticed something odd—the minute the writer of the angry email received a response, their tone changed completely.  It was as though the writers didn’t realize that these emails did not simply get dumped into a virtual bin somewhere—they were shocked to find that a real, honest-to-goodness human being was reading these responses, and hand-writing individual replies back to each one.  The moment one of these replies was received, the writers would back off immediately and apologize for being harsh.  I didn’t have to say much—just a little “hey, we’re not going anywhere or changing everything, give us a chance”—and people calmed down very quickly.

People are jerks on the Internet.  But I don’t think the reason for this is because the anonymity shields them from consequences—increasingly, people are becoming married to their usernames.  I know that if you google “Malgayne“, you can quickly find anything I’ve ever written.  If I were to post something embarrassing, rude, or ill-advised on this blog, anyone who was offended could spend ten minutes matching my username to my Twitter account and Facebook, which would give them anything they needed to know to find me in the future.  I am not anonymous enough that I can shield myself from dealing with the consequences of what I say.

No, people are jerks on the internet because as far as your brain cells are concerned, no one else on the Internet is a real person.

The Internet is the trolley switch that keeps me from realizing that by taking this action, I will be murdering a human being.  It’s the thin layer of implausibility which interferes with my brain’s ability to make the connection that by being a dick to this guy on a forum, I’m actually bullying him just as much as I would be if I called him an asshole to his face on the street.  It’s the colorful set of pixels that keeps me from realizing that this gnome I’m griefing in World of Warcraft is a real person somewhere—somebody who had a hard day and just wants to relax by farming some leather, and now I’ve taken even that from him by camping his corpse for 45 minutes.

In order to effectively manage an online community, we need to realize that this is not simple “bad behavior” on the part of our users—it’s chemical.  The decisions we make when interacting with people online are governed by an entirely different part of the brain than the decisions we make when interacting with people in person.  Even fine, righteous, morally upstanding people behave differently when they’re dealing with people online, because suddenly interpersonal ethics are being governed by a part of the brain that was built for something else entirely.

If we want to be good community managers, we need to remember two important things:

  1. Every time we feel tempted to be rude, cruel, or judgmental towards someone else, we must forcibly remind ourselves that behind those pixels is a real person, with real feelings and real wishes that need to be addressed, and:
  2. Unless forcibly reminded, no one—no matter how good a person they may be—can be expected to consistently abide by #1.

For those who are interested, Jonah Lehrer maintains his own blog, called The Frontal Cortex, at http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/frontal-cortex/.

Like This!

Tags: , ,
Comment

Games to Teach the Youth

Filed under: Gaming, Philosophy by Argent — 12 Comments
August 3, 2010

For most of my life I have been unhappy with the education that has been offered to me. Few countries know how to deal with gifted or troubled students, and only a few teachers are able to act properly when they find one. The bane of the genius and the idiot is to never be understood, they say. Well, I did a little thinking, some more talking, and finally decided to do some writing on the topic as well. Why do we often find education inadequate, and why are students growing increasingly uninterested in the classroom activities?

A simple answer would be something like “They are not interesting.” Well, let’s stick with this and try to figure out how to make learning more interesting. After all you can be the greatest teacher the world has ever known and will ever know, but if your students are not interested in the stuff you are talking about, almost all of your talent is wasted. We can look at neurobiology, or at religion, or at psychology, or at philosophy, and we would probably find some pretty good answers. However, I would like to offer you a drastically different approach to the problem – let’s look at games.

Games, unlike dry learning, are by definition interesting. Some of you may remember my blog from a while back – Gaming Can Make a Better World. If you haven’t seen it, I would recommend reading it and watching the video, it has some points relative to what I am going to talk about here. If you don’t want to – that’s fine, I am not going to base this blog on the other one.

So let’s get to the core of the problem. Studying is rarely interesting. Gaming usually is. So if we could combine the two – somehow – we have a potential recipe for success. Maybe if we looked deeply into what makes games interesting and look at what makes schools boring… then we might be on the tracks of a revolutionary redesign of the educational system as we understand it, and have understood it for hundreds of years. And just for the purposes of this blog, I am going to take World of Warcraft as an example of a game, and the American high school education as an example of schooling system.

Achievements & Failures

In yet another blog I talked about what attracts me to WoW. I won’t ask you to read it if you haven’t, but my point there was that one of the most addicting elements of WoW and all the other MMORPGs is that fact that they are virtually endless. There is always something that’s just beyond reach. In a way, you can sense a feeling of continuity – you’ve spent weeks trying to slay Heroic Professor Putricide, Blood-queen Lana’thel, and Sindragosa. It was hard. It was time consuming. But now all three lay dead at your feet, you feel a surge of exhilaration from the colossal achievement you’ve accomplished… yet the Lich King is still within an arm’s reach. What do you do? You don’t stop raiding for a month basking in the glory of the fact that you’ve destroyed those very hard fights. No, tired you get up on your feet and run to the Lich King, because you know he offers a new challenge to you and your fellows. You will likely fail time and again before climbing this mountain. But what do you do when failures knocks your door down? You try again. And again. And again! And then you succeed. And there is another goal to aim for, and you know that after you conquer it, there will be another one. Yet you don’t give up, because you know the game will never end – you keep moving towards this mysterious final challenge.

So what did we learn? Games offer infinite number of attempts to succeed. Games always offer you one more “level” – and that level feels like the next piece of a giant puzzle. Games don’t punish you for failures, yet they stimulate you positively towards success. “Congratulations, you won! Here’s a prize.” or “Aww, you failed. It’s alright, I’ll just hold on to the prize until you win :)” – that’s the basic philosophy of all successful games I know of.

School, you will notice, is quite the contrary. Usually you have only one shot to do a test, exam, quiz, or homework assignment correctly. Wouldn’t you say that the goal of our schools it to teach students that they should either do something correctly on the first try, or suffer the consequences? It certainly looks like that to me. In addition to this, whenever you were being lectured, how often has your professor or teacher prompted for interactivity in the classroom? You might come from a school better than mine, but in my own experiences I have very rarely caught myself thinking “Hmm, we didn’t really discuss this particular case in this lesson. I wonder if the next one will be about it.” or “Oh, this makes sense! I should have known that, this is clearly how the world works!” Instead I have often wondered why we are learning this particular thing, since I would normally be unable to put it in any context. Only rarely would a following lesson feel like an extension and clarification of a previous one.

And the big one in my eyes – failures in school. Failures are severely punished, and chance for redemption is very rarely given. As I mentioned above, shouldn’t the goal of our education be to learn whatever we are supposed to learn? And if that is the case, why does it feel like there is a little “but you have only one chance” attached to the end of this mission statement? Let me introduce you to the concept of positive/negative reinforcement and punishment, all four of which are generally psychological concepts: the “positive/negative” part refers to adding or subtracting something to or from an individual’s environment respectively; “reinforcement/punishment” refers to the goal of encouraging or discouraging specific behavior. Or in other words:

  • Positive Reinforcement – adding something good to an individual’s environment (positive) to encourage a specific behavior (reinforcement). For example, increasing a student’s grade when they do an extra assignment they were not asked to do.
  • Negative Reinforcement – removing something bad from an individual’s environment (negative) to encourage a specific behavior (reinforcement). For example, lifting the requirement to turn homework in on time for a week when a student does an extra assignment they were not asked to do.
  • Positive Punishment – adding something bad to an individual’s environment (positive) to discourage a specific behavior (punishment). For example, giving a student’s extra homework when they don’t do their original homework.
  • Negative Punishment – removing something good from an individual’s environment (negative) to discourage a specific behavior (punishment). For example, removing a student’s privilege to retake a quiz when they sleep in class.

Now that I am done with the psychology lessons, let’s see what this means. Student works hard to complete a homework on time (behavior we’d like to promote!), turns it in, but receives a bad grade (adding something bad to the student’s environment). So we are adding something bad to the environment in order to… encourage  behavior? You, dear readers, are correct – this is not on the list. It’s not going to work, because only a few people will think “Oh, I didn’t work hard enough, here, let me work even harder and hope for a better grade!” Most students will react with something along the lines of “I worked so hard on this assignment, I showed up to class, I turned it in on time, and I get a stinking C for it?! Why study if I am going to be getting low grades anyway?” I exaggerate a little here, but only a little. The seed of the idea is there. Think about an alternative situation – one where students were given a second, and third, and fourth chance. Think of a situation where the thing that was valued was the actual acquisition of knowledge, not its perfect display under stress, while being giving only one chance to do so.

Geography and the World

Let’s start with the gaming aspect of this again. I have often joked that I know Azeroth’s geography much better than I know our own Earth’s. The sad part to this is that it’s true. You argue that Azeroth is much smaller than the Earth, but trust me, I know so little of our planet’s geography, that it would barely cover a land as big as the Barrens. Granted, I am not a geography person, and it has never attracted me, but you would think that after taking classes about it for 3 years, I would know more than the 7 continents and a handful of countries. But let’s look at Azeroth now. Wetlands you say? Sure, south of Arathi Highlands, north of Loch Modan. Lots of marshes, populated by gnolls and moss beasts for the most part. Dwarves, Dark Iron Dwarves, Humans, and Dragonmaw Orcs represent the majority of the “high” races in this zone. Grim Batol, a major historical site lies to the east; Menethil Harbor, named after the Menethil line of human kings, lies to the west, where it serves as one of the major ports for the Alliance. Stonetalon Mountains? Between Ashenvale, the Barrens, and Desolace. Contested area where orcs and night elves fight for control, all the while goblins destroy the forests. Long story short – I know Azeroth better than I should.

Surely, there must be something to take from all this. I have long thought why I know a virtual world so well, and the best answer I came up with is the following – I can travel in it. Freely. I can walk through the Barrens’ savanna, look at the landscape, stop and enjoy the view, then continue walking south. There I can see the remarkable Thousand Needles, bordering with the Shimmering Flats, and the scorching deserts of Tanaris and Silithus nearby. I can see the entire world with my own eyes, I can denote its most interesting features, I can explore at my own pace, I can interact with the world. Let me make this more visible – I can interact with the world. Azeroth does not exist just in my textbook, nor does it take me thousands of dollars to explore it. It’s right here.

Geography teachers and software designers out there, read this carefully. What made my exploration of Azeroth an activity I longed and wished for was not its dynamics. No, it was the fact that I could go and see the world myself.  Think back to the days when you were still in school – or back to your geography classes, if you are still in there. Now, imagine you were given – either freely or for some ridiculously low sum – a very specific piece of software, a little similar to Google Earth. It would allow you to go anywhere around the planet. It would, in fact, allow you to travel deep beneath and high above the surface. It would give you all kinds of information about the location you are in right now, but it wouldn’t  be in form of long and excruciating lessons in a book. It would be more like little snippets. Or even better – you would be able to meet with people from all those areas, and they would have stories to tell you. Legends as well. You would always be able to inquire about a greater level of detail, and those people would gladly provide them to you. And you know what? Not only would they talk to you, but they would have accents, just to give the entire experience a more realistic feeling. Whatever team designs this might even decide to incorporate culture and history! Just imagine…

History and Character Association

My problem with history has been closely tied to the one I have with geography – all of it seems so dry. Dates, places, years, numbers, names, families, treaties, and whatnot. I could tell you more about the War of the Ancients than I could about the Hundred-Year War. I could talk about the Second War more than I could about the World War II. So we are back at the place we started at – history is detached from our immediate life, just like geography is. Or all the other subjects – but I will talk about that later on.

To bring this into context, I am actually going to refer to something other than games for just a brief moment – books. If you are a reader, you probably know that one of the most interesting elements in a book is the character building. We follow their journeys through space and time, we see with their eyes, we feel with their hearts. In a way we become their friends. I have found a similar phenomenon in good games. One only needs to look at our forums from a few months ago to see that I am correct. We had burning hate against Garrosh and Varian (hey, fictional characters, yes?); we had strong warm love for them too; we had people attack and defend Sylvanas with passion. I am sure you have some WoW characters you like, some you dislike, some you love, and maybe some you hate. Or admire. Or despise. Or loathe. In this Blizzard has succeeded, I think – it has created fictional characters strong and believable enough to make people across the globe feel for them.

So why can’t history books do that? There are few historical figures we might have emotional attachment to, but they are very few. Hitler. King Leonidas? A couple of my own nation’s heroes of the past. My list is already almost depleted. By now you should have no doubts that I can give you the names and stories of over 20 key figures in Azeroth’s history. The reason I am able to do that and still be an Earth historical failure is similar to the one that causes my inability to engage in geographical studies – it’s out there, in the books, not in here, in my mind. To me, it was a memorable moment when I help Thrall and Sylvanas retake Undercity. It felt good, I was important! Definitely didn’t feel as excited when I was reading about France reclaiming its provinces lost to England 200 years ago. If only somebody could figure out a way to make history more personal… oh, wait. I had an idea like that a little up. Remember that piece of software I asked you to think of? Well, what if we added a modification to it? Let’s say you can now travel not only through space, but time as well. You can go back thousand of years. There (or then?) you can charge side by side with Roman Legionnaires, Persian Immortals, Alexander’s Companion Cavalry, Belisarius’ Cataphracts, Aztecs’ Jaguar-warriors, Hannibal’s Carthaginians, and all the other famous military units. You could sit down and have a tea with queen Elizabeth, discuss grain costs with Caesar, debate philosophy with Aristotle, joke around with Lincoln, or bask in the glory of Attila himself. You could be a pharaoh commanding his thousands of slaves to build him a pyramid; you could be a lord living in a castle of stone, where servants would stay up day and night, ready to satisfy your smallest whim; you could be be… anyone. Anywhere. Anytime. You could live history, you could help make history!

Integrated Learning

I spoke of the general philosophy of our education system, and how I think it could be improved upon – using gaming practices. I talked about two of the less “science-y” subjects, and how learning and teaching in them could be improved upon… yep, with gaming techniques. Unfortunately I am in no position to offer advice about how to teach math and science better -  I have always been a quick learner there, and a teachers’ inability to teach has never irritated me as much. However I do have a few thoughts about how to improve the learning experience in general – it’s a method I have heard to be called integrated learning (or teaching).

The core principle of this integration is that classes in school almost always feel separated from one another. There is no apparent connection. You go to math, then you go to art, then you go physics, then biology, then psychology, then maybe some language, and you are done for the day. The point here is that if I asked you to applied whatever you learned in math to the next art lecture, you would look at me like I told you to make this bear ride a tiger to the local farmers’ market, or buy me some Saronite Bars so I can smelt them into Pygmy Oil. Even if you are in a sound school, chances are that your teachers won’t try to relate one class to another, so at the end of the semester, or year, or four years, you would leave school with a few bags full of knowledge, but have no idea what to do with it. Maybe you are a smart cookie and have already learned that out of the 8 classes you are taking, only 2 will help you with your career of choice. Awesome, you get your good grades in all the classes (so you look on resumes), but you only really know those 2 classes you found helpful. Maybe you even find the job you were looking for. But consider this for a moment: did the other 6 classes really only waste your time?

I am majoring in computer science, and am considering double-majoring it with applied mathematics. Pretty narrow field, isn’t it? Finish college, go write code, be happy. Not so. I am paying extra attention to my humanities and social science classes, because they teach me a lot about how people act. You can see how this will help me not only with finding a job, but also with maintaining it and growing in it. I am paying attention to my physics, chemistry, and biology classes, because there are a lot of applications for computers in those fields. If I was looking for a programmer to write software for my, say hospital, I would take somebody who knew not only how to code, but who knew his way around the various aspects of biology, so he could code optimally.

But I haven’t told you anything new. I told you that everything you learn is important, and kind of gave a few examples. Let’s talk about how we can take the education offered to the youths today and turn it into something useful not only for them, but for our society, nation, and world as well. Integration is what I spoke of in the beginning of this section. My good friend Google says the following:

“integration: the act or process of making whole or entire”

Make something whole. Take some chunks of stuff and make them something whole. What chunks, what whole? Chunks of knowledge, I say. Teach students how to combine them, teach them how to see the interactions between them, teach them how to apply principles from one discipline to another. Use your knowledge about geometry to do better art. Use your knowledge of psychology to explain why history happened the way it did. Use your knowledge of physics to explain internal bodily processes. It is all a single unit, and it should be thought as such – it is all knowledge. A little bit like a game. Or a character. My paladin has talents, but they are meaningless without spells. He has an experience bar, but it gathers rust without quests and NPCs. He has gear, but it helps me not at all if I keep running RFC with my Emblems epics. Singular relatively simple elements coming together to form Voltron something vast and complex. Reminds me of cells, tissues, organs, systems, organism…

“Divide and conquer.” Words said by a pretty successful man – you know his name. Kind of implies that dividing something whole to smaller pieces weakens it. I wonder if that man would have been able to accomplish all the things he did if the divided parts had come back together…

Gladiator image courtesy to adonihs.

Comment

Apple and Tylenol: A Study in Corporate Communication and Crisis Management

Filed under: Business, Philosophy by Malgayne — 6 Comments
July 1, 2010

Apple has responded to these concerns in a hilariously inept open letter.  I’ve added a few paragraphs to the end of the post to discuss this.

I can say these with complete confidence as I type this on my MacBook Pro, while listening to music on iTunes and waiting for my brand new iPhone 4 to arrive in the mail: In the last year, Apple has laid the groundwork for its own downfall.

The old and new Tylenol bottles.

Crisis = Opportunity

In 1982, someone tampered with a number of bottles of Tylenol while they were on store shelves, adding small amounts of cyanide to the medicine.  As a result, seven people were killed—including 3 members of one family.  In response, Johnson & Johnson (the makers of Tylenol) acted immediately—they performed one of the largest product recalls in history, voluntarily reclaiming and destroying 31 million Tylenol capsules, at a cost to the company of over $100 million.  Johnson & Johnson then re-debuted their product with tamper-proof packaging, a practice which is now standard in the industry.

Despite the $100 million price tag, the Tylenol recall is today considered to be one of the finest examples of corporate crisis management in American history.  Tylenol sales immediately bounced back up to pre-crisis levels.  Suddenly Tylenol, which days before had been a poster-child for corporate negligence, was leading the way in consumer safety—and taking action which other players in that industry had to scramble to catch up with.  It is generally accepted that consumer confidence in the Tylenol brand was actually higher after the deaths took place than before.

Fast forward to the launch of the iPhone 4.  Just a few hours after the first purchasers got their phones home, users discovered a serious design flaw—when the phone was held in such a way that the holder’s palm bridged the gap between the two metal antenna panels on the bottom left corner of the phone (as is generally considered the only way to hold the phone), the antenna short-circuits and the phone loses reception.

This is a corporate crisis.  And like every corporate crisis, it is also an opportunity.  The question is, how is Apple going to handle it?

Well, it wasn’t long before Steve Jobs gave us our answer:

It’s not a big issue.

You are in a marginal cell area. It has nothing to do with the phone.

Just avoid holding it in that way.

Gripping any mobile phone will result in some attenuation of its antenna performance, with certain places being worse than others depending on the placement of the antennas. This is a fact of life for every wireless phone. If you ever experience this on your iPhone 4, avoid gripping it in the lower left corner in a way that covers both sides of the black strip in the metal band, or simply use one of many available cases.

There is no reception issue. Stay tuned.

If you read the Wikipedia article on crisis management, you’ll find a few examples of successful crisis management—but you’ll also find a number of examples of unsuccessful crisis management.  One of the examples cited is the Ford/Firestone tire fiasco that took place in 2000.  Regarding Ford and Firestone’s poor handling of the crisis, Wikipedia has this to say:

The two companies’ committed three major blunders early on, say crisis experts. First, they blamed consumers for not inflating their tires properly. Then they blamed each other for faulty tires and faulty vehicle design. Then they said very little about what they were doing to solve a problem that had caused more than 100 deaths—until they got called to Washington to testify before Congress.

Sound familiar?

Apple’s behavior in this crisis is a textbook example of poor crisis management.  In turn, they’ve refused to acknowledge that a problem exists, blamed their customers, blamed other companies (like AT&T), and finally been intentionally obtuse regarding what action they intend to take (if any) to resolve the crisis.  It remains unclear even now whether Apple intends to take any steps at all to resolve these problems.

In fact, Apple has created a corporate culture that is antithetical to the very idea of crisis management.  Successfully resolving a corporate crisis requires admitting error, requires apology, requires taking immediate action at visible cost to the company to make sure the user experience is a good one.  Apple’s entire brand strategy is centered around the concept that they simply don’t make mistakes.  Steve Jobs knows what’s best, and if you just trust him, then he’ll take care of you.  I know you say you want multi-tasking, but what you really want is task completion and widgets.  He has a long history of being right of course—that’s the reason for Apple’s success.  But Steve Jobs, and Apple, really have no idea how to handle being wrong.

Why Should Apple Care?

Now there is one obvious argument in favor of Apple’s current PR strategy: 1.7 million iPhones sold in 3 days. “What does this PR crisis even matter?”, Apple execs will say.  ”There are a lot of complaints, petitions, funny images, 4chan memes and Hitler videos going around, but who cares as long as people keep buying iPhones?”

This is flawed thinking, and Apple—the masters of brand management—should know better.

I work for a website called Wowhead.  We are currently the market leader for World of Warcraft database sites.  This is a space that’s crowded with competitors, including Thottbot, Allakhazam, Wowdb, and to a lesser extent WoWWiki.  We have the tireless efforts of our team to thank for our continued success.  But for initial success, we have to thank someone else entirely: Thottbot.

At the launch of WoW, Thottbot was king.  The site was ultra-fast, the interface was simple, and you never had to work too hard to get to the content you wanted to see.  Over time, though, anomalies crept into the data—monsters would appear in the wrong zones, bosses would be listed as dropping flowers amongst their normal array of loot.  User confidence in Thottbot began to weaken—people would complain about the inaccuracies to their friends, or laugh and make jokes to their guildies.  But Thottbot’s traffic didn’t decrease—in fact it increased over time.

The reason is simple: There were no adequate competitors.

The fact is that even though Thottbot had its share of issues, for most users it was still the best option available.  People forgave the anomalies in exchange for the simplicity and ease-of-use of the site interface, and this continued for a long time—until a competitor did come along: Wowhead.

Wowhead had cleaned up the data, and had designed a new interface from scratch with ease of use in mind, and over the course of the next year, traffic slowly bled off from Thottbot to Wowhead.  Today, Wowhead gets around three times Thottbot’s traffic.

But here’s the trick: Making a product that’s a little better than your competitors isn’t enough.

Some time later, the Curse Network launched Wowdb, another competing WoW database site, in the hopes of duplicating Wowhead’s path to success.  While the Wowdb project has been a boon to Curse in other ways (most notably providing a framework for them to expand easily to other games, like Aion or Warhammer Online), as a competitor to Wowhead it failed utterly.

Why?  Wowdb did everything right.  They had a solid development team.  They rolled out some exciting new features that Wowhead didn’t have, several of which Wowhead wasn’t able to develop until months later.  Their design was familiar, but still new.  They had the support of a well-established MMO network.  Why did they fail?

They failed because unlike Thottbot, Wowhead users weren’t looking for a replacement.

It’s hard to change an old habit.  Once you’re used to getting your news from Digg, it’s hard to switch to Reddit—even if someone gives you a convincing argument that Reddit is better.  Even if I can make a convincing argument that Android phones are superior to iPhones, people still don’t want to switch—if their iPhone works fine, why do I need a new one?  If Wowhead has all the info I ever need, why would I switch to Wowdb?  Wowdb failed because they didn’t have a compelling answer to that question.  Wowhead succeeded because Thottbot’s users already had a reason to switch—they just didn’t have another site to switch to.  Wowhead filled a need that already existed.  Wowdb tried to create a need where there was none.

The Straw That Broke the Customer’s Back

The first signs of a collapsing brand are never sales numbers.  Once sales start dropping, it’s already too late.  Anyone who’s read The Tipping Point knows that the spread of ideas and behaviors isn’t linear—it’s logarithmic.  Communities withstand a certain amount of pressure, and then they break.

This is an idea that people who work online frequently deal with.  If I run an ad-supported site, how many ads is too many? How intrusive should the ads be?  How do I balance the desires of the advertisers to get clicks with the desire of the users not to be irritated, so that the business is its most successful?  This is a difficult question, because communities don’t work on a linear scale.  You can’t just turn up the “annoyance meter” one click at a time, watching users leave your site in dribbles until you find the point where revenue is the highest.  What happens instead is that your pageviews stay near-constant as the annoyance meter gets higher and higher, until it finally reaches a particular point where it becomes too much—your community gets up and leaves en masse, leaving you scratching your head and wondering what happened.

The true danger of this situation lies in the fact that it’s often difficult to predict where this point is, even after you’ve crossed it—and once you’ve crossed it, you can’t go back. Thottbot’s users had already decided to leave before there was anywhere to go.  Curse made the mistake of assuming that Thottbot users switched to Wowhead because they thought Wowhead was better.  Wowhead was better, but Thottbot’s users switched because they thought Thottbot was bad.

Over the few years, Apple has dropped a huge number of straws on the backs of its users.  Apple rose to prominence on the power of its hipster charm, portraying itself as a creative, irrepressible minority struggling against the soulless corporate drones of IBM and Microsoft—their classic 1984 ad being a striking example.  Yet in the past few years, Apple has increasingly come off as Big Brother itself.  iTunes music files aren’t designed to play on other players.  They’ve fought to keep down Skype and Google Voice to protect their relationship with AT&T.  They’ve remotely disabled jailbroken phones.  They’ve maintained such tyrannical, arbitrary restrictions over iPhone app development that some of the best have resigned in disgust.  They’ve created an advertising API built directly into iOS so that app developers can run rich media ads using their closed app system, then built ad-blocking software into the browser they claim to use to support the “open web”. They even questioned a Foxconn employee about a leaked iPhone prototype using such “unbearable interrogation techniques” that the employee was supposedly driven to suicide.

The fact is, these days even the most hardcore of Apple fan-boys—like myself—are no longer comfortable admitting that they use Apple products.  A few days ago I noted that a game was causing my MacBook pro to overheat.  I posted it on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Buzz, and within seconds I had received responses in all three mediums raking me over the coals for owning an Apple product:

I think the solution here is simple: Get a PC, you tool :P

Take a hammer to the top of your MBP. Then hire a moving company to take something from one place to another. Smash some other shit for good measure. Then claim that they did it, sue them, settle out of court, and use that money to buy a PC with decent fucking cooling.

Get away from Apple….only way to fix that problem

Get a computer that was designed for something besides looking pretty?

Apple products are no longer the aesthete’s badge of honor.  Now they’re for blind, corporate sheep—people who are unwilling to look past the shiny design and see the at best kludgy, and at worst downright insidious, hardware that they’re using.

Apple sold 1.7 million iPhone 4s in the first 3 days, their biggest product launch of all time.  Apple’s bad corporate behavior hasn’t stopped their core audience—myself included—from buying their products.  But we used to be devoted fans.  We used to wear our iPods like badges of honor.  We were willing to buy any Apple product, no matter what it was, just because it was an Apple product.

Those days are gone.  Apple’s core userbase is starting to look a lot like Thottbot’s—they’re looking around for an alternative.  And as it is now, just like with Thottbot—there is no alternative.  As much as I respect the work that has been done on Android phones, they still haven’t released a product that can compete with iPhones in the places where it matters—design, responsiveness, and ease of use.  But eventually, the day will come.

How It Should Be Handled

If Apple wants to recover from this crisis, they need to take a page from Johnson & Johnson’s approach to crisis management.

Make a public apology. Jobs and crew need to acknowledge that there is a fundamental design flaw in their phones.  Acting as though it’s not a big deal makes it worse, not better.  My father is an actor, and one of the things he taught me was this: “Never laugh at your own joke.  If you laugh, the audience doesn’t have to.”  The same is true when you’re acknowledging a mistake.  If you acknowledge and publicly own up to a mistake, then there’s no longer any need for the legions of Mac-haters on the Internet to do it for you.

Recall the first generation of phones. I know it’s expensive—more than $100 million expensive.  But the quality of Apple’s brand is at stake, and if Apple takes a moment to knowingly and publicly put customers before immediate profits, it will spell greater revenues for them in the long run.  Imagine for a moment what a juggernaut Apple would be if they had the kind of customer faith and goodwill that Google does.  The only way to earn that goodwill is to be straight with your customers.  Re-debuting the phone with a non-conductive coating on the antenna band is a tiny investment compared to the level of profit that Apple could reach if they were once again able to convincingly argue that they were on the customers’ side.

I don’t expect that Apple will do this—it flies in the face of their whole corporate culture.  But if they don’t, it won’t be long before a competitor that honestly beats the iPhone will appear.  And when that happens, Apple’s core customer base will dry up overnight—and Apple execs will be left scratching their heads, wondering what went wrong.  Apple will tell their shareholders that it was the competitor that destroyed their business, but they’ll be wrong—it was Apple.

Edit: Apple has responded to these concerns in an open letter, which you can read about here.

Apple is addressing the issues by claiming that in fact, every iPhone launched since 2007 has been incorrectly calculating how many “bars” of connectivity to show at all times.  Gripping the iPhone incorrectly does cause the signal to drop, but no more than any other phone—it’s just that the phone was showing you bars you didn’t actually have, and when you grip the phone incorrectly, it (apparently) stops displaying those fraudulent bars.

There are two reasons why this response is hilariously insufficient.  One is that it seems willing to say anything, as long as that statement is not “You’re right.”  Apple is even willing to admit that they have made a mistake—as long as it’s their mistake and not the one you thought they made.  But the other, and the more significant, is that this doesn’t address the problem at all.

I recognize that the lower bars are the symptom by which we recognize the problem.  But the problem itself is the fact that when you hold the phone wrong, you drop calls. This has been tested and verified by measuring internet connectivity, and regardless of how many “bars” we’ve lost, the phone still becomes nearly unusable when you hold it normally, and that’s the problem Apple needs to solve.

This is exactly what we should expect from Apple: It’s more important for them to be right than for their users to be happy.  Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if we discovered the “bars” problem Apple claims doesn’t exist at all—that Apple is releasing a software update which will do nothing except break the formula they use to display connectivity, just to make it harder for their users to identify the real problem with their phones.

Comment

Facebook Privacy and Mind-Reading

Filed under: Philosophy, Politics by Malgayne — 9 Comments
June 5, 2010

I have always believed that, as a culture, mind-reading was the solution to all of our problems.

This sounds like a joke, but I prefer to think of it as a thought experiment.  Imagine, if you will, that everyone in the world could read minds. Think of the changes and the effect that would have on our culture.

Oh sure, there would be some growing pains as we get used to it.  The first few weeks would be terrible—every dirty secret you had, or thought you didn’t want to acknowledge, would be instantly known by everybody.  It’s hard to imagine a worse fate.

…except when it happens to everyone else too.  How can your boss judge you for secretly wanting to dress up like Jem and the Holograms when you know all about his illicit fantasies involving Hulk Hogan?  No one would ever be able to judge another person, lest they be judged.  Every single character flaw you had would be laid out for all the world to see, and no one could say a thing—because you could see every bad thing they’d ever done.

How could we ever argue? We’d instantly form a complete understanding of the other person’s point of view.  How could we hurt one another? It’s impossible to imagine being cruel or hurtful someone when you feel every pain as if it were your own.  We couldn’t lie, cheat, steal or murder—because everyone would instantly know what we’d done.  The more you think about it, the more you realize…once you get used to it, it might just be a perfect world.

I guess what I’m really trying to say is, I don’t care what Facebook does with my privacy settings.

Now I’ll be the first to recognize that Facebook trying to profit off of my personal information without informing me is serious bad news.  I disapprove whole-heartedly of this behavior.  But in general, the concept of using my personal preferences in order to better market to me things I might be interested in? That doesn’t bother me in the least.

The fact is these days, it’s getting harder and harder to keep secrets.  Everyone in the universe has a camera in their phone, so no matter what I do there’s a good chance it’ll wind up posted on Facebook somewhere.  Even if I want to keep some illicit activity a secret, all it takes is one photo-tag and everyone I know has found me out.  I can’t do anything too dastardly, even if I wanted to—because there’s no way to keep it a secret from my loved ones anymore.

Privacy is disappearing, and quickly—and I agree that this is difficult, painful, and disruptive to our lives.  But if we ever really got there—I mean really got there, where privacy truly was a thing of the past, and no one could keep any secrets anymore….well, would that be so bad?

Tags: , ,
Comment

How Interactive Are Videogames?

Filed under: Gaming, Philosophy by nabterayl — 15 Comments
May 25, 2010

Reality? Heresy?

Natalie here (turns out “Natalie” is already taken as a wordpress username … who knew?).

Let me start this post with an acknowledgment, followed by a confession.  The acknowledgment: I am bound by secret gamer law to hate Roger Ebert and all his works.  This is, of course, because Ebert once said (and to my knowledge continues to believe) that videogames can never be art—a statement that all gamers are honor-bound to abhor on principle.  In making this statement, Roger Ebert has made himself an enemy of the gamer state, and all true gamers are bound to deride him at every opportunity.

The confession: I admire Roger Ebert enormously, both as a writer and as a thinker.  And while I disagree with him that videogames, by nature, can never be art, I do think that he raises an interesting point.

Here and here, Ebert articulates why he thinks that videogames can never be art.  I’ll extract the two most interesting passages:

Video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control.

My notion is that it grows better the more it improves or alters nature through an passage through what we might call the artist’s soul, or vision.

Here’s the question I think these two passages raise: Are videogames artistically interactive?

Let us assume (as we are bound to do by gamer law) that videogames are, or at least contain, art.  Is that art interactive?  Do my “player choices” contribute to or change the art in a videogame?  Assuming (as we are) that nature is “improved or altered” through the passage of the soul of the artist of a videogame, am I part of that “artist?”  Is nature passing through my soul to be improved or altered?  When I play a game, am I in any meaningful sense the “artist” of that game?

Non-Interactive ArtLet me draw from two non-videogame examples that are not artistically interactive to better illustrate what I mean.  Suppose both you and I are observing a painting that is a piece of art (say the Mona Lisa, if you need a specific example).  You and I will be having different experiences—the way I react to the painting is different from the way you react to the painting.  In other words, the identity of the consumer changes the overall artistic experience, and in that sense, we might call viewing a painting an “interactive” experience.  But when I ask whether videogames are “artistically interactive,” I am referring to something more interactive than this.

Now suppose you and I are at an old penny arcade and we come across one of those coin-operated peep show machines where we can turn a crank to animate a little flip book animation.  Let’s further suppose that the animation in this particular machine is undeniably a work of art.  In order to view the entire work, you and I must put a penny in the slot and turn the crank.  In short, we must interact with the machine.  But that is all we are interacting with—the art itself (the animation) is essentially unchanged by our interaction, although it is our interaction that allows us to reveal or uncover the art that is hiding within the depths of the storage medium.  When I ask whether videogames are “artistically interactive,” I am asking not whether our interaction is necessary to uncover, unlock, or experience the art, but whether we interact with the art itself.

My suspicion, and I welcome disagreement on this point in the comments, is that videogames are not artistically interactive.  In fact, I submit that they are nothing more than really complicated peep show machines, whose cranks have become keyboards, mouses, and gamepads, and whose art can be viewed in more combinations than simply turning the crank forwards or backwards.

In short, I submit that while we interact with the game, the art is not meaningfully subject to player choice, and that however many souls there may be through which nature passes to be improved or altered by a videogame,  the soul of the end-user gamer is not one of them.  In a follow-up post I’ll offer some thoughts on why this might be significant, but in the meantime, let me pause here, and submit my heresy to the judgment of the gamer state.

Tags: , , , ,
Comment
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.