| “Honesty good. Marketing bad.” Those are admirable words to live by in general. But marketing is just a subset of a larger topic: communication |
| Once you have a good, solid piece of information, you need to accept that in today’s information-glutted world, facts by themselves usually aren’t enough to capture the attention and interest of the public |
| First you need to arouse the interest of your audience, then you need to fulfil the expectations that you’ve created. Arouse and fulfil |
| If you want them to get something, you’d better show them rather than just tell them |
| Tell a good story and the whole world will listen. And this is a principle that holds for both audiences: academic as well as the general public |
| Great storytelling is infinitely difficult and elusive |
It’s a formula old as the ages, and as important today, in the age of information overload, as ever. A good story is like Jello: there’s always room for it. |
A lot of happy talk is the kind of self-congratulatory promotional writing that you find in badly written brochures. Unlike good promotional copy, it conveys no useful information, and focuses on saying how great we are, as opposed to delineating what makes us great.
|
Tim’s “cool cam” saved European Air War. It went from a money-leaking embarrassment to a top-tier release for MicroProse. The weekly meetings got easier, more developers were brought on, and the team managed to put together one hell of a game. It reviewed well after its 1998 release and is still a popular game for history buffs. And it probably wouldn’t have been released if not for a programmer that knew what the project needed most; the cool cam. |
| The “Cool Cam” was cool. But it didn’t change the fact that the game was almost completely broken. |
|
