THOUGHT (aka Centric's Blog)

For the past two days, I’ve been playing with the Spore Creature Creator.  Did I say "playing"?  I meant "researching."  All in the name of Science, of course.

Oh, hell, who am I kidding?  This is a bundle of ridiculous joy, a Frankenstein lab with Play-Doh bodies, Mr. Potato Head parts, and Pixar life.  You start out with a blobby body that you can contort, shrink, and pummel into whatever shape you want, and then you slap on legs, mouths, eyes, arms and other appendages until you have a creature that runs around, dances, and has offspring.  The children are adorable, all extra large eyes and tentacles, and they mimic their parent’s behavior.  When you’re done, you save your creatures and share them to the Sporeapedia where they’ll eventually become the bestiary of Spore’s sprawling universe.

The best part of the SCC is how easy it is to use.  I wasn’t kidding when I namechecked Play-Doh and Mr. Potato Head.  Making monsters is as intuitive as those simple games.  Move your mouse over the body, the skin goes transparent and the vertebrae highlight.  Spin the mouse wheel, and the muscles around that vertebrae expand. Slap on some legs and arms, move the mouth around, and suddenly you’ve got a creature that blinks in amazement and smiles every time you change its body.

There’s enough depth to keep the statistic nut inside you going for days.  Do I make an herbivore that can sing well to find a mate yet has a weak charge?  Do I add more legs and faster feet?  Or do I just do crazy with eyes ’cause it looks really cool?  The game itself isn’t even ready, and already there are four hundred sixty thousand user-created creatures (and there will probably another fifty thousand by the time I actually finish writing this post).

 What gets me is how easy it is to get attached to these wee beasties.  While a lot of this is due to the fluid animation and charming gestures the creatures make (when was the last time you saw a giant spider do a sumo wrestler’s shiko?  Or, y’know, bat its many eyes at you in a come hither glance?), but most of it is thanks to the magic of the Uncanny Valley, the idea that as a figure becomes more lifelike, a person’s positive emotional reaction will actually dip.  It’s easy for me to get attached to these goofy creatures, but show me the models from The Polar Express, and I get the creeps.  Mr. Incredible and my Striped Faffasquat don’t approach anything near photorealism, and you know what?  That’s fine.

While the creatures and their backgrounds aren’t real, their look still feels right.  I think that’s because Will Wright and his team have realized something that manga creators have known for ages: a simple character in a complex environment means people can easily immerse themselves.  Instead of getting faffing about  with pointless gabble about how 3d their world should be, Maxis is probably going to make something that is pretty to look at, just real enough for people to accept what’s going on (with things like shadows and gravity and movements that don’t look like cardboard cutouts), and then there will be a sudden drop in productivity as people around the world spend their waking moments leading their creations out of the amino acid muck and up to the stars.

One more thing to keep in mind is that Spore is a game, and games are meant to be fun.  That may sound like an obvious idea, what how many times have you heard some sim queen stamp his virtual feet and pout that virtual worlds aren’t games?  Isn’t that another way of saying that they’re not, y’know, fun?  Call me biased (and I know I’m biased, since my professional and geek roots are in games), but if given a choice between developming a pardigm-shifting method of personal interaction or teaching a three-footed horned giraffe how to walk, sign me up for the giraffe cages, dude.  I’ve long yelled (much to the office’s chagrin) that if people building virutal worlds aren’t raiding the ranks of video game developers, they’re missing out on a gold mine of experience.  Immersion, ease of use, fun: these are what you get from a good game.  Along with the giraffes.  Man, they’re cute.

Last week’s discussion with a client was a disaster.

Here’s the skinny.

These guys lease space in the leading supermarket chains in North America and install DVD rental kiosks right behind the check out counters. Big traffic, so-so business. The problem is that supermarket shoppers rarely notice anything after they’ve paid and checked out.

So, how do we get their attention?

A solution, they say, is to use their big name ad agency’s advice and begin a week long PPC (pay-per-click) program with a newish publisher who is “doing great in five cities.”

It’s important to note that the agency here is so big that they actually own the publication in question, plus a leading hockey team and everything else Clear Channel doesn’t own.

“Have you or your family ever heard of this site?” I asked.

“Well, no, but our agency is run by a billionaire and he either knows what he’s talking about or can buy whatever we need to succeed," they said.

“Can’t argue with that,” I said.

What I wanted to say was that they are heading into a dark place and are wasting their money by trying to pull eyeballs into unfamiliar places using unfamiliar behavior. Instead, I used all the skill I could muster and said the magic b-school words, “But have you considered…?”

Have you considered creating a program gently informing your customers that there is a very cool and cost effective movie rental machine right there in front of them when they check out? That the message will be found where the shoppers regularly go to see news of their TV shows and movies? Where they research products and services? Places they go to every week without fail? Social media, boys!

I tell them that of all the top 10 sites in the world, maybe half are social media and the rest are search engines. I raise my voice that there are social media activators that can grab a customer’s attention by the throat without leaving any of the tell-tale paid ad marks.

And, if you know what you are doing, it won’t cost nearly as much as paying someone to go where they don’t want to go and click where they really don’t want to click.

So, here is where things got weird.

The client says, “Hey I hear you, but my boss is very impressed with the agency’s cred. If it fails, I can always say I used the best.”

Cut to the sales guy turning red.

Okay, it’s time for some more bold pronouncements.

I think that today marks the end of corporate wankery as we know it. Meaningless mission statements, impenetrable double-speak, chest-pounding talk of "leadership" and "global front-runners" all fall away. The traditional notion of "the big box brand" is dead. The bigger, better, grow-at-all-costs mentality is over.

Why?

One simple site: http://buynlarge.com/

Go ahead. Click on it. Looks like any other global megaconglomerate’s site, doesn’t it? Except for a few odd turns of phrase. "The family that pays together, stays together." "The world’s premier engineering, robotics, construction, retail, consumer goods, space, science, and media company." T-shirts with 1000 words of legal disclaimers like "The Buy n Large Corporation acknowledges that this shirt may or may not be worn according to the Buy n Large standardized undergarments usage agreement (BnLSG3ba). Viewpoints and endorsements made by this shirt’s wearer/owner (the Customer) do not represent the Buy n Large Corporation, its affiliates, partners or sub-brands . . ." A new video game console that features a "new Joyspend controller, which allows kids to adjust their investment portfolios without interfering with game play." A drug designed to simulate the shopping experience.

Yes, this is an alternate reality site. It’s a site for a company that doesn’t exist. But the sheer depth, breadth, and comprehensiveness of the site, the way they take apart every single silly self-congratulatory, inward-looking bit of corp-speak and corporate positioning is breathtaking. Someone spent a lot of time to develop all this content and make it fit together into a single, seamless, chilling whole.

And the people who spent a lot of time on it are none other than Disney.

Yes, that Disney.

Yes, Disney as in Disney who owns Pixar.

The site succeeds on many levels. It’s a great way to promote their upcoming movie WALL•E. And it’s a wonderful way to give people a glimpse of the events that led to the world of the movie. But, most of all, I think, it’s a scary commentary on the vapid, rah-rah, ultimately meaningless corporate wankery we see every time we visit a large company’s website. Or call customer service. Or visit a store.

And when Disney is doing that, it’s the end of an era.