What is your product’s entertainment proposition?

Entertainment proposition - what are users supposed to find entertaining about your product?

When I joined Playdom one of the founders put me in charge of building a game in a month. I was excited by the challenge and was given a rough concept, 5 Engineers, and an Artist. Short a Game Designer the founder told us to just get started and if he liked our progress he might add a Game Designer later. Turns out he knew what he was talking about, he also knew to cram all of us into a converted conference room - “don’t come out until you have a completed game”.

Crammed in that room, everyone looking to me, I quickly realized how much trouble I was in. I was new to consumer games and this wasn’t like anything I’d built working at Yahoo! and other startups. What I had built earlier were products, they were about solving a problem, that’s what startups were built on as explained in Lean Analytics:

Most of the time, the risk isn’t whether you can build something, but rather, whether anyone will care. The really important questions to answer are whether you’ve found a problem people care about having solved, and whether you can solve it remarkably better than others. Lean makes sure you don’t put the “product” cart before the “need” horse.

But this wasn’t a problem to be solved, unless you consider boredom a problem. Working on Yahoo! Messenger our goal was to overtake AIM. All of us on the team had our own hypothesis and could come up with many more - improve features, build others, tweak our UI, improve marketing, etc. Testing would confirm if were were heading in the right direction.

What problem are we trying to solve with a game though? We brainstormed as a group and were all over the place.To be entertaining was too wide a goal. We needed to focus but how? If we just picked something out of a hat, how would we know we were heading in the right direction. We seemed to have no framework. All the methodologies I had learned, the methodologies Silicon Valley had evolved to build successful startups, were of little use if we couldn’t get started. Customer development, lean startup, lean software development, all start with a problem to be solved.

How was I going to pull this team together and drive toward a game? We didn’t have time to toss things against the wall and see what sticks. We could just copy another successful game, but we didn’t even have time to do that really. We couldn’t copy and build all the game features so how would we know what were essential or even prioritize them? As they say, knowing what to steal and what not to is an art in itself.

I spoke with other Game Designers at the company but they all gave me conflicting advice on where to take the game. Opinions are like assholes, everyone… How could we even compare one suggestions vs another?

Game design is an art right?

Finding little help I began to feel that all of this was more art than science. It’s game design right, it’s an art. And I’m not an artist, I’m a Product Manager. There was only one artist on the team and they drew pictures.

Oddly enough I found myself coming back to my experience with screenwriting. I had always dreamed of writing the Great American Screenplay so I started writing one. I was convinced it was great and let friends read it. Only two of them could finish. It was horrible. Robert McKee had seen it all before:

If your dream were to compose music, would you say to yourself: “I’ve heard a lot of symphonies… I can also play the piano… I think I’ll knock one out this weekend”?

My first attempt and failure led to over ten years of study - from books and classes to multiple conferences. I’m still struggling to write the Great American Screenplay but I’ve learned what originally seemed to be art is actually a lot more. It seemed to be a journey Hollywood learned in the 80's, or relearned as well. Attending the conferences I learned the history of much of the knowledge I was being presented with. In the 70's Hollywood was about the auteur - you hire a hot director and trust them.That began to change after Syd Field, working as a reader and having gone through thousands of screenplays began to notice a pattern - the “three act structure”. His work was quickly followed by Christopher Vogler’s legendary memo to Disney and then a slew of screenwriting gurus (the very ones I was learning from). What Syd Field and the other gurus allowed was for the industry to look at the product from a new perspective, a frame work from which they could apply various methodologies. There are now methodologies for fixing a weak 2nd act, punch up a weak ending, short list of must haves for the first 10 pages, etc.

Many will also credit this knowledge with allowing Hollywood executives to destroy great movies. “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing”. That doesn’t mean the knowledge is bad, just that it can be applied incorrectly and arguably the “average” movie has improved since the 80's. In other words the hit rate has improved.

Your entertainment proposition

What I learned from all the gurus and teachings was that movies were about “characters in conflict”. Seems simple but when I started writing my first screenplay I had other things in my head - the cool action sequence, great character, etc. What a movie is really promising is characters in conflict. With that in mind, writing a screenplay is a whole lot easier and more productive. I had a framework to judge other movies and my own writing.

I began to think of this as the entertainment proposition of movies - characters in conflict. If your film loses conflict for a minute the audience begins to shift in their seat.

Armed with my quest for the entertainment proposition for games I again met with Game Designers around the company. What I learned was that what drives games is a bit more varied than popular movies. For some games it’s all about competition, for others it’s about getting into the zone or a state of flow. Our game would be about the latter.

With that I was able to direct the team and employ many of the methodologies and techniques designed for traditional startups and products - Lean Startup, Lean Software Development, etc. We also knew what to look for when we did play tests, what was the most important data from the beta tests.

Thanks to the team pulling together we were able to hit the month deadline and the game, Treetopia, went on to be Playdom’s fastest growing game to date. Some even said it’s quick growth strongly influenced Disney’s purchase of Playdom for $763 Million.

Entertainment products are different

I learned a lot building a game in a month but my biggest takeaway was the entertainment proposition. It’s a mistake to treat everything as a problem in need of a solution. We would have been lost treating a game as any other product - we wouldn’t have known how to focus nor test to see if we were on track. That isn’t to say it’s all art either. Armed with the entertainment proposition of screenwriting anyone can give a quality critique on a screenplay. It makes entertainment look a lot more like a problem and solution, something all of us can relate to.

So if you find yourself building an entertainment product you shouldn’t treat it as an exercise in problem solving nor treat it as all art, but admit it’s entertainment and try to define what your entertainment proposition is.This is a lot easier if you’re targeting a form of entertainment that’s been around for some time and has years of study - film, games, music. However given all the innovation around tech and entertainment I would only expect the number of new entertainment products to grow. What will their users find entertaining about them? What will be their entertainment proposition?