With Karoline Leavitt joining President-elect Donald Trump’s administration as White House press secretary, press briefings might look slightly different in 2025. At 27, Leavitt will be the youngest person to serve in that role and she has signaled that she will approach the entire operation differently. During an interview with Sean Hannity on Tuesday night,…Read More
When it comes to drama, the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City are always going to give it to you straight, with no sugar. But on this rare occasion, the ladies are getting sweet by rolling out a special partnership with the iconic New York ice cream chain, Van Leeuwen. A new limited-edition flavor, “The…Read More
Top of the Ticker: CNN seems to be pleased with the performance of its satirical news show, Have I Got News For You. The Roy Wood Jr.-helmed American version of the long-running British series scored a Season 2 order. Have I Got News For You has paired well with CNN’s encore presentation of Real Time…Read More
Morning Joe ended a tumultuous week with a precipitous ratings drop. Since co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski disclosed their in-person meeting with President-elect Donald Trump, the MSNBC morning show has seen a steady erosion in viewership. While that dovetails with the larger post-Election Day ratings woes facing both MSNBC and CNN, it also suggests…Read More
Netflix is announcing massive streaming numbers for its Jake Paul and Mike Tyson fight from over the weekend. However, the streaming service also suffered a technical knockout thanks to buffering and crash issues, and it’s raised questions among viewers and advertisers as the company’s two exclusive NFL Christmas games loom. The streaming giant has a…Read More
Happy Friday to all who celebrate! In this week’s edition of stories we didn’t get to for one reason or another, we get a little more info on the Tegna layoffs and how our friend AI may start to impact our professional lives. We also see a few heavyweights hang up their lav mics in…Read More
Ally Financial is reviving its “Banksgiving” campaign, in which its call center associates hand out no-strings-attached funds to customers to help them overcome personal financial challenges. The Thankgiving initiative was originally launched in 2018. It quickly went viral with a moving video that showed the bank’s employees granting customers’ wishes. The push ran again in…Read More
Flashback is a feature series that revisits key moments from TV news history with the Newsers that were part of them. Long before the fictional machinations of the Roy family, Americans were hooked on a real-life succession drama playing out on their television screens… or one they believed to be real anyway. 35 years ago,…Read More
Making something fun is a good place to start if you’re building a casual word game like Bongo.
But it’s not enough. Lots of things are fun, for a while, but that doesn’t meant that they’re worth the investment of time and money it takes to build them.
From the user’s perspective, a casual word game works when it offers a combination of:
Accomplishment
The creation and release of tension
A stretch or tickle of the brain’s processing power
Connection to friends (new or old)
Status from achievement
Satisfaction from accomplishment
A flow state
And from a business perspective, online casual games need:
A compelling reason to share
Benefits from the network effect
Stickiness (otherwise, you need new games or new audiences all the time)
A reason for someone to subscribe or click or otherwise create commercial value
A persistent and scalable engine for ongoing promotion of the game
Often, when we set out to design something, we skip most of this, and rely on intuition instead. “I’ll know it when I see it.” If this is working for you (as it does for jazz musicians and clothing designers I know), I’m hardly going to argue against it. But for most professionals, most of the time, saying it out loud is an effective way to not only measure the quality of the work, but to engage and coordinate with a team.
I wrote This is Strategyto remind myself and the people I care about that there’s an iterative process that can make our work more effective. In the case of Bongo, I spent months coming back, again and again, to “what’s it for?” Andrew Daines and the team at Puzzmo worked with me to stay clear about this as the game developed.
You can’t answer that question without also asking, “who’s it for?” Because nothing is for everyone, and identifying the dreams, desires and expectations of the audience is essential to discovering if you’ve actually solved a problem.
Tic Tac Toe isn’t much of a game, because the winning algorithm is too obvious and there’s very little tension, and so, little reward once the tension is released.
And Tic Tac Toe might become accidentally viral, but it’s not likely to happen.
In Bongo, I began with assertions about who it was for. Not hard core videogamers, certainly, nor for the people who can solve a crossword puzzle in 2 minutes. I don’t mind if either group plays, but the core group would be people who aren’t quite that competitive, and who might not have a vocabulary in the top 1%. Beyond that, though, was the nature of the network effect.
Almost all crossword-type games have a single correct answer. The constructor thinks of a puzzle, and every game, the players have to guess the answer.
I find this personally frustrating (because what if my answer is good too!) and it also diminishes the power of sharing. If I’ve solved the puzzle, then sharing it with you is simply bragging. Bragging goes a long way, but I was searching for something more generative.
Part of the breakthrough of Bongo is that there isn’t a right answer. There’s simply a better answer, until, finally, no one can find a way to improve it. This means the creator of the game doesn’t have to know the highest scoring play, and probably doesn’t.
Since the game is constantly iterating, there’s a really good reason to share your score. Just as Wikipedia gets better when others edit an article, you can work with your friends and improve while you’re playing.
Note that this isn’t tacked on at the end. It’s part of the “what’s it for” at the very beginning.
The next challenge was the rise of AI and the destruction of the status of winning because some folks are solving word games in six seconds now. I wanted the game to be resistant (if not immune) to this sort of shortcut, so everyone playing felt like they had a chance to do well. And so the scoring of each tile changes daily, and the bonus word and the blank increase the number of permutations dramatically.
A key tactic that supported the point of the game came from Zach Gage. Instead of rewarding the last 1% of obscure vocabulary (as Scrabble and crosswords do), we give a bonus for common words instead. There are dozens of other methods we used to continually reinforce the delight of the game. I’ll let you discover them as you play.
If you’ve made it this far on this long post, here’s a punchline: A key part of bringing strategy to creativity is that it removes, “because I feel like it/said so” from the conversation. Once you have a clear strategy of who and what it’s for, anyone can chime in and make it better.
And my best word so far for today’s Bongo is CRUX (406) – 1074.
The holidays are here, and now is the time to gift our readers some campaigns and news you might not have seen yet. So enjoy this cozy batch of marketing morsels to get you through Turkey Day, Black Friday, and the rest of the holidays. Last Prisoner Project Thanksgiving is a time for family traditions,…Read More