differentiation
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RIM chief: we looked 'seriously' at Android, didn't want to join the herd
RIM's current CEO Thorsten Heins has been very candid about his company's plans and past, but he has usually given the impression that the company wouldn't even consider deviating from its one true vision of a BlackBerry OS future. Although BlackBerry 10 is very much the center of RIM's universe today, Heins has revealed to The Telegraph that his firm's eyes did stray briefly -- at one point, it "seriously" investigated Android as a platform. The company ended up backing away after deciding a "me-too" strategy didn't fit the productivity-obsessed BlackBerry crowd, the executive says. RIM decided, like Nokia, that it couldn't differentiate enough in Google's ecosystem. There's still some time to go before we learn whether or not the gamble on the in-house OS pays off. If Heins' comments still leave you dreaming of what might have been, though, don't worry: at least a few companies are providing their own visions in a slightly more tangible form.
Officers' Quarters: How different is too different?
Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook, available now from No Starch Press. One of the most important things you can do when you start a new guild is to differentiate your community from other guilds on the server. When you offer a different experience or a different set of expectations from the typical guild, no matter how slight, you increase your chances of garnering attention and, thus, recruiting players who are attracted to those differences. It's a concept I've mentioned in a number of columns over the years. But is there such a thing as differentiating too much? One guild leader wants to know: Hello, I'm Emir Ergenç from Turkey, i read your wowinsider column for a long time. And i really enjoy your writings. Me and my girlfriend found a new guild named "Efsane" (meaning Legend in English) in our realm (Wildhammer-EU), i'm telling this to you for checking us :). Our website is efsane.guildomatic.com (although its Turkish). My characters are Alhara, Faelha, Eladia on guild. My girlfriend is guild leader and Shehrazad. Together we wanted to form a Turkish speaking Rated Battleground guild. Our aim is to have about 14-20 members (we do not aim to be a big guild, but time will tell) and get high ratings (read: hardcore) in rated battlegrounds as Turkish people. This is a very specific aim, thats where i started having some issues.
Nokia will be able to customize 'everything' in Windows Phone 7, but likely won't
Stephen Elop, in his financial and strategy briefing continuing Nokia's marathon Capital Markets Day, just posed an interesting rhetorical question: will Nokia be able to "customize everything" on Windows Phone 7 in order to differentiate itself? "Yes!" was Elop's ebullient proclamation, though he quickly pulled it back to say that Nokia likely won't make extensive use of this freedom to tailor Microsoft's OS. Instead, the company will be cautious and seek to maintain compatibility rather than pushing the boat out too far in tweaking the underlying software. That's a major shift for Microsoft, who forbade HTC from skinning Windows Phone 7 with Sense, something the Taiwanese company would surely have loved to do, and limited it to the introduction of a self-contained Hub. Now Nokia's saying it -- perhaps exclusively -- has been given the liberty to play around inside WP7 to its heart's content. We'll see how important that turns out to be whenever Nokia delivers its first device bearing its new smartphone OS. An insider tip tells us the current plan is to introduce such a handset by the end of 2011, potentially based on current hardware. Who's ready for Xbox Live on a future version of the N8?
The Daily Grind: What crazy idea should someone try?
If you want to be a cynic, or you just happen to be one anyway, it's easy to complain that MMOs have turned into something of a cookie-cutter genre. So many of the basic expectations that players have are all but carved into stone, and there's a well-understood set of basics, ranging from quests to default control schemes. Of course, there's no shortage of variances between the biggest titles, but there's certainly a general idea in people's heads of what an MMO should look like by default. Of course, any artist knows the best thing for when a genre starts to stagnate: trying something truly absurd, something that breaks down basic assumptions of what should be done. And we're seeing games with systems that do precisely that, like TERA's action-oriented combat with no lock-on or Guild Wars 2 experimenting with environmental gameplay. But those only scratch the surface of all the assumptions about MMOs that could be turned on their ear. What insane idea would you like to see a game put into practice?
Jante Law and player psychology
Larisa over at the Pink Pigtail Inn has been posting some really interesting things about psychology and the World of Warcraft lately. The other week she wrapped up a little survey (along with the folks at Dreambound) about personalities of players and how they correspond to the roles they play in game, and this week she's got a little analysis up about something called the Jante Law, developed by a Norwegian author for a novel back in the 1930s. You can read the whole idea on her page or over on Wikipedia, but basically it all boils down to one "rule" for overseeing each individual member of a community: "Don't think that you are more special than us."She applies the law to the WoW community at large, and says that without knowing it, comment trolls and those who attack people who differentiate themselves on the forums (including the folks who caused Ghostcrawler to rethink his role there) are following this law, and attacking those who stick their neck out as different. Personally, I don't know that the "haters" in the community give it that much thought -- most of the time when they do attack others, they do it to try and build themselves up rather than enforce any community standard ("You've won 1,000 AV matches? Big deal, I win in there all the time.").
