Formal Brainstorming Has a 0% Success Rate
December 24th, 2008From How to prototype a game in under 7 days:
Formal Brainstorming Has a 0% Success Rate
We tried hard - boy we really wanted brainstorming to work! We scheduled “brainstorm meetings”, and “powwows”, we tried different color markers on whiteboards and oversized post-it notes, we even used motivational phrases like “blue sky” to help with our “out of the box thinking.” But in the end, out of all the games we created, not a single one was the result of sitting down as a group for a brainstorm session.
Why not? This was all very shocking to us, but after much investigation, it appears that you just cannot schedule creativity. You cannot say, “Hey everybody let’s meet for a brainstormer at 4:15, and by 5:00 we’ll have 4 kick-ass game ideas ready to hit the ground running!”
This seems like a deeply shocking result but one I’ve had a sneaking suspicion of all along. Certain things are great for brainstorming sessions but it’s not the magic tool for everything and a lot of useless wheel spinning can occur.
Also featured in blogs: Figuring Shit Out
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The state of Australian ecommerce
December 15th, 2008
While cooking dinner last night, I accidentally broke the handle off of my pan and so I thought I would get myself a new one as an early Christmas present. Looking online, I was confronted full force with the sheer retardedness of the current state of Australian online ecommerce.
Let us currently review the state of the online offerings of the 4 largest department stores in Australia:
Provably Unsolvable Security
December 6th, 2008One interesting, unnoticed property of security is that it often contains provably unsolvable problems. Generally, we tend to split problems into those that have been solved and those which we don’t know if they can be solved. Nobody knows right now how to build a 100 mpg+ Internal Combustion Engine but that’s because building a 100+ mpg engine is hard. We imagine that if we throw enough smart people and technology at a problem, it will inevitably be beaten down and solved or we’ll reach a point where it’s not worth the effort to solve. Nobody imagines that building fuel efficient engines is impossible.
Translating that same thinking to security, we imagine security problems are a matter of effort. If only we were willing to expend enough resources, security problems could get solved. The TSA takes this approach to airline security. Airline security breaches occur because there is a lack of political will and if we only had enough regulations, screeners, X-Ray backscatter machines and cameras, airport security would become a solved problem.
However, the fundamental flaw with airport security is that what makes a good “dangerous” is how you use it and not what its made out of and so it’s impossible to develop an effective screening process that is not in the context of use. A laptop battery is pretty much just an explosive which is designed not to explode (sometimes unsuccessfully). That planes aren’t being brought down every day from laptop explosions is not because they can’t explode but because nobody wants them to explode. Imagine all the technology you want, it’s impossible to look at a laptop battery sitting in a scanning machine and decide whether it will be wanted to explode.
Convincing people that security can be provably unsolvable is the hardest step because often, the actual proofs of unsolvability are fairly simple. Normally, we assume that an explanation of why something can’t be done is something only comprehensible to experts because it’s more accurately a proof of why it can’t be done yet which requires you to understand what can be done now. As a result, we take explanations of infeasibility on a certain degree of faith and deferral to expert opinion, we use zero knowledge rather than first order proofs.
Security flips this around. Proving something secure is hard because it requires you to know all the ways it can be attacked whereas proving something can never be secure is easy because it requires a simple application from first principles. This is an important consideration in policy debates because one common tactic of bamboozling your opponent is to force them into using first order proofs where zero knowledge proofs would have been more appropriate (the Intelligent Design movement uses this to great effect with their “teach the controversy” and “let the children decide” messages). This means that unless your opponent is aware of the curious inversion on the structure of a security debate, arguments about security can often seem seedy and underhanded because they resemble so much debates in other, less reputable areas.
The result of all this is that security is one of those areas where there is a disproportionate amount of astoundingly bad, poorly thought out policies and a large part of this can be explained through the communication mismatch between security experts and managers where “it can’t be done” means “It’s impossible to do” but is interpreted as “I don’t know how to do it and I’m too lazy to find out”.
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1000 car companies? Yeah right
November 21st, 2008I’m a huge fan of Seth Godin but his most recent blog post is just really, really dumb:
I was in Detroit last week… I have family there. I also drive a car. And I would rather that the world doesn’t melt and the economy thrive. So I’m uniquely qualified to weigh in on the automobile industry.
Not only should Congress encourage/facilitate the organized bankruptcy of the Big Three, but it should also make it easy for them to be replaced by 500 new car companies.
Or perhaps a thousand.
The reason there was 1000 car companies in the very early days of automobiles was because it’s very easy to make a shitty car. Fortunately for them, everyone around them was making shitty cars as well and they could compete on the marketplace. Nowadays, it’s equally as easy to make a shitty car but everyone else is making awesome cars and so the only way to compete is to make awesome cars as well.
This is an established pattern in many industries: there is an initial burst of anarchy and creativity with many different ideas and paradigms being explored until the product gets to a sufficient level of complexity such that it essentially locks out new entrants to the field. From then on, only established players have the resources to compete and the rate of new ideas drops dramatically. There used to be a dozen CPU makers, a dozen airplane makers and a dozen operating system vendors. Now, there’s only two, two and three respectively.
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Helicopters and anti-Helicopters
November 20th, 2008From a post on the straight dope:
I work in advertising, where frequently the challenge is to get the client to agree to pay you as much money as possible, then go away. The problem is that some clients (particularly new ones) will absolutely refuse to let an estimate pass their desk without making some alteration, just to show that they’re involved in the process. Now, if you go in with a carefully crafted ad campaign, where everything beautifully interlocks with everything else, then this moron blindly slashing away with his pen will inevitably cock it all up.
The solution is to give him a helicopter. A helicopter is something glaringly, obviously wrong, deliberately thrown in to satisfy a busybody’s need to “do something.”
It comes from a video producer I once knew who would always include an actual helicopter (for aerial shots of the city) in the estimate every new proposal he made. The helicopter was always obviously far more expensive than anything else on the list, and the client would always immediately cross it off before approving the proposal. End result: the producer got to do the project as he wanted, the manager got to feel useful, and everyone was happy.
An anti-helicopter is the opposite of this. It’s something you inadvertently put in which seems to make everyone fixate on it at the exclusion of what you were trying to show them. If you’ve been in enough debates or done enough blogging, you get a general sense of what the anti-helicopters are and yet it doesn’t stop you for occasionally throwing one out. You’ll be making this long, well structured, elaborate argument and add in a totally tangential sidenote and all of a sudden, everyone’s gone off in a huge 100 post argument about whether the sidenote is valid.
A proper understanding of helicopters and anti-helicopters can be very useful when trying to convince.
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Thoughts on virtual worlds
November 19th, 2008I went to a talk today on virtual worlds and it got me thinking a bit. I’ve always been somewhat of a virtual worlds skeptic. Virtual worlds is one of those things where the concept is so easy to understand that when you’re first exposed to it as a layman, immediately an infinite field of possibility stretches out before you. You end up envisioning something that could have come out of a William Gibson or Neal Stephenson novel where all our transactions would be conducted in a virtual 3D space. The problem is, as soon as you dig a bit below the surface, some real serious usability issues immediately pop up and I’m not convinced that virtual worlds provided a compelling solution.
The power of computer interfaces is precisely that it breaks away from the strict physical constraints of the real world. It is the types of non-physical abstractions that really leverage the full power of using a machine. Imagine if you tried to build Amazon in Second Life, it would be a disaster. The things which make Amazon so powerful is precisely the things which escape from the limitations of real life bookstores. It’s the ability to store millions of books and find books via search rather than navigation and the ability to slice and dice the book collection in all sorts of interesting ways while conventional bookstores are stuck with only a single sort order which make Amazon succeed. Virtual worlds always struck me as an idealistic but naive attempt to add back in the physical constraints that we worked so hard to get rid of.
However, as I was sitting and listening to the talk, it struck me that the real benefit of virtual worlds is to allow for shared virtual experiences. Our current technology really sucks at delivering a shared experience to people who are not in the same physical world as you.
Think of a group of teenage girls who go shopping together at a mall. They might start independently drifting and forming clusters around certain objects. They can gather around a particular item and point out areas of interest and physically manipulate the item. Conversation will be constant and only semi-directed and the entire social experience has a huge amount of depth and richness.
Now think about shopping online. While we do a good job of replicating the commerce aspects but the social experience is hugely impoverished. It basically amounts to sharing links with each other and then verbally describing what you see on the page that should interest them. Sure, you could imagine some fancy, heavyweight collaboration software that does some sort of shared screen and fancy mouse tracking but there is an inherent limitation of how well you can replicate a shared experience on a GUI platform because there’s so little presence information.
The lack of presence in traditional software is part of it’s power. The only way to create something as powerful as Amazon is to abandon the idea of presence. To abandon the concept of shared spaces and canonical representations. But this lack of presence also means that it’s impossible to deliver any meaningful shared experience.
Virtual worlds represent the other compromise. To accept everything that sucks and is limiting about a physical representation and to embrace those constraints rather than fighting against them. The up side of doing this is that you now can allow for the types of powerful shared experiences that we have in the real world.
It’s no coincidence that MMORPGs are the first real success we’ve had with virtual worlds. MMORPGs are founded on having shared experiences and they derive their power from making presence an integral part of the gameplay. However, I think this concept of shared experience allows us to take a much more nuanced view of what the impact of virtual worlds will be. It’ll allow us to gain a more sober insight of what virtual worlds can and cannot deliver which seems much more credible than the utopia that gets hyped in the mainstream press.
A better way of serving ads
November 19th, 2008Here’s a far more non-obnoxious way of doing ads from Ptable.com.
If someone has no adblocker installed, show them the original ad:
If an adblocker is detected, replace the ad with an option for them to donate instead to the site:
If you click the X button, the ad will close and remain closed forever:
Those who click ads aren’t typically donators, and those who block ads would probably prefer to donate so this seems like an effective way of pleasing both parties.
PS: Ironically, I spent 20 minutes trying to figure out why none of my images for this post were uploading before realising that any image with “ad” in the name gets blocked by adblock plus. This explains the naming of the images.
“Remember me” sucks at remembering me
November 18th, 2008Why does remember me tend to work so universally poorly? Wordpress for example, is a particularly irritating case, logging me out seemingly at random. Some sites manage to get it right, facebook almost never logs me out. Is there some subtle issue with cookie management that most sites manage to get wrong?
Coupled with this, what’s the basis for remember me only lasting a few weeks? Is this a legitimate security feature? I don’t really see the basis for it. If I check remember me, I want the site to remember me until I am old and grey (or at least until 2038).
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On the auto industry bailout
November 15th, 2008I’ve been reading various things about the audo industry bailout and various opinions of people for and against. Through all this confusion, I thought out I would point out a couple of invariants:
- We’ll still be buying the same number of cars whether GM goes under or not. Those cars will still need parts and workers and those workers will still be working in North American plants. They might not be plants in Michigan but they’ll be somewhere in North America. So when you hear that GM and it’s subsidiaries employ 300,000 people, it does not mean that the employment rate in the US will drop by 300,000 just because GM is out of business.
- The dislocation will be painful. On the flip side of the fence, the market idealists who like to think of creative destruction as an abstract force are wrong. There’s going to be plenty of economic cost before the economy rights itself again. Factories are going to have to be torn down in Michigan and built up in Kansas, assembly lines will have to be retooled from making GM widgets to Honda sprockets, Engineers who are used to working with Mac down the hall now have to work with Joe from Ontario, most of the R&D on the GM Volt isn’t going to be much use for the Toyota Prius.
- Whether you support the bailout or not depends crucially on whether you feel GM can turn itself around. It’s curious that this case rarely seems to be made explicit. Those supporting the bailout make the fundamental assumption that GM can eventually be restored to a smaller yet functional corporation that will eventually return to profitability and those opposing it assume fundamental structural flaws in the company system. I’ve not yet found many articles which make such claims explicit and try to justify yet and yet this is the determining factor in whether the bailout makes economic sense.
Personally, I’m very much against the bailout. It seems to me that the problems that GM face are caused by an endemic failure of corporate culture spanning everything from an uncreative, insular management to obdurate union which is unable to make the concessions needed. Such a thing cannot be fixed through any sort of superficial restructuring or easy infusion of cash. Rather, GM needs to go through the sort of wrenching transition that IBM went through in the 90’s and I don’t see any evidence of such a thing occuring.
Yes, it sucks that GM is going out of business and it’s going to cause enormous economic pain for those involved. It would be great if we could wave a magic wand that would cause that pain to go away and I would wholeheartedly support a bailout plan if that looked realistic. But as it stands, it looks like GM going out of business will be inevitable and all a bailout will do is become an expensive way of forstalling the inevitable.
The 30 day recap and the next 30 days
November 14th, 2008Well, the 30 days are over and it’s been quite an interesting experiment. I’m quite proud that I managed to get a blog post done every single day. One of those posts was inexplicably eaten by the server, one was kind of bullshit and one was done several hours after the deadline. All in all, by my calculations, I think that counts as one $20 donation and one beer that I owe to Jeff.
By an act of total serendipity, I happened upon an ACLU canvasser in my neighbourhood for today so I’m all paid up on that angle:
Doing this 30 day thing was definately interesting to me. I had been battling motivation problems with my blog for a while and it was amazing how such a simple thing managed to get me over the hurdle. As a result, I’m going to be trying another simple experiment.
Over the next 30 days, I’m going to try and develop 10 substantive features for the sites that I’m working on. The parameters of the challenge are the same, $20 to the ACLU for every challenge that I miss. It’ll be a good way to force me to work on some stuff that’s been sitting on the back burner for a while. I’ve yet to figure out how to emulate the social proof aspect although I might end up utilizing my sketches blog for that purpose.
At the same time, the blog is most definately not dead. I’ve got almost a dozen ideas still sitting around that need to be written about so subscribe to the RSS feed to keep yourself updated. The ironic thing seems to be that I’ve posted more content today than any other day now that I’m out of the one post per day format I set myself.