Media isn’t a magazine or a website. It’s a system. We can learn to see the system and contribute to it with leverage.
There are three elements to consider in a media system that’s worth a professional creator’s time:
- A business model. There are magical cultural effects that happen when volunteers produce content that is embraced by others. Being a folk musician in 1824 might have been thrilling, but it doesn’t pay the bills. Some media systems naturally support a business model and others don’t.
- Assets to be built. This is related to the business model. Can the creator compound their effort over time, rewarding later work based on the effort put into earlier work? If not, then there’s a good reason to wait.
- Systems that are changing. Static media systems (like book publishing in the 1920s) certainly offered creators an opportunity to produce valuable work, but they were scarce. When a system is in flux, there are more chances to contribute.
Systems are changed by technology. When desktop publishing arrived in the 1980s, it changed elements of the system of book publishing. It was now possible to create complex designs, detailed reference books and illustrated books with more impact and less expense.
I saw books from Dorling Kindersley and Workman and realized that readers (and thus the system) needed more of them. It was a good time to become a creator of books.
The technology shift in audiobooks (every phone is a player) transformed the entire system around audiobooks. Buying Audible was a no-brainer for Amazon. Once you had a phone, you needed more audiobooks and a good way to get them.
But it’s easy to miss the signals. When the web showed up, I was one of the first users and was already running an internet company. Yet I was sure that there was no business model and missed a huge opportunity.
A few years before the web, book publishers were excited by DVD ROM, a new storage technology that would let them publish large, data-driven software projects. Other than a project I did with Fisher Price, we mostly wasted our time–I thought the media would develop, but it faded in the face of the web…
YouTube transformed the system of creating and sharing videos as a professional. When Hank and John Green began creating videos, the system was at an inflection point, allowing their effort to pay off.
There have been popular casual games since the newspaper started carrying the crossword in 1913. But limited by the available space in the newspaper, the medium was fairly small. Once again, the smartphone is a game changer, but so was the rise of the attention economy and the growth of development tools.
Lots of games have shown up online, some built with the basics of HTML/CSS/JS. Games which want to keep track of your progress might require adding backend languages, databases, and a cloud platform. More complex interactive games may need game engines (Unity, Phaser), or a front-end framework (React / Redux which is what Puzzmo uses). None of the game creators built all of these from scratch… the system evolves as software enables forward motion.
A challenge in working with media systems is the delay. There’s a moment when the system needs more creators, and then, months or years later, the arrival of new content from those creators. This leads to a cycle of shortage and surplus, and the whipsawing can make it difficult to sustainably create useful content.
Netflix and the streaming wars set off a frenzy in creating a certain kind of content, but as that content came online, the amount of attention (and money) available to support it began to spread ever thinner.
It’s also possible to go too soon, to decide that there’s a business model when there actually isn’t one, and to build a pioneer homestead on the edge of the desert.
Thanks to Wordle, the New York Times is now a casual games company with a small news division. They’ve taken the business model and head start that they had from crosswords and multiplied it. But Puzzmo and others are betting that there’s room for something even better, and their traction is proof that they might be right.
Bongo is an expression of how much I love designing casual games (video games give me a headache) but it’s also possible to do this work because the system was ready to support it.
There’s a new game today. I hope you get a chance to check it out and share it. Here’s my best word of the day.
