There were too many good moments of Freeplay for me to list them all. The whole weekend was a little like a bomb going off in my brain, in an excellent way, and it’s left me with a lot to think about.
I felt, for maybe the second time ever at a games event, unequivocally welcomed and valued. I felt acknowledged for my work and appreciated for my insight, even though I’m not a programmer and I work in liminal places. I didn’t once have to justify live games or LARP or Twine games or text as being worthy of inclusion. The fact that I’m not a full-time game designer, that I’m employed outside the industry, didn’t single me out as an outsider or render my input less valid. I wasn’t a token woman or a token live game person or a token anything.
In the broader world, games like the Gobstopper Job and The Trial and the Twine projects I’ve got running in the background are strange hybrid things that have to fight first to be accepted before they can be loved. But at Freeplay on stage for the first time I used the word “art” to describe Detritus, and it wasn’t inaccurate.
The second day’s keynote was given by Steve Swink, who talked (among other things) about the need to keep creating, to keep getting ideas down. The 10,000 hours theory. He shared an anecdote about a talk in which a designer waded through page after page of comments about how awful his games were until finally reaching a slide that said: yeah, that one was OK.
I am scared of making bad things, things that aren’t legitimate, that aren’t the best thing they could be. I have been in enough conversations where people deride the sorts of things I make as “too niche” or “not interesting” or “shallow marketing ideas” or “not really games” or redefine them as “concept pieces” (as opposed to “solid games”, like that’s a meaningful distinction) and I have internalised some of that, even while being aware that it’s total crap. I have a depth of feeling here that I wasn’t aware of, until now. Becoming aware of it has meant becoming aware that it’s been blocking me from doing some things I’ve wanted to do for a while. Little games. Silly things. Learning new tools. Making shit art, as Steve Swink would have it.
And I’ve made a start on some other things. ibis, fly! had stalled badly; now it’s moving again, albeit slowly, because the structure needs some work. I’m going to be writing more regularly about Twine games here – if you have favourites, please send them my way. And the Boobjam project I didn’t think I knew enough to make – I think it might work in Unity. If I can work out how to make Unity work, if I can learn enough about those tools to encode what I know about game design and systems and play in a new medium. Which means making shit art, and not caring if it starts out shit, and not caring if other people don’t think it’s art.
PopSci has turned off its comments, citing research demonstrating that rude comments beneath an article polarise a reader’s opinion of its content, and tend to make people doubt the science involved.
Given their stated aims, it seems like a reasonable move – if they’re not going to be able to give the conversation the attention it needs, and especially if they’re facing coordinated astroturfing to undermine their science. They don’t owe anyone a platform.
A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another thing for two people to “debate” on television. And because comments sections tend to be a grotesque reflection of the media culture surrounding them, the cynical work of undermining bedrock scientific doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories, within a website devoted to championing science.
Has anyone yet tried a pre-mod commenting policy requiring scientific accuracy and cited sources in comments? That could be an interesting community – labour-intensive for the moderators and maintainers, but a fascinating place for expert discussion.
Newsrooms still tend to be weird about data. Not external data, that comes from governments or companies as part of a news story – we’re getting much better at that. But internal data, the numbers we generate ourselves. Web stats tend to be left to teams who use them mostly for commercial stuff. They exist as Big Numbers that newsrooms want to increase but don’t really understand why or how to do so. Editorial people who want to know their data tend to be given the numbers that are useful for commercial or sales teams, because those are the ones that matter to the business’s bottom line; they don’t tend to get much training in how to dig into the numbers themselves, or in analysing and applying that data to their own domain. Which is, to be honest, a bit of a shame. Stijn Debrouwere recently wrote an excellent talk about cargo cult analytics – about the problem of newsrooms assembling data packages that look great, but that don’t bring anyone any closer to actually acting on the data in useful ways. The most frustrating thing about this situation is that most newsrooms are stuffed with people who spend all day approaching things with curiosity, interest and an eye towards discovering something of use. Newsrooms today tend to include data journalists, people with at least a basic stats background, people who know the internet incredibly well, people who are excellent at sifting information and then distilling it down to the bits that matter. But those skills aren’t always applied to the data news organisations themselves produce. So this is a basic guide for journalists who want to get started on web stats – not for the technical skills you need, but the sorts of questions to ask, ways to approach the problems involved.
Which numbers matter?
This is probably the most important question, and one most companies have a very hard time answering. It’s always tempting simply to look at the top line – the biggest collection of data you can find – perhaps split by referrer or by section if you’re working on a large site. But the top line isn’t generally very helpful, unless you know what it’s made from and how much of it is actually useful traffic. The definition of ‘useful’ varies depending on what you’re trying to do – useful for an editor and useful for an advertiser are not the same thing. Useful in live stats and useful in long term analysis are not the same. The numbers that matter aren’t going to be the biggest ones you can find, unsegmented page views or monthly unique users. Those hide a multitude of smaller and much more interesting numbers. Numbers with a financial value attached; numbers that are too small, or too big, or unbalanced in some way. Numbers that are interesting in part because they’re not what you want them to be. Numbers you can work to change. Those are the interesting ones. Commissioning editor? Try Stijn’s monthly active users to daily active users ratio. Front page editor? Try loyal bounces – people who hit your front page for a second or third time in a day but only view one page before leaving. Journalist? Try daily referrals from your Twitter account. There are dozens of interesting numbers, when you start looking. Try non-registered users who view more than three pages per visit. Try email traffic. Try people who didn’t come back last month. (That one will almost certainly upset you.)
What’s normal?
You won’t know whether you’re seeing something new or unusual until you understand what normal is. What does an average day look like? What shapes and patterns would you expect to see in the data? Is it normal to have 25% of your users on mobile, or 10% from Belgium, or are those surprisingly high or low? And what about other comparable sites – is your data broadly similar to your peers or are there unexpected elements that make you special?
Why’s normal?
This is a bit more difficult to work out, but it’s worth trying to understand. Why is the status quo the way it is? Why do you see spikes in traffic at 9am, midday, and midnight on weekdays? Why do you get most of your traffic from Google, or Facebook, or a suite of obscure cycling forums? This is your current audience: understanding why it operates the way it does, the context and the wider web in which your data fits, will help you understand which levers you can pull to change it.
What questions can I ask?
Just being in possession of a bunch of numbers isn’t that interesting. What matters is how you can use them. This is pre-interview prep work, and a basic data journalism skill. Which questions can you ask that are going to get you a story? How and why are more interesting than what and when, on the whole, but also much harder to answer. Knowing that something’s unusual, or knowing a trend exists, is less interesting than understanding why that is, whether it’s a good or bad thing, and how it might be changed.
What’s the context?
Contextualising data helps you understand it, and identify potentially-useful patterns. Seeing weird Google-related activity around a particular piece on a celebrity at certain times of day or week? Check the TV guide. I remember once discovering that a four-year-old article about young entrepreneurs was getting unexpected fresh traffic because it ranked well for the name of a man who featured in a Google Chrome TV ad – in which he Googles his own name. Every time the ad aired, we had spikes of people copying him and clicking through. That’s a great opportunity to make sure that piece has good related links, and acts as a decent first page for someone hitting the site. Think about seasonality, and geography. Seasonal traffic changes can be vital context, and so can the fact that seasons aren’t the same all over the world. Behaviour online isn’t divorced from behaviour offline, and TV in particular influences it far more than might be obvious (see also: Miley Cyrus). Knowing the context for a number helps you identify causes and work out whether something is a fluke, something you can influence, or something you can take advantage of.
Grind fine and experiment
Seeing behaviour on your site in real time is genuinely useful – if you have a newsroom setup that lets you react to it. There’s no point having a dataset that you can’t, or won’t, use. Watching a big number on a graph climb is great for morale, and watching it sink is hard work; but neither requires much response in most newsrooms aside from checking your watch to see if you’re on the way to a daily spike or a daily trough. Watching a small subset of the data change because of something you did, though, is immensely powerful. There are not many tools out there right now that let you dig deep enough to be able to understand what effects you’re having in real time. Chartbeat’s dashboard is, for all its prettiness, built around the big number; real time Google Analytics is built for watching, and not really built for publishers, though you can hack it with advanced segments to make it much more useful. If you’re lucky enough to have a tool that lets you go deep, don’t just use it to look at the big number at the top. Go for the detail. Grind fine. Experiment at small scale and document your results. And then spread out your discoveries to the rest of the newsroom. Use the numbers to change practice. Far easier said than done. This post was written with help from the folks at Help Me Write. If you want to suggest post ideas or encourage me to blog more frequently about stuff you’re interested in, I’d be massively grateful.
This was written in part as a response to the current Blogs of the Round Table topic, “What’s the story?” If you want to read the other responses, please go there and use the dropdown list, because I still can’t get it to work here without breaking my blog. 🙁
Stories in games are a battleground, especially in digital & video games. I’ve had a couple of tangles in the past with folks who think games can’t tell stories, that good stories and good games just don’t mix, and that games built around stories don’t sell; others say that all games have a story of some sort, even if only an experiential one, and that narrative’s essentially built in to all games.
Reality, as ever, is somewhere in the middle, and a bit more nuanced than that. Zombies, Run, Gunpoint and Gone Home, to name three at random, are excellent examples of narrative built in to digital games from the ground up; Tetris, Super Hexagon and Peggle are excellent examples of games that don’t need narrative at all. Most games do try to tell a story, but the most successful ones let the player do the telling themselves, and give them agency over the narrative – or at least acknowledge the primacy of their play over authored and scripted elements.
Gone Home, Day Z and Minecraft, despite their many differences, are all about creating a world and letting players explore it. Each lays out the bare bones of their worlds and invites exploration, asking players to make their marks on the experience, by creating their own niche within the world or by uncovering the mysteries and reaching conclusions the game’s creators left behind. The difference is in scripted vs unscripted narrative, the difference between imposing an authorial vision on the player vs instructing and equipping them to make their own.
Cut scenes in gaming are, to be blunt, godawful ways of telling a story. So are journal pages left scattered around a landscape – pointless objects supposedly created and discarded with not even the most cursory nod to believability or the internal credibility of the game world. Players are asked too often to suspend their disbelief, not in a “this giant underwater city is (a) real and (b) full of drug-crazed libertarians” way to buy into a grand narrative, but in a “my character’s arch-enemy would definitely communicate privately with themselves through tapes strewn randomly around corridors and cafes” way that denies the internal consistency of the characters within a world. Players are asked to tolerate having control taken completely away from them by an invisible hand, for the sake of a plot point or two. They’re asked to carry out all the action most of the time, but remove themselves and watch passively when it matters most.
Sacrificing believability for delivery undermines a story, and taking player agency away mucks about with consent and identification in ways that most games don’t bother to consider (the first Bioshock game is the obvious exception here). Game stories that use the medium well are incomplete without a player – they require play as an intrinsic element of their enaction, not as a way of filling in the gaps between cut scenes, and they don’t subvert played choices with authored ones (see also: LA Noire, Nico and the prostitute in GTA4).
For instance, The Last Of Us succeeds as a story not because it is a revolutionary approach to narrative, but because it is decently written and because its play elements accord with its authored ones. It makes the player complicit in a combined act of authorship as the game is played: it doesn’t force conflict between the experienced and the authored story.
So much of the perceived conflict between game stories and game mechanics comes from an arbitrary approach of pushing story out on its own – whether it’s seen as more or less important than mechanics in a game, it’s the fact it’s seen as separate that causes problems. Sometimes it’s a decision by studios to keep story creation separate from gameplay. Sometimes it’s a broader production approach that considers them as two separate elements, when – at their most successful – they’re inextricably intertwined. Too many games fail to integrate story into the game at the mechanical level, breaking both the story and the game in the process.Story doesn’t work if it’s limited to spaces where the player no longer has agency, or where their agency is strictly limited by things like dialogue trees or morality systems with the subtlety of a bludgeon.
One of Douglas Adams’s lesser-known games, Starship Titanic, relies on both adventure-game point-and-click mechanics and on freestyle text inputs that let you converse with the robots that inhabit the ship. It was released in 1998, and has more than 10,000 potential responses coded into its conversation engine. Making the characters robots is a smart choice that lets the game get away with repeated scripted responses, and making it possible to talk to them – to say anything at all – is still revolutionary. At one point you have to persuade a bomb (played by John Cleese) to stop counting down. There’s no list of standard responses, no ‘persuade’ options, no raw skill numbers to test against. There’s you, typing, and frankly it’s some of the best games dialogue ever written.
What’s the story? The story’s a collaboration. The author’s not dead, but she’s a shifting entity made up of many others: the designers, the writers, the game’s creators, and its players too. Game makers have to give players the tools they need to do their part of the job without going against anything that’s come before. Video gaming is at heart a performative medium with at least one actor, often more akin to theatre than to cinema. Storytelling in a game is not a broadcast act with a teller and a receiver. It’s an act of authorship that’s incomplete until it’s played.
Elegant, pointed rant in the Onion, courtesy of CNN’s decision to put Miley Cyrus’s VMAs appearance in the top slot of their site:
There was nothing, and I mean nothing, about that story that related to the important news of the day, the chronicling of significant human events, or the idea that journalism itself can be a force for positive change in the world. For Christ’s sake, there was an accompanying story with the headline “Miley’s Shocking Moves.” In fact, putting that story front and center was actually doing, if anything, a disservice to the public. And come to think of it, probably a disservice to the hundreds of thousands of people dying in Syria, those suffering from the current unrest in Egypt, or, hell, even people who just wanted to read about the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech.
But boy oh boy did it get us some web traffic.
The argument’s not one that purely applies to online news (see also: recent Sun front page, every Daily Express splash for quite some time). Appealing to a mass audience is one way of trying to keep generalist news organisations in business so they can also do the harder, less grabby, more worthy news – selling sweets to fund the broccoli business. There’s a strong argument too that people are interested in many things: I can care about Syria and Cyrus simultaneously, and if someone who comes for the twerking can be persuaded to stick around for the complex international news coverage then that can be a valid growth tactic for generalist outlets. But that doesn’t mean it’ll happen organically, without a strategy to convert the Miley fans into long-term readers. And it doesn’t mean that giving the two stories equivalent billing is wise, unless you’re making a Mail-style move towards a very specific editorial tone.
You don’t have to stop doing the fun stuff, the cheeky and irreverent things, the entertainment journalism, in order to be a serious news outlet – but packaging and context do still matter online. People who go to your front page – your most loyal readers – notice shifts in your editorial approach to these sorts of stories, and will judge you on these things. It’s a deliberate, conscious editorial decision to put twerking in the top slot or rosy cheeks on the front page. There’s definite sense in promoting what your readers most want to read, and in using data to guide editorial strategy. But the key word in that sentence is guide, not subvert or overrule. It’s not the traffic play the Onion’s really angry about – it’s the editorial strategy that underlies it.
Replicating the print product online exactly is madness – because the digital audience wants something different. Not looking at digital data and letting it influence the news agenda in the newsroom because you believe journalists know what the audience want is madness. Assuming that just because people tell you they don’t buy the paper because they read it online means they’re reading your content exactly the same way online as in print is madness.
Superb piece by David Higgerson on the supposed folly of giving away news content for free, and the bigger issues that make it hard for newspapers to make money online.
The idea that print news organisations could have solved all their current woes by charging online from the start is seductive, but – as David says – it’s also wrong. There are plenty of other things papers got wrong in the early days that are causing long-term ill effects: lack of archives & link rot caused by crazy self-deleting CMSes; refusal to participate in standard web link economy; shovelling content to the web without making it web-friendly; assuming print editors understood web audiences without giving them any tools or training to help them do so.
Lack of early investment online is a less seductively simple explanation for current difficulties attracting and monetizing an audience, but laying it all at the feet of a failure to charge is telling a simple story in place of a complex one, and missing a big opportunity to learn.
The first Bit.Trip Runner game is an abomination. It is almost excellent, for the first ten levels. It has you learning to leap, kick and duck to avoid obstacles, running at speed through a pink-and-purple tinted robotic landscape. The blocky, retro graphics are chunkily beautiful, but the sound is what makes the game. Each gold you get, each jump you make, each obstacle you navigate or ignore contributes a tone to the ambient music: each element is perfectly placed to fit with a broader rhythm. Play means mastering a complex pattern, pushing the right buttons at the right time to navigate increasingly complicated landscapes: the process of mastering those patterns, and the moments when they work well, are both gloriously satisfying.
But at the eleventh level it goes wrong. Odyssey is too long. It isn’t that it’s too challenging – but that it requires more concentration and a much longer stretch without error than any other level in the game up to that point. The joy of Runner is about mastering the patterns in each level, fine tuning to the point where you can not only play the piece note-perfect, but add your own elements on top: a trill here, a crescendo there, an extra jump to get the last gold for a perfect run. Odyssey does not give you chance to master the later patterns, because they are two minutes’ hard concentration away from where you start out. It is too long. It’s been an insurmountable barrier to my playing further: I can see the elegance, the joy in the early levels, but that one defeats me. It’s not worth the effort it takes to surpass.
On your side
Bit.Trip presents… Runner 2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien, henceforth referred to as BTp.R2FLoRA, expands on the first game and fixes the faults that make Odyssey such an iron bar on the train tracks. I picked it up in the Steam sale expecting to find it a flawed but interesting play – as I do most of the other Bit.Trip games – but instead I find myself turning to it frequently in spare moments, being sucked in to play dozens of levels, hours at a time.
As with Guitar Hero and Rock Band, music is both the purpose and the punishment for the Runner games. Failure – falling to your death, or crashing into an obstacle – makes the music stop playing. In the first game, these failures reset you right back to the start of the level, collapsing the musical landscape back to a very simple, straightforward beat. But the second offers checkpoints – in its own version of Odyssey, multiple checkpoints. As the difficulty ramps up in later levels they’re not generous, and every checkpoint is skippable if you want a harder challenge. But their presence is crucial – they turn an experience of severe frustration into one where you are certain if you just try it again, one more time, you’re sure you can do it right this time. Unlike Runner, BTp.R2FLoRA is on your side.
Dazzling leaps
This time all three difficulty levels are worth playing, because all three have gold to collect. You can play on Quite Easy to pick up collectibles and learn the level structure, then switch through Just Right to Rather Hard for a proper, teeth-grinding challenge. All three play differently – Easy is a thrilling, speedy rush of music, rarely interrupted, while Hard can be determinedly repetitive, a slow push to get a little further each time. After a Hard level, playing on a lower difficulty feels like drinking a cold glass of lemonade on a hot day: refreshing, dazzling, thrilling.
Even within levels the pacing is elegant. Tricky series of jumps and slides that must be timed to perfection and embellished for a perfect score are followed by dazzling leaps in which gold is handed to you by virtue of your trajectory. Moments where you lean forward, snapping buttons in perfect time and deep concentration, are tempered by these sudden, exuberant periods where you have nothing to do but luxuriate in your achievement. You leap joyfully across the screen, which glitters and gleams and rewards you with visual extravagance as you relax for all of about three seconds. These moments are water breaks, waypoints in your race. They are a substantial part of the game’s excellence.
And again, as with Guitar Hero and Rock Band, the beat always acts to ground your actions, the way a metronome does when you are playing music. It’s tyrannical too, the way a metronome is when you don’t yet know the notes, or when you can’t move your fingers fast enough over the piano keys to sound the tune correctly. The music acts both to make your experience more difficult and easier; sometimes both by turns, as you learn to master each track. Missing a note, missing one of the optional obsctales or choosing a less complex route, or avoiding a power-up that gives you both a score multiplier and a tonal shift to the background music: these aren’t punishments, but they are moments you could improve, if you played better. You could jump faster. You could hit the Bit.Trip equivalent of all the meedly-meedly notes. But if you don’t, that’s OK. The music still plays.
Dance button
I still haven’t played Hotline Miami. This is an admission of failure on my part, because I know I will love it, once I get past the violence. It’s about understanding a complex landscape and the patterns within it, moving very quickly and improvising based on what you know, learning the levels and mastering them. It’s a game of mastery, and those games are like catnip to me. But the violence is a barrier. I get home from a hard day and I want to relax in a way that doesn’t mean beating someone’s head off a pixelated floor. I don’t want to shoot dogs or see my avatar’s guts spilled, even with hypnotic pulsing music and vibrant psychadelic graphics and a story that’s meant to say something interesting about the violence. I want joy.
BTp.R2FLoRA lets you dance.
Not enough games have a dance button. You aren’t told about it until a fair few levels have passed beneath your constantly running feet, but there it is: you can dance. Dancing can happen at any time, on a flat surface; the animation lasts a fixed length of time, and can’t be interrupted to slide or jump, so it has to be timed well to avoid dancing to your death. Each of the characters you find – there are seven in total, with five found by completing optional levels – has several different dance animations. They are joyous.
They aren’t only joy. Fully completing the game’s extra achievements requires dancing an astounding amount, dancing for an hour when each dance is a second or so. It means dancing as much as you possibly can, treating dancing as a necessary embellishment. It adds a further layer of difficulty to the game: suddenly, Easy mode is no longer a lean-back gentle play with few button presses, but a trickily-timed endurance mode full of single-button improvisation. Hard mode becomes essentially impossible. You learn to read the road, using the beat to guide you: that spiky mushroom dude is coming up there, if I dance here and jump now I can clear it and get the gold to the right of it without dying.
Digital mandala
It is never so carefully thought through as that, of course. Like every excellent game in which speed and mastery are at the core of play, you play better in a slightly distracted reverie. Super Hexagon is one of the games at the pinnacle of this genre: despite having only two buttons, left and right, it is a rich and engaging challenge to learn the game’s patterns well enough to anticipate them, to almost be already moving by the time it becomes clear which direction you should move in. Time slows as you play, relying on what you’ve learned to guide you – relying on instincts faster than conscious thought. On harder levels, thought itself is too slow to guide you. By the time you’ve actualised what’s happening in your head, you should have already reacted. Distracting yourself is key to the top levels of play; using it like a sort of digital mandala, I play best when I am furious, or extremely stressed.
BTp.R2FLoRA never quite reaches those heights of instinctive reflexes, but it begins to come close. It proves this to you beautifully at the very end, which I won’t spoil here. There is a boss fight at the end of each world, in which you must run, dodge, jump and kick against a moving enemy that works against you. The final boss is a glorious reversal of everything you’ve spent the rest of the game learning, and playing it is proof positive that you have learned far more than you’ve realised over the preceding levels. It is gleefully self-assured, a moment that could feel like a betrayal if it weren’t for the game’s excellent mechanics, elegant implementation and perfectly judged difficulty curve. Instead, it has you feeling as though you have discovered a whole new skill that the game’s been hiding from you all along. It has you jumping for joy.
Virality is one of those words that means something new on the internet. It’s become a short word for ‘lots of social media traffic’, but virality isn’t the same thing as popularity – the latter implies a one-to-many channel, many people clicking on a single shared link, where the former is many-to-many, more about the network than the individual, and more about the volume of subsequent shares than the initial link drop. What makes it happen? Here’s a partial list.
Identity
What people share isn’t the same as what they consume. (Any survey of the book titles on show at a Shoreditch coffee shop should demonstrate that beautifully.) People consume things they’re interested in; people share things that they think make them look good to the people they share them with. Identity is external and socially constructed, and the internet makes that astonishingly clear; we are, online, idealised and caricatured versions of our selves, the best selves we can be to the people whose opinions we care about in those social spaces. So we share not what we read, but what we believe others will think better of us for both reading and passing on. (This is why frictionless sharing gets such a massive backlash.)
The right thing for the right platform
Virality is something that varies with context. The biggest viral hit I’ve ever had on this blog was a post written the day after the Olympic opening ceremony – that got a lot of Twitter traffic for a day, because that’s where the conversation was, and then it all disappeared. Grant, on the other hand, wrote a roleplaying tips article that picked up steam through Facebook and a wide range of forums, then through Stumbleupon; as well as three separate peaks of interest, it has a very, very long tail of traffic that still reaches it more than a month after publication.
Guardian articles go viral at different levels, in different communities, in different ways, every day. Different platforms have different effects, because of the relative stickiness and longevity of content posted there. The half-life of a Twitter spike is very short, often less than a day; Facebook’s are longer; Stumbleupon’s have lower peaks but are longer still. The half-life of an article, image or video is very much related to the platforms it works for.
Embrace a niche
A little-explored element of viral traffic is all those other websites that send tiny portions of intensely interested traffic. Forums devoted to niche topics might only send ten or twenty visits, but if those visitors like what they see they are likely, these days, to also have networks in other places that will share their hobbies. For example, most people on an RPG forum are friends on Facebook or Twitter with a few folks interested in RPGs; if they see something good, they’re likely to want to pass it on.
Honesty
One of the reasons Buzzfeed works is that its headlines are absolutely clear and honest about what you’re going to get. @expresident at Storyology yesterday talked about the fact that even the number in a list headline gives the reader clues – 53 Cats That Don’t Like You is telling you not just what you’ll find but also how long it’ll take you to get through it, and whether it’ll matter if you have to get off a train / go back to work in the mean time. I can share that headline without feeling like it’s incomplete, like it tricks anyone whose opinion I might care about. And I can click on it knowing what I’m getting myself into. The Mail Online is also excellent at this, though less good at making headlines of sanely tweetable length.
Flirtatiousness
There’s another school of thought here, which I’ll call the Upworthy Teaser approach to headlines, where the idea is to create a social post that demands a click to find out what on earth is going on. This Amazingly Heartwarming Video Will Restore Your Faith In Humanity – often it does, and often it’s shareable. But there’s also a backlash against this kind of head – @huffpospoilers is a case in point – and there’s a certain friction here for some people in passing it on unedited. It’s very, very clickable, but it requires a certain type of content to make it work – to make certain people don’t feel tricked when they click. If you’re telling me I’m going to feel something and I don’t, that’s a dangerous play. It’s one step up from One Weird Trick.
Easiness
You know those websites that don’t have social buttons, or that don’t let you paste a quote without pasting a whole bunch of copyright stuff and extra code around it? Don’t do that. Don’t annoy people who want to share your things. This should be obvious, but it’s too often overlooked. Remove as many barriers as possible.
Emotion
An emotional response is generally something we want to share with other people we think are going to feel the same way. If something makes you feel sad, or happy, or furious, or like you’re going to literally cry from how amazingly cute it is, that’s something you’re likely to want to share with other people. This ties in with identity, too – sharing that feeling is a way of bonding with people, of saying: here are feelings I have, do you have them too? It’s a way of making friends. Through cat gifs. Isn’t the internet brilliant?
Quality
Make it good. There are no cheap tricks here. The things that go truly massive are truly good: truly funny, truly interesting, truly deep. Good reporting is only one dimension of quality here – hilarious things, morbidly fascinating things, distressing but important things all go viral because of their nature. But you can’t fake funny with a cute headline, and if it isn’t the best thing it can be it probably won’t take off.
Controversy
The one exception to the above is, of course, things that make people angry, which can be absolutely horrendous and get a lot of traffic. Outrage is a powerful motivator. But it’s also not generally something that drives a lot of positive association, so if you’re after loyal audience it’s probably best – in the long run – to go for the “OMG this is terrible, don’t you agree” approach rather than just publishing awful things. Some things straddle the line, and go viral in part because people argue about them; those pieces tread a dangerous but interesting path, in which they need to be both defensible and defended by people whose opinions are reflected in the piece in order to be sustainable.
Necessary but not sufficient
All of these elements are worth considering, if you’re trying to make something take off. I’d put identity, honesty and quality as the top three, but other people make different things that work in different ways and play off others. But none is sufficient in and of itself to make something catch on widely. Timing is crucial but often unknowable; sometimes things work because they coincide with a broad trend, while other things fall flat because they coincide with too many other things being published around the same broad trend. Excellent things fall down, despite everything being done right; good things do well despite several things not working as well as they could. Networks are inherently unpredictable, and often fickle. For sustained traffic, it helps to have both a network approach and a broadcast approach, that feed off each other and support each other. And to remember that people are just people, even in aggregate on the other end of an anonymous internet, and what people like isn’t all that hard to predict, if you’re honest with yourself.
This post was partly written in response to folks on Help Me Write, where I’m kinda testing the water at the moment. If you want to help me keep to my vague promise of more regular bloggery, head there and vote for stuff you want to read, or suggest ideas.
At the end of a week that saw the Boston Globe sold for $70m by the New York Times Company, to Red Sox owner John W Henry, it seems that the lock gates transferring newspapers from a gilded past, through an unsustainable present, to to an unknown future have creaked open. Newspapers are now restored to their former status as playthings of the rich, rather than market-driven profit centers.
First, I’d guess that Jeff Bezos thinks that owning the Washington Post will be interesting, fun, and cool. And my guess is that, if that is all it ever turns out to be, Jeff Bezos will be fine with that. This is a man who invests in rockets and atomic clocks, after all. He doesn’t necessarily make these investments for the money. Or bragging rights. Or strategic synergies.
Second, I’d guess that Jeff Bezos thinks that there are some similarities between the digital news business and his business (ecommerce)–and that no one in the news business has really capitalised on this yet.
On the Kindle, Amazon’s been very good at keeping distribution costs and platform costs to a minimum, while making their profits on the content delivered – low margins but at vast scale. It’ll be very interesting to see how this goes – and whether this really is a business venture for Bezos, a path to perceived old-media influence, a plaything or an interesting combination of all three.
