Dec 13th, 2007
The blank page
Shell Oil has been running an ad in the print media which shows a full, blank page with the following scrawled in the corner…
“The blank page, still the most challenging environment there is.”
We have released an early version of the Sharendipity platform to a small group of people, and this message is ringing true for them as well. When Sharendipity users embark on creating a new casual game or slide show, they start with a blank, white screen and aren’t always sure where to get started.
It is a tricky problem. After all, the blank page may be challenging for some, but it offers the ultimate power as well. If we forced our creators to start with templates it would be a disservice to the creative individuals that don’t want to be painted into a corner.
As the small print on the ad goes on to say, “The mind finds freedom difficult to handle. It prefers parameters, rules, precedents.” There will clearly be a significant fraction of our users that have good ideas, but need a place to get started. This is one of the problems we’re working on now to get more users engaged in content creation. What ideas do you have to facilitate this? Are there elements of templating in other applications - whether it is PowerPoint, Wikis, or some other creative tool - that you like or dislike?
Sometimes it is helpful to take real world content and model a simple game around it. For example, NASA has a wealth of interesting content generated on a regular basis by its many space probes and telescopes.
I think people too often think that creativity starts from the void of “pure thought”. The reality is that most art (casual games included) is a reflection of our world.
I used to work with these guys: http://www.cet.edu/index.html
They are a good example of turning content into games, etc. for learning purposes.
Personally, I have a hard time coming up with ideas out of nowhere. I have a much better time with a starting point on which I can build from. One thing that is certain is that everybody’s creative process is different, so forcing one way or the other will alienate at least part of the audience. The trick is to figure out what kind of tools will give people the help they need. Of course after getting started with the idea people will make it their own right away, which is the point, which means that the ideas to get them started only have to be bare bones.
A few ideas: highlights of what other people are doing will help spark ideas of something new or improvements on existing ideas; since theres going to be a structure for people suggesting ideas to programmers, that structure could be used to create a set of user generated ideas to start with.
Templates are nice when you know what you’re doing and want to get started without having to lay everything out yourself. That works for a memo, but from my viewpoint sharendipity is supposed to be more of a creative outlet than an alternative to powerpoint/word/etc. -i may be wrong. Sure getting people to use it as that is fine, but the goal is to extract the crowd creativity. I don’t think templates will necessarily solve the problem of helping people generate ideas, but it will help them create standardized content.
I think the following things would help with “blank page” syndrome. The first is getting people who do similar things together. People with similar interests have a way of motivating each other. “Oh, you used that to do this thing that we both care about! Cool, let me try that.” In other words, allow people to network within the community.
The second idea has to do with letting creators receive recognition. Maybe you have contests or some of other ways of recognizing people who are contributing to the community. Maybe there are levels within the community, e.g. you start out as an apprentice and then work your way up the kingdom. This would allow an inexperienced user to recognize a more experienced user so that they could ask for help/feedback.
Finally, maybe there’s some sort of experts forum that users can visit and post questions when they are having problems with a particular aspect of creating. If you know help is just around the corner, you are more willing to take risks and invest your time.