A few years ago I met the most important game-designer in the world. He is the inventor of many board-games but also of very successful television-games. His games were sold all over the world. At that time he was just hired by one of the most important entertainment-firms in the word to become their Chief Creative Officer (CCO).
We started to talk and I found out that I could do what he could do. I was generating new game-concepts with ease. When I generated these concepts his comments were very clear.
“This is not possible because of the state of the IT-technology“.
What I found out first surprised me but later I found the reason. The entertainment-industry was way behind the banking industry. This is normal. Every segment in the Industry goes trough a cycle of maturity and has no idea what is happening in another segment.
I wan’t say they are re-inventing the wheel because the Entertainment-Industry has been very innovative in the area of the User-Interface (The front-end). Banks were unable to do that because their front-end was a branche-office.
Because I understood what the CCO wanted to do I was able to make a connection between two independent areas.
The other thing that surprised me was his focus on the TV. I explained him how easy it was to use a PC as a TV. I also explained him that a combination of many User-interfaces (PC, TV, and GSM) could create completely new concepts. Concepts are named Formats in the Entertainment Industry.
After some time he asked me to arrange a demo. I went to TNO. I have been working as an advisor for TNO for many years. TNO is a huge government-paid research organization. They experiment with every thing you can imagine. They were abl to demo all the upcoming innovations and he was very surprised.
I wrote a document about “what was possible” in his language. I used Cordys as an infrastructure and defined many new technical concepts like the Worldwide Media Hub, a Format Engine, a Monitor (Generating Feedback) and a model of the Emotions that could be used to stimulate Impulsive Buying Behavior (based on Frijda). I also defined a Scenario-generator based on the collected Stories. This generator could generate a completely new type of Soap.
The CCO became very interested and wanted to start a business outside his own Company. The company he was working for was not interested. He was allowed to do this (The so called Right of First Refusal). We made a complete business-plan and started to look for people that wanted to finance our business. The amount of profit we could generate was tremendous.
To my surprise nobody was interested. Our plan was too advanced. People in the Investment Business had no idea about the combination of Banking Technology and Entertainment Technology. Their idea about the World was based on the concept of the Website.They were also very hesitant because they lost a lot of money in the E-Commerce Hype.
Now almost 3 years later big worldwide media companies are finally interested and it looks like we are going into business. So if you want to make a lot of money this is your chance to jump on the bandwagon.
This is the last blog about Story Based Games.
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