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Katie & Scott & Simon & Cecily.

Tag: crowds

Day 294: the eca and how to get the internet to hate you (a case study)

December 2, 2009 / / 0 Comments

March 27, 2009: The Entertainment Consumers Association’s (ECA) president and founder (Hal Halpin) talks to Ars Technica, announcing a new membership benefit: 10% games purchases with Amazon.  Hal comments: “If you buy three games or so a year through Amazon, your ECA membership is basically free.”  Membership is a very reasonable $20 a year.

Almost immediately, new members are confused.  The discount and Hal’s quote seem to imply that the discount codes can be used multiple times.  However, initial codes seem to be one-use-only.  This is shrugged off by ECA administrators as a technical glitch.

It takes a few weeks to get this glitch working and when it does, it has the restriction of generating a new Amazon code for each discounted game.  This forces members wanting to buy multiple games to avoid any group orders and forces Amazon to ship all games individually.  It’s not a big deal, but is a bit inconvenient.

May 17, 2009: The generated Amazon codes stop working.  The ECA responds, saying that the “initial batch of one-time use codes has been depleted and will be replenished as soon as the new batch from Amazon comes in.”  New codes are available and working 10 days later.  The admins mention that they are working with Amazon to attempt to get unique per-member codes that can be used for all purchases.

July 1, 2009: The codes stop working once more.  10 days later, new codes are available, but these codes can only be used once.  5 days later, multiple codes are up and working again.

August 19, 2009: The codes run out again.  The admins mention that this is due to the increasing popularity of the discount.  New codes are up and working within a week this time.

September 11, 2009: Hal Halpin writes an article in Game Informer magazine, ending it with a generic code that can be used to get a free year’s ECA membership.  This code gets posted to many forums and sites online, as it is usable by anyone.  With the lure of the Amazon discount being a huge perk of membership, many new members predictably flock to the ECA and sign up for free.

Within 2 days, the codes have been used up.  The next few weeks are a bit of mayhem in terms of getting codes to work.  Some people are lucky, others are not.  Code batches get exhausted quickly and members are only able to generate one code per day at most.

October 10, 2009: The Amazon codes disappear from the ECA site.  The ECA admins say that this is at Amazon’s behest and that new codes will appear when they get them from Amazon.

October 28, 2009: The Amazon partnership and promotion is “no longer available.”  New members, many of whom signed up solely for the Amazon discount, are a bit miffed.  Forum moderators begin locking down and deleting new threads about the Amazon discount.

December 2, 2009: Today.  Members become aware of several things simultaneously.  First, an option that existed on the accounts page that allowed a member to set their auto-renew status for next year’s membership disappeared.

Second, the terms of ECA membership cancellation changed.  Previously, members were given a phone number to call if they wished to cancel.  The new terms dictated that members needed to send a piece of postal mail in order to cancel.

The forums (and other blogs and sites that pick up the story) explode with comments and criticisms.  A moderator answers some questions thusly:

Was there a button for auto-renewing?
Yes, for some browsers, but it wasn’t intended to be there, wasn’t a working option and was removed as soon as we became aware
Why can’t we terminate via email?
Because the org has grown too large to handle the volume and requiring a mailed piece separates those who are serious from those who are lazy or finicky – joining and leaving repeatedly – and it gives us written documentation, a paper trail to reconcile against

Later in the day, Hal Halpin releases a statement that seems to place the blame on members who exploited the Amazon codes to such a degree (even going as far as to repeatedly join, leave, and rejoin the ECA) that these changes were the only way to quickly and easily prevent these exploits from happening.

I don’t want to pass too much judgment here.  I’ve already written a lot of words and there are certainly arguments to be made for both sides.  But as someone who has followed this story from this morning, I can say that the response I’ve seen from the ECA (both their forum moderators and Hal’s statement) have seemed at times smug and at others condescending, going as far as to treat all of their members like criminals.  On the other side of the coin, many of the ECA critics have shown themselves to be immature and vindictive.  It’s hard to get reasonable people to discuss anything on the Internet, but the ECA certainly didn’t make it easy.

Changing terms of service without notification, requiring postal mail for cancellation of an auto-renewing membership, and promoting a benefit that was often dysfunctional are all things that can hurt the credibility of any organization, let alone a pro-consumer one.

Day 292: trustnet

November 30, 2009 / / 0 Comments

I’ve written about trust before, but I wanted to briefly talk about trust in this new age we live in on the omnipresent (and perhaps least trustworthy) medium of our day and age: the internet.

There’s a certain amount of stock you can put into the learned body language and life experience of social interactions.  When I meet someone for the first time, look into their eyes, listen to their voice, shake their hand – there’s a certain amount of trust that can be gained by these action alone.  There’s a bit of social bonding that occurs that instills a trustworthiness in a person.

This, of course, is impossible in the wilds of the Internet, a land where you’re lucky to get more than a concocted screenname and a picture of an animated cat.

For me, the best measure of trust on the Internet turns out to be the old-fashioned one: knowing the person in “real life.”  This is a luxury in some cases; I can’t personally get to know every online vendor I buy from.

So the Internet has built its primary trust foundation instead on brand recognition.  I trust Amazon with my credit card information because so many other people do (and, once I’ve ordered a few times, based on past experience).  I trust an email from a corporate email account because I know that people can’t just buy email accounts with the @ea.com tacked onto the end of it.  I trust Wikipedia to be a somewhat reliable fact-checking source because so many other people use it when they seek knowledge.

Rarely in real life would we be comfortable place our trust in something primarily because it has the popular vote.  We try to find recommendations from friends, references from previous buyers/employers, our gut when we meet the person.  On the Internet, we simply plug into the hive mind and trust the crowd.

Is that any less reliable or any more dangerous?  Or is it just a different way to judge who and what to trust, no better, no worse?

Day 148: crowdsourced viral marketing

July 9, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Something interesting happened this week and I’m still trying to wrap my head around exactly what it was.

About a week ago, I learned (through a gaming blog) that Professor Layton had a Twitter account (@tophatprofessor).  Being a fan of Twitter and Professor Layton, I followed that account.

Through the next few days, several other accounts appeared for other characters in the game series: Luke, Inspector Chelmey, Don Paolo.

There was a bit of ongoing story about Don Paolo’s attempts to thwart/kidnap Layton, and Layton would tweet a puzzle or two each day.  On Wednesday, there was a bit of an event as Layton went “missing” and followers were directed to a message board site where Don Paolo had posted a series of puzzles that needed to be solved in order to rescue Layton.

The entire thing was charming and the puzzles were nice distractions and it felt like a bit of early viral marketing for the US release of the Professor Layton sequel.

Today, the entire thing kind of…fell apart.  It seems that the Layton Twitter account was not an official one.  It hadn’t been created by someone at Nintendo, but rather an ardent fan and semi-games-journalist/blogger.

This, to me, doesn’t really matter one bit.  The account was well-crafted and stayed within the bounds of the associated character and the hype and excitement it created for the upcoming game was very real (for me, if not the hundreds of other followers).

However, the Internet didn’t quite see it that way and he, out of shame or embarrassment or an unmentioned word from the powers that be at Nintendo, has shut down his Twitter account.

Here’s the crazy part: this random guy who created the Layton account only created the Professor and Luke, his assistant.  Two other people then created the Inspector and Don Paolo accounts to aid in the storytelling and created, from three different brains that were unlinked before this event, a viral marketing campaign that was unofficial but very, very compelling.

It was a way of creating something I’ve never seen before and in a spontaneous fashion that is impossible to engineer.  A hearty congratulations to everyone involved in the great Professor Layton tweetathon of July 2009.  It is something that I won’t forget for quite a while.

Day 139: aussie aussie aussie oi oi oi

June 30, 2009 / / 0 Comments

There’s a powerful human effect that occurs in crowds.

Large groups of people, if convinced to believe in the same thing, can be a supremely powerful force, whether its an Australian rugby team, a political party, or a cause of some kind.

Crowds can unite in impromptu cheers in near unison, in group activities and cooperative destruction with little advance planning or personal relationships between those involved.

But in a spurt of emotion over a sports team winning/losing a championship or a candidate winning/losing an election, groups of strangers find the motivation to band together and block traffic, or flip parked cars, or participate in group activities that would be awkward in other situations.

The odd thing is that this odd energy is present in both victory and defeat, both extreme emotional highs and lows.  Why is it that we work so instinctively well in groups and clans when we are filled with energy and emotion?  Does this speak to a piece of our basic being that tells us we belong in packs and tribes – that no man is truly an island?

Or do we just seek like-minded individuals when we are elated or outraged because it gives us all more power than we individually would have?

Or do we seek like-minded individuals our entire lives and it is simply more obvious when our emotions run high?

I’m not sure what the point is.  I suppose it may be: if you want to do something extraordinary or dangerous, find a group of like-minded people, pump yourselves up to a point of charged emotions, and the rest will come naturally.

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