updates and life – things aren’t so bad
Well, it’s been a good day mostly. I get to go make a few hours pay tomorrow
afternoon and my night at the Dojo went OK. Tomorrow (Friday) night I am going
to go see Tatsumi and
that is always a pleasure 🙂
In the big news,
Majestic is really living up to it’s hype. Kimiko and I have had a good time
playing it – though I have to admit that Kimiko has been able to get much deeper
into it than I have. That’s OK, because as you will find out it looks like it is
paying off really well for us.
I know this seems like an odd time for us to be getting distracted by a game,
but I don’t see it that way. things have really started to happen for
the company now
that we have cast aside our pretensions at being a traditional web company and
embraced our gaming and character development roots. Not only does it look like
the market is much more willing to look at us now that they don’t see us as just
another of a billion
"dotcoms" but we are much clearer in purpose internally.
To that end, the time we spend studying how Majestic and the Majestic
fan community
are working has already helped us validate some of our assumptions and is
providing us with a real boost to our confidence. It seems like the things we
think will work are working – and it also looks like we can bypass some of the
problems they are having.
To be clear, the project we call "catapult" on our website is a project that
shares some of the more interesting market elements of Majestic – but catapult
is a totally different beast. Where Majestic is in episodes, catapult is
constantly moving. The person who joins tomorrow will simply not be landing in
the same universe that you landed in today when you joined.
I think both paradigms are powerful – Majestic reads like a novel, catapult
is more like an immersive role play game. Speaking of novels, Majestic reminds
me of the first real interactive fiction story called "Portal"
that really made an impression on the world. Sadly I cannot find a copy of the
game itself, though I would love to the story was re-written as a
book that is out of print. Maybe someday I’ll own a copy *sigh*.
So the big news is that while playing Majestic Kimiko ran into a fairly heave
guy in the game industry (and yeah, we have reason to believe it’s the real guy)
and talked to him a little about our company and our projects. it’s along shot,
but he expressed interest in what we are doing and wants to talk again.
Ah well, that’s all for now – but we are making huge leaps I think. Just goes
to show you what can happen…