on the design note: recall that sometimes the most interesting thing people can do with your application is use it for things it was not intended to do, or at least not designed in at the outset. instead of assuming that an ideal design should make good things easy and bad things hard, why not build for the kind of flexibility that allows users to come up with new and interesting and useful interpretations and uses for which you couldn’t possibly have imagined in the first place? especially if, for some, what’s easy for you isn’t going to be easy for them.

Hard – a student vet consults the prof. Should it be so hard to do this? The reply might be differentiated – this is hard, this you will learn with thime, this is easy. Basically hard means complicated – feedback is not very helpful.

The 10 000 rule is from Nobel prize winner – Simon. A Grand Master needs to know 10 000 real chess boards. Put a random board in front of them and they are no more successful than you or I.

10000 scenarios/200 working days/ at 5 a day = 1o years corresponds to the QUICKEST time to expertise of value in the world – fully fledged surgeon. Tenure at a world clas uni etc. We also notice that our work becomes noticeably easier about this point. We suddenly get fluent.

Designing skill uptake is important. It can’t be hurried but we have to learn 5 new sceanarios a day. So the level of the scenario is important. For surgeon it will be relevant ops equivalent to chess boards. The principle in management is 10 000 profit and loss accounts. We need to be learning at the level we expect to work at. To make that concrete, if we are training hotel managers they need to go through 10000 cycles of managing the entire hotel. Within that cycle they can loop through food&beverages, front office etc – but never leaving the focus of the whole.

Hope this helps. Some things are genuinely hard. Your question has to be is this hard and do I want to master it. Figure out what you need to know and what the 10 year expert needs to know and whether you are one or the other.

Expertise relies on real experience. There are no shortcuts. Some people don’t get there – either the wrong focus or just too low a work rate. Someone with the expertise will have worked really hard to get there. An object of art almost.

From an operational point of view, the “right” thing is whatever the designer intends, and the “wrong” thing is when the user does things the designer does not want. This is what I intended throughout the post.

There’s a larger ethical question, of course. What if the person designs a system that rewards “wrong” behavior? For instance, it’s fairly easy to create a corporate culture where everybody is out for their own personal gain (e.g. Enron), but that may not be a good thing in the big picture. I’m not even attempting to address that bigger question here, because, wow, hard

This isn’t quite a comment on this statement, but this statement reminded me of something I keep encountering in games – and in talking about design with what should be experienced designers…

There are a lot of times when a metric of a game has to do with the size and scope of the world. Fuel, for instance, recently promoted the fact that they’re in the Guiness Book of World Records for the largest in-game world at 5,560 square miles. Compare that to GTA IV’s ~10 square miles, and yeah, that’s a pretty huge world.

In stuff I’ve worked on in the past, people have wanted to push the size of the game world – but the thing is, none of our resources allowed us to actually populate that space with anything interesting. So the suggestion was always, “Well, we’ll fill it with procedural stuff,” or worse, “Well, it’ll be empty, and that’ll encourage the player to go back to the interesting places.”

NO IT WON’T YOU F**KING MORON.

What it WILL encourage is for someone to go explore the world – that’s what people do. And when they find that 90%+ of your world is a dead, lifeless nothingness, the size of your world actively works against you, because what happens is people find the easiest thing to do and do that – REGARDLESS of the design of the thing. The key is to make the easiest thing fun.

So if you’re game’s about a huge world and exploration, you have to do something to reward exploration. Nothing is obviously a TERRIBLE reward for that.

Anyway – I guess my point is simply this – people will do what’s easy, whether that’s what you’ve designed the thing to do or not. If the easy thing is boring and lame, your thing sucks. If the easy thing is interesting and rewarding, you’ve created something good.

Applying that, of course, is harder.