Have you been to the Martin Luther King memorial?

No, not the famous one(s) elsewhere that are all over the web in arguments and rantings about costs etc. I mean the small, quiet, semi-secret one hidden in the heart of San Francisco, in the Yerba Buena Gardens.

Last year, in the run up to the election, I happened to go there, and reading the many inscriptions on the walls I found several to be disturbingly (and resonantly) apposite today – perhaps in some ways even more so than when they were first spoken. Plus, at the time, there was the added poignancy that Americans *might* have been about to vote in the first non-”white” President of the United States of America. Afterwards, I wanted to see the context of each quote, so when I got back to England I went on the internet and tried to find a list of the quotes on the memorial.

Internet says: “no”

Despite hours of searching (at the time), and link following, etc, my Google-Fu was not enough – I couldn’t find a record anywhere (by now there may be a list somewhere?). So, I promised myself that next time I went back to SF, I’d either transcribe or photograph each of the individual quotes myself, and put them online. Here you go:

Transcriptions

In no particular order…

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy

When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro Spiritual, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’

Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will; and he’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over and I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you; but I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.

There is nothing in all the world greater than freedom. It is worth paying for; it is worth going to jail for. I would rather die in abject poverty with my convictions than live in inordinate riches with the lack of self-respect.

Through our scientific genius, we have made this world a neighbourhood; now, through our moral and spiritual development, we must make of it a brotherhood. In a real sense, we must learn to live together as brothers, or we will perish together as fools.

As the movement took hold, a revival of social awareness spread across campuses from Cambridge to California. It spilled over the boundaries of the single issue of desegregation and encompassed questions of peace, civil liberties, capital punishment and others.

I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of thermonuclear destruction. I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant.

An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.

I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality, and freedom for their spirits. I believe that what self-centred men have torn down men other-centered can build up.

These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression; and out of the wombs of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are raising up as never before.

Men for years have been talking about war and peace. But now, no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer the choice between violence and non-violence in this world. It’s non-violence or non-existence.

We must rapidly shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

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(the quality of photos is very poor because … well, because of reasons that are obvious if you go visit the memorial yourself. And most/all of it seems deliberate. I only had a compact Nikon on me – anyone with a fat DSLR and a tripod is welcome to go back and take better photos the next time they’re there?)

NB: the first time I went to the memorial, I found it disappointing and irritatingly unfriendly. The second time I went, it made a lot more sense.

Your professor tells you that you can’t study them for their own sake. However, if they’re as exciting as you say, and all the young people are reading them, then perhaps you could write an educational one? He therefore instructs you to go away and write a novel to teach addition.

For one of the conferences I was asked to speak at this year, I proposed a talk on the topic:

“Why the Serious Games movement is fundamentally bankrupt based on an idea that will never work, and what you should be doing instead, because there’s some great stuff you’re doing under that banner – but only when you undermine or ignore the classic definition(s) of Serious Games”

Unsurprisingly, they didn’t accept it. They kept on asking me to talk on something more “positive” and “business encouraging”; I kept on replying that it needs to be said, that it would be more valuable to their audience than anything else I personally could talk meaningfully on, and that if they didn’t want it, fine. Not my loss. Ah well.

(and to those of you who are doing great stuff and calling it Serious Games, but not following the foolishness of the majority – well done, keep it up, and we’re looking forward to what you come up with next!)

No. University causes people to do badly at University. For most children, more so now than ever before in history, it’s the first time they experience true “independence” and “full responsibility for their own stupid actions”. Developing addictions – any addiction – and succumbing to them for the first time is, from what I recall, pretty common as one of the learning experiences many go through.

IMHO, the FCC Commissioner really ought to be *celebrating* the fact that students today learn how to integrate addictive entertainments with their daily lives on something as benign and social as a computer game. MMO’s such as WoW have some great things to help people learn to understand and deal with addcition, such as the social support of in-built human social/friends networks (largely comprised of people who aren’t addicted, or who have found ways of getting a decent workable balance between their game-playing and their life).

Maybe the World Has Suddenly Changed, and the FCC Commissioner’s statements and scaremongering are both reasonable and an excellent warning. The balance of probability suggests that’s not the case, and that instead it was a foolish, ill-considered statement from someone in a position of public attention who really ought to know better.

Normally, I’d shrug and not care; there’s lots of public personalities who make silly statements every minute of every day (that then get leapt-on by news outlets eager to do some trouble-stirring). But in this case, she was using it to prop-up her argument in favour of forcing telecomms carriers to “adopt initiatives to provide curriculum and education regarding safe use of their products – including internet safety”. In the process of trying to promote something worthy, she stamped on the face of one of the most effective tools for doing precisely what she was aiming for. Sigh.

From the ARGs in Charity and Education conference last week. Alice was forthcoming on real data – and, more importantly, C4’s outlook/perspective – on a bunch of issues. Very useful stuff.

As ever, errors and ommissions my own, and my commentary [in square brackets].

Background

Until 2008 C4 education had a budget of £6m to spend on TV shows. We had a morning slot around 9:30, target audience british 114-19 year olds. All great telly, but 14-19 year olds are either at school, work, or college, so we were merely getting the odd ill one and practically no others.

So we started thinking about where they really were, physically, and go to them.

So this year we’re spending all that money on x-platform projects. Combination of:
- straight-up TV
- games on the web
- new platforms (we’ve never done anythong on before) such as mobile or XBLA etc

ARGs…

Two of the projects for 2009 are … sort-of … ARGs

Projects we really liked that we saw: Perplex City (PXC), World Without Oil (WWO), Jamie Kane (JK), Lonely Girl 15 (LG15)

LG15 people thought was an ARG, but wasn’t.

PXC you can think of as an ARG, but it wasn’t entirely. [ADAM: Ha!]

If you define ARGs as a realtime mystery to solve using lots of tech, it becomes too narrowly defined. But we love narrative and cross-media content and live events etc.

We put out a call for “broad appeal” + “something ARG-like for 14-19 year olds” to see what we’d get.

Content

We dont work to the curriculum per se, we go for the softer stuff that they need help finding their way through – sex drugs alcohol relationships etc

We’re doing x-platform games, some single-platform games, it has to be free-to-play (we have to make this F2P because its Education as PSB).

WWO: the great thing was that it was such a serious topic, and yet also had a really high impact.

• Want to avoid scaring people senseless (c.f google: Wonderland ARG weird)
• Want to attract wide range of people, dont want to alienate the main audience
• Giant audience who dont want to do much interaction

Channel 4’s ARGs

First game: genomics, genetics, evolution, etc. Scientific core that would appeal to teenagers, introduce teenagers to privacy of genetic material etc. Trying to balance spicing up without dumbing down. There are flash games with DNA themes – trying to get attention, very easy to play flash games. Going to distribute those across miniclip, yahoo games, etc – try to bring people in, get them to watch videos on the side, get them even more engaged, and then finally get them into the ARG stuff.

[ADAM: immediately brings to mind Xenophile Media's reGenesis ARG that was run explicitly as a TV show + web ARG a couple of times in Canada. Assuming this isn't just a syndication of the original RG, it will be interesting to see what parallels (if any) there are between these]

Second game: privacy, security, personal security – and what happens with social networking. Lots of msitakes by kids, eg 12 year olds, discovering the hard way how dangerous it is. We’re going to get them to experience eg cyber-bullying both as victim and perpetrator, so that when they really experiece it they’re a bit better prepared to handle it.

How will we measure success?

We have to compete wth the broadcast TV part of Channel 4, which means competing with “millions of people overnight”. We’ve been asking: how can people play these games if they stumble over it a year later on the web?

Well, we have to hit UK people, young especially. Doing a hell of a lot of research, especially on PR – how to seed it, when to seed it, etc. We will probably publish a whole load of data afterwards to say “this is what happened”

Q&A

Q: are the games standalone, separate from C4’s brand / TV channels?

One of them has a sponsor/partner (Wellcome Trust). They loved the game theme so they provided us with real scientists and look at all the data we put in the game and vet it for accuracy.

Do we use the rest of C4 to help this along? Yes.

With the first game we’re having a large launch event at C4 head office. C4 Edu does get some TV slot between programmer at peak time – so we’ll put URLs in between adverts for e.g. Hollyoaks.

Bow Street Runner was done to complement a post-watershed show (City of Vice). You could push from the TV to the game, but we weren’t allowed to go backwayrds becuase the game was designed for teenagers.

We found that having an advert on the telly does create a spike, but talking to the target audience direclty works much better – e.g. seeding on gaming blogs was much more effective. TV definitely useful, but definitely not the overwhelming promotion thing.

Q: is 3 months the optimum time for a game? (both the C4 ARGs for 2009 are coincidentally that)

Dont know. Maybe its because we’re a broadcaster and they’ve targetted it to us as what we’re used to for TV dramas etc.

Q: do you have to play the 3 months simulcast?

Out of 3 args we looked at:

• One was: live theatre stuff, if you miss it all you can do is watch the videos after
• The other two were: turn up play through anytime

Q: can you syndicate an ARG experience?

I really think you can. Where they work is where they have post-finish value. WWO is being repackaged as a teaching tool now, for instance.

They can be localized relatively easily.

At C4 we own buy the rights to the specific game, we never take the tech or format rights, so it’s easy for people to re-sell as re-skinned elsewhere

Q : [ADAM: ... 3 questions at once ... I didn't hear them at all ... ]

14-19 yo if you go for the full bracket yo uhave to be appealling to a wide variety already, so it will often hit 12 years too, but definitely we’re expecting to hit people a lot older than 19.

There are 4m 14-19 in the UK. We check whether the amount it costs us is worht it for the number of people we get it. 15 minutes a month is the benchmark for getting a single viewer on TV, so games are way higher than that normally, and TV is also extremely expensive compared to games stuff. We get 50% of C4.com viewers as overseas, so attracting non UK people as well is fine too.

[ADAM: what about forging international-relationships between people - is this not covered by PSB? That's a bit sad if not]

It would be a problem if the game appealled only to, say, Australian OAPs, so missed our target competely.

Q: is there competition in the games?

There will be prizes to be won, there will be status tracking, but no overall winner. We are not aiming to have a “win point” for the game.

Q: if going for younger audience how does privacy about taking peoples details affect you, how does it affect community if you limit talking?

If you introduce registartion, the will to play drops off massively. Even asking for email address maybe 50% of people will remain. Adding another field gets rid of another 40%, so you end up losing 90%.

[ADAM: pet peeve here - while the basic point is very true and very important, this is something that a lot of people doing their first online game have no idea what they're doing, and screw up - but it's well-understood and well-researched if you go and do your homework. ARG's are not *that* much different from signup for casual games, MMOG's, etc, and I don't consider the 50% figure a reasonable estimate except for alpha and/or low quality implementations, and while 90% can happen, it's so far from what you should see if you do any pre-planning that it's not worth talking about, IMHO. Also, I wonder if Alice's figure is an overall drop rate (?) and doesn't take into account those people who were going to leave anyway, which would inflate it anywhere from "a bit" to "a heck of a lot" depending on what your traffic sources are. e.g. make sure you run A/B tests to establish a baseline drop rate]

Sometimes you have to – e.g. when running live events for legal reasons you need to.

Main post on the conference is here.

As ever, errors and omissions my own, and any personal commentary is in [square brackets]

EDIT: updated with some corrections, courtesy of Juliette

Introduction

Started when the CRUK competition was launched about a year ago, we were the winners of that competition, and made this game. Did it all in our spare time, and the game only finished last week.

To play the game, you signed up as a trainee secret agent on a website – http://www.wearenottheagency.com/ – main site has a grid in the centre, 10×10. Each cell it he grid is an agency sleeper cell that needs to be funded to combat EVIL.

New cells got released gradually over the course of the game.

On release, each cell has to be sponsored with real cash, usually up to around £30, and the sponsor gets to choose the icon that then represents it. The team who sponsored got a 10-hour headstart on the mission (it was free to play – you would just always be 10 hours behind the curve).

Puzzles

Most missions were puzzles of some sort

(example: listening to morse code recording and decoding it)

(example: create a scene from a James Bond movie in lego)

(example: make a cake)

(example: knitted cup of tea and knitted biscuits (angelsk))

As well as the puzzles, we had a story. Key NPCs had their own blogs, and one had a twitter feed. Story revolved around working out which of the NPCs was a mole.

EVIL = Erudite Villains In Leather

EVIL website was available (and ugly) and the players had to work out the password to get in at one point.

The evil mastermind’s pet goldfish had its own blog, and would drop hints to the player, because she hated her owner.

Each time you complete a puzzle you get a reward of some kind from the sleeper cell. Sometimes these were cosmetic / fun / jokes, other times they were bits of a huge jigsaw puzzle, a blueprint for a doomsday mahine. That jgisaw puzzle also had encrypted numbers in it that players had to decode and find a particular book – The field guide to the Birds of the West Indies (which inspirted the naming of James Bond) – and the nubmers from puzzle decoded names of the birds that lead you to cancer research UK shop, where a copy of that book contained a clue to a masterplan kept in Bletchley Park.

Rewards

If you sponsored the game, you got a certifiate in the mail, and a business card which had a single letter written on it in UV ink. Players didnt quite manage to get all that data together in time to make the message with it, so game ending had to be changed a litle.

Stats

amount raised: £3110

donations: 108 (by 66 people)

players > 4000 = 42
players > 1500 = 72
605 reg players
62 people posted to forums

34 twitter followers
5300 visitors
avg time on site 11.5 minutes
num players on facebook group = 135
number of players at end of game social event = 2

forum posts = 1296

Q&A

Adrian: do you think it was a success, what would you change

Juliette: 4 main things to change: our original plan was amibitious (such tend to win competitions) and we should have scaled back after winning before starting, and added them in as we had time. We had too many people involved in development which made things inefficient and it was particularly hard to make decisions quick enough during the live game. We didn’t think enough about the game design before making it, partly because the team was mostly working remotely, one of the key people at the start was in liverpool when most of the rest were in south east; getting together in real life was the most productive thing but we didnt do it enough.

Dave: the biggest problem was that we relied a lot on skyped, and it would have been a lot easier if we’d been physically co-located.

Alex: either think more creatively about advertising, not enough time thought about how to market it, too much thought about just delivering it.

Marc: spent a lot of time making a game for ourselves, and we could have thought more about who was going to play it, and what they would like, and where they would spend most of their time. Turned out at the end that most players really just wanted the puzzles, and weren’t that interested in the meta-story / mega-meta-puzzle we made – so that time perhaps wasn’t entirely well-spent.

Adrian: what would you try out next time

Alex: we launched at start of school term, but didnt take advantage of that. We had some teachers contact us wanting to do thigns with their kids.

Q: I found the puzzles at the start were so hard that I couldnt get as far as the meta-story. With PXC (Perplex City) there were millions of forums posters who constantly helped you with the puzzles as an individual, so it was OK it was fine, but with this there were very few people helping you.

Dave: a lot of people have said to me that it looked eally good, but the initial puzzles were – perhaps not too hard – but more engaging, maybe some easier, maybe some more attractive. We had a lot of people visit the site who never engaged. Eventually we added a Start Here cell which helped a bit, but it was late. We had no obvious starting point for people new to the site.

[ADAM: very interesting observation here - PXC was a major commercial undertaking, with 1.5 years of warm-up marketing before the main game launched, and then lots of professionally-managed PR etc. Other ARG makers need to be careful when taking inspiration from PXC to note which things were inherent to the genre/game, and which were inherent to the presence of a substantial full-time professional development company]

Q: generally do you think that ARGs are a viable mechanism for charities, not only a resource financially, but also the market – are ARG-players the correct market that charities are trying to reach?

Adrian: during conversations we’ve had with charities, a lot of them want to target younger people because their own demo is skewed too much away from that right now.

The time it took is a red-herring – we didnt spend that many hours over the course of the time we spent.

Adrian: getting a lot more players at the start would help using non-ARG techniques eg CRUK has a lot of marketing it can do itself for such a product. CRUK was such a big organization that there were lots of people inside the org who had no idea of the existence of the ARG.

Q: with 600 people playing, how did they find the game?

Word of mouth, people blogging about it (e.g. the Guardian games blog ran an interview about the game) [ADAM: GGB has a substantial readership, and Aleks Krotoski has featured ARGs quite a few times, so I'm surprised they didn't get more players than that], about 2 thirds were ARG players already.

We didnt really have anyone concentrating on the PR, which let us down a bit.

[ADAM: I misheard this as "art", not "PR". Doh. Getting it right it makes a lot more sense!]

Q: how do you attract NON-ARG players then?

keep the puzzles less cryptic, and have a wider range – that stands out, that different people like different stuff, and the general population really like very simple mass-market puzzles like SuDoKu.

Q: did you have any user-testing

A bit of usability testing of the site, and a little bit of testing of puzzles but not much. A lot of stuff we were doing on the fly as the game happened so there wasn’t a chance to do playtesting

Adrian: spend less time on game desing, more on marketing / promotion?

Spend more time thinking about how to integrate the two

Q: how did you price your puzzles? [ADAM: the sponsorship was priced by the game developers]

really wanted individuals to put small donations and pool it as a team, but werent enough team donations vs personal, so we had to drop the price of cells down to around £30 from having been £50 initially to make it viable for individuals

Q: what about awareness raising, did that add a lot more intangible value than just the small cash raised?

Adrian: we asked CRUK do you want awareness or money, and they said emphatically money.

Q: what was the connection between fundraising and money? did you have to raise moeny to play?

no, it was just a headstart on the missions. At the end, some of the teams were very competitive about this.

Q: a week after sleeper cell there wer elots of other ARG charity launches – is there a danger of too many of these?

[some comments here - and later on throughout the day - from both speakers and audience suggesting that the Red Cross game was a lot less compelling; should check it out]

As with all other conferences I go to, here’s are writeups of all the sessions I attended. Unfortunately, Channel 4’s offices are a bit … um … 20th Century: their auditorium has no power points. It has sockets that have been covered over with screwed-on metal covers to prevent you using them. Pretty amazingly dumb, considering how funktastic the rest of the building is. So, I ran out of power halfway through, and couldn’t cover all the sessions. Sorry!

As ever, errors and omissions my own, and any personal commentary is in [square brackets]

Keynote

Adrian Hon, Six to Start

Check out the mailing list we’ve started – http://groups.google.com/group/seriousargs

[ADAM: ...and make sure you join the more general ARG development list at http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/arg_discuss ]

One of the very first puzzles in the Beast was based on elements in the periodic table. People quickly realised that the picture (of things added up) looked like elements. They summed to an irrelevant number, but if you used the two-letter names of the elements you got a sentence of mostly nonsensical, but partly sensical, characters. With a bit of tweaking, we got Coronersweb.org [ADAM: you should know this already if you've read the post-mortems from the Beast, but ... image showed transition - with some subtractions you get something like: Co R O Ne R S W E B O R G). Of course, some people got hung up on trying to find a person called Coroner Sweborg.

One of the keys about ARGs is that they can really motivate people to learn about a huge range of subjects. They dont employ any one specific technology [ADAM: actually: look at what's happened and they depend so far almost entirely on the internet, but maybe that's being pedantic], but what they do is weave these disparate new technologies into a story.

First example

I Love Bees (ILB) – Payphones. Creators rang 4,000 payphones around the USA, players had to be at each phone at the right time to answer them all [ADAM: again, if you don't know about this, google it - there's been loads of coverage]. The questions asked on the phone were not terribly interesting or educational. But towards the end of the game, they changed it.

[ADAM: again ... read the post-mortems]

Operator: Tell me something only you know

Player: “I really like hollyoaks”

O: In 30 minutes, Bob needs to know that (bob is at phone X, 2000 miles away)

30 mins later, at a different payphone thousands of miles away…

O: What is the phrase?

Player 2: “I really like hollyoaks”

Over the course of the game, the relay time kept being reduced, until it reached 10 seconds. Although at first a forum or mailing list was more than good enough, the challenge became really difficult.

The challenge for the community was to somehow solve this problem, via teamwork, innovative use of software tools, etc.

(they did it through a combination of: IRC, email-to-SMS, database-driven multicast phone calls)

This is something that you can’t really teach through a book or through a mainstream computer game, and yet is taught very well like this.

Second example

Perplex City (PXC) – one of the fictional characters had to get a book out of a fictional library, but could only do so if they were a published author. The library had a website that the players looked at, tried to hack, etc. Meanwhile, other players decided simply to go and write a book and get it published. So they setup a wiki, assigned one chapter to each player, and over two weeks they wrote a book and self-published it on LuLu – therefore solving the puzzle. We knew they could do it this way, but we hadn’t been absolutely sure they’d do it this way, we were prepared for them to do it other ways.

[ADAM: I remember there was quite a lot of excitement within the company when some of the players decided to do the book-publishing route]

ARGs and Charity

Cancer Research UK

The PXC book, written in 2 weeks, was what caught the imagination of CRUK – if people can be motivated to write books, can they be motivated to raise money for charity?

Seen this graph? Believe it?

or:

Well, you really shouldn’t (see this report on Multimodal Learning through Media, from Cisco)

As it turns out, doing is not always more efficient than seeing, and seeing
is not always more effective than reading. Informed educators understand that the optimum
design depends on the content, context, and the learner.

For example, the bogus percentages on
the cone would suggest that engaging students in collaborative learning in general would result in
higher levels of learning than would a lesson where a student listens to narration or reads text
about the topic. The reality is that, for the novice student engaged in basic skill building such as
learning chemical symbols, individual learning through reading or simple drill and practice might be
the optimal learning design. Yet, for a different learning objective – for instance, understanding
cause and effect of a specific chemical reaction – involving that same student in collaborative
problem-solving with fellow students through a simulation might be the most effective learning
approach.

The concept here – that that graph is completely wrong – was pointed out to me more than 10 years ago by my line manager at IBM, who’d done badly at school, and in later life heard how the cone needed to be mapped to different dimensions according to context (the learner themself, the subject at hand, etc), – and discovered that his primary mode of learning, according to basic testing, was to watch other people do stuff. He confirmed that that “50% Watching a demonstration” was for him often more like 95-100% retained – yet (thanks in part to this myth) was rarely offered as an option whenever teaching was happening. Sigh.

Background

When I was an undergraduate at Cambridge University, a new society was founded – Cambridge University Entrepreneurs – which started an annual business-plan competition for members of the university and local community, giving away £30,000 (about $50,000) to the winners, and modelled on the pre-existing MIT 30k ($30,000).

I felt greatly let down by this competition and society in the first year, so the founder and president co-opted me over the summer holidays to change it for the next year. I ended up being involved directly with running the society / competitions (we branched out to multiple competitions) either as a committee chairman (there was more than one committee) or ex-officio for more than two years. Unofficially, one of the core reasons for founding the society was that Cambridge University at the time did not have any dept devoted to Entrepreneurship; the closest it had was a few classes on entrepreneurship within the Engineering Faculty (Engineering at Cambridge being an exceptional course of international reknown, and hence very large in terms of undergrads and well-funded in terms of diverse courses and extra lecturers; it also had a history of graduates going and founding successful startups). In the belief that the university would take many years or decades yet to found a new faculty for entrepreneurship, this society was created instead. Teaching entrepreneurship was a major mandate and one we took very seriously, running our own entire lecture course (!) each year, for which we co-wrote the syllabus with our sponsors (law firms, accountancy firms, management consultancies, venture capital firms, marketing consultancies, etc) who were also providing 2 or more speakers for the “course”.

The whole exprience was fascinating, and I learnt a lot both from working with the various people involved (sponsors, angels, investors, organizers, contestants) and from entering the competition myself one year (making it to the finals but not winning the cash prize) – but perhaps most of all from seeing what happened to the competition alumni AFTER the competition was over (we maintained strong links with them). I even worked for one of the alumni companies as a summer intern (with the title “Lead Developer” IIRC).

But we never did do very well at the “teaching entrepreneurship” part; our lessons were great, high quality with lots of juicy information, and generally very well recieved – but with hindsight they never seemed to have taught much of what was really needed by the entrepreneurs. It’s something I’ve thought about a lot in the back of my mind in the intervening years.

Here’s a new idea: get rid of the lectures, get rid of the tests, get rid of the business plans, get rid of the competition based on “40 page plan + 10 minutes pitch to a panel of real investors”, instead…

It’s all about the pitch, baby

• Given the facts, can you pick out the bits that will make the company succeed?
• Given the facts, can you pick out the bits that will make the company fail?
• Can you convince someone you’re right when they’re trying to find a reason to condemn you?

The whole course would be built around Pitching. Everyone on the course would spend half their time pitching, and … half their time reviewing other people’s pitches.

The key abilities participants should be developing are:

• Ability to sell, given some info
• Persuading a cynical and suspicious interrogator who’s allowed to dig further into anything you said
• Keeping a time-limited meeting on-topic despite the above
• Seeing through the BS in someone else’s pitch (useful both in self-analysing your own pitches, and also in evaluating business partners and vendors)
• Understanding what needs to be said about a company and what – given a time limit – is unnecessary to be said, even if it’s critical to the company
• Understanding what can be said, and sounds good, but in reality means little, because it doesn’t actually differentiate sufficiently from the failures

When I say “reviewing”, I mean something specific that is NOT what you normally see. I have a trap…

The pitching game

Each pitch-session, you have 3 teams pitching, and 3 teams reviewing.

One of the pitching teams is told that their company is fake, a lie – they have to try and trick the reviewing teams into giving them the money. They are allowed to say ANYTHING in their pitch, and present it all as fact. The other two teams are given the facts of real companies to pitch (names removed), and MUST stick to the facts (this to be assessed by person running the course; some leeway is allowed, but its assumed there will be a due-diligence session further down the line, and veering too far from the facts will count as failure).

Here’s how it works to achieve the learning goals above:

The real teams have to learn, by trial and error, what “facts” about a company are the ones that will A) convince investors, and B) make them stand out from the liars.

This forces them to think about what makes a company suceeed – and, possibly more importantly – what makes a company *appear* to succeed. Competing against liars, they’re going to have to succeed at both.

The liars just have to master the art of the sell. Which is crucially important both to building and running a business and to raising funding and keeping investors happy enough to raise follow-on funding.

There is more to it than that, and there were some better ideas I had half-formed for the game part of this, but I’m out of time for today. The essential idea should be clear though: use “the pitch” as the recurring fundamental element of all the teaching.