Kickstarter doesn't validate your product; it validates your pitch (and that's okay)

I came here to praise Kickstarter, not to bury it, but this article on major corporations using Kickstarter for product research reminded me of a lesson we covered at the Louisville Digital Association's crowdfunding workshop a few months ago: Kickstarter is sales training, not product research.

Well, that's not entirely fair. Kickstarter does provide some basic market research about your product description and maybe your price point, but only in the context of your marketing. Kickstarter can't validate a product that doesn't exist. It can only validate what you're putting in front of the consumer and all Kickstarter puts in front of the consumer is your marketing pitch.

Kickstarter validates your marketing pitch, not your product.

Dragon*Con 2011: A n00b's Tale, Part III

English: People in Star Trek costumes, at DragonCon Parade in Atlanta in 2009. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

[In the wake of Thursday and Friday awesomeness, the Saturday infodump continuous apace.]

SATURDAY

I awoke slightly later than usual, which is to say 9:00 am, as I had burned the midnight oil at the Star Trek Reboot Review on Friday. My original plan was to attend the 10:00am "Give Me The Bottom Line" writers panel with Mike Resnick and Peter David, but after the Friday disappointments with the Writer's Track, I decided to bow to convention and take in the legendary Dragon*Con Parade. After a quick foodcourt "breakfast" (scare quotes intentional) I staked out a spot betwixt the Hyatt and Marriott along the main parade route.

Now, the parade doesn't start until ten, and when I arrived at 9:30 the crowd was already three-deep along the street. I snagged a view behind a group of parents, as it's easy to see over kids. By the time 10:00am rolled around, the crowd was 8-10 deep on every side. Despite not being in costume, I got compliments on my Diesel Sweeties t-shirt, to the point someone snapped a photo of me. (I tweeted said event, and R. Stevens himself acknowledged my nano-infamy.)

And then, the parade.

What was Super Mario's original name and occupation? (Hint: He wasn't a plumber)

Image via WikipediaI'm totally hosed with work, so I'm copping out again and recycling a Geek Trivia column rather than writing a new Truly Trivial. Luckily, Nintendo was founded 121 years ago this week, so I've got an easy topic to milk. See below.

Mario first appeared as the ladder-climbing, barrel-dodging, gorilla-enraging protagonist of Donkey Kong, which made its arcade debut in 1981. ... It wasn't until 1983 that Mario would rate his own name on the game marquee, when he enjoyed three title releases: Mario's Cement Factory, Mario's Bombs Away, and Mario Bros. The latter introduced the world to Mario's brother, Luigi. (It was also the first time Mario squared off against evil turtles.)

...In an industry where an ever-increasing number of complex and hyper-real — and in some cases, hyper-violent — characters and concepts grab headlines and zeitgeist, it's nice to think that a simple Italian plumber named Mario still carries a lot of weight with avid game consumers. Of course, this world-famous character has come a long way from his humble roots — when his name wasn't Mario, and his gorilla-free day job was something besides a plumber.

WHAT WAS THE ORIGINAL NAME OF THE NINTENDO VIDEO-GAME CHARACTER MARIO, AND WHAT WAS HIS OCCUPATION?

Find out here.

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What was the original name of the Space Shuttle Enterprise?

Image via WikipediaA mere 34 years ago this week -- Sept. 17, 1976 -- the Space Shuttle Enterprise was revealed to the public with a  Star Trek-themed press event. Gene Roddenberry and much of the original Star Trek series' principal cast were present, which was appropriate since it was a mass write-in campaign by Star Trek fans that prodded NASA into naming the original shuttle orbiter after the famous fictional starship.

The space shuttle designated OV-101 was originally intended to bear a different name than Enterprise, one which has some intriguing parallels to Star Trek canon.

What was the original name of the Space Shuttle Enterprise?

What work of classic literature was Gene Roddenberry's inspiration for Star Trek? (Hint: It wasn't "Wagon Train")

A mere 44 years ago this week -- Sept. 8, 1966 -- the first episode of Star Trek aired on CBS. The debut of "The Man Trap" was the culmination of six years of work for series creator Gene Roddenberry, who had been developing and shopping his show concept since 1960.

Like all Hollywood pitches, Roddenberry had to relate his show premise to an already successful franchise in order to interest production studios. Thus, Star Trek was floated to TV houses as "Wagon Train in space" -- a description that many fans consider inaccurate, and perhaps even condescending.

In truth, Roddenberry was only citing the episodic, random-encounter-with-the-unknown aspect of Wagon Train. His inspiration for Star Trek, as he would later claim, was actually one of the most famous works of classic literature ever written.

What work of classic literature was Gene Roddenberry's self-professed inspiration for Star Trek?

Nerd Word of the Week: Crit

Image via Wikipedia

Crit (v.) - A shortened vernacular form of critical hit, critical attack, or critical success; to inflict a particularly devastating or unusually effective attack on an opponent or object, usually within the context of a tabletop roleplaying (RPG) or video game. Used as a verb, as in "I totally critted that orc," or a noun, as in "Was that a crit or just normal damage?" Like all such game-centered terms, it creeps into common usage for geeks, sometimes used to describe any particularly successful action. The accepted antonym is a critical failure, also known as a crit-fail, wherein the worst possible outcome of a situation or attempted action comes to pass. Geeks often use crit-fail to describe their attempts at socialization or romance which, given that we use terms like crit-fail in basic conversation, is a pretty good indication of why we crit-fail socialization and romance.

In a gaming context, crits and crit-fails are most often associated with rolls of a twenty-sided die, otherwise known as a D20. In a significant number of tabeltop roleplaying game systems, rolling a 20 on a D20 is an automatic critical success or critical hit, and a roll of one is an automatic crit-fail. Thus, the ubiquity of geek t-shirts that invoke D20s and their related terms (see here, here, here and here).

I bring it up because: Today is the first day of Gen Con 2009, one of the two largest tabletop gaming conventions in the United States, the other being the Origins Convention. For the next four days, 25,000 hardcore gamers will descend on Indianapolis and large sectors of the geek blogosphere will be overcome with news of the latest Dungeons & Dragons supplements, miniature wargaming models, and collectible card game (CCG) franchises. Pretty much any and every major non-electronic geek game will be on display, so brace yourself for an online tidal wave of nomenclature only slightly less obtuse than that employed by Internet daytraders. And if you get cornered by one of the us nerdspeakers, just tell us we crit-failed the explanation and we'll downshift to English. Maybe.

Nerd Word of the Day: Retcon

Image via Wikipedia

Retcon (v.) - Short for "retroactive continuity," it is the geek-slang term for the rewriting of backstory or fictional history to accommodate a new chapter in an ongoing franchise. This is a pretty common practice in comic books (and, quite frankly, soap operas) where characters are revealed to have very different pasts than previously assumed. For example, at various points Spider-man was said to have received his powers from either a radioactive spider-bite, because he was a totem warrior of a spider-god, or because he was a clone of the original Spider-man. (Currently, I think we've doubled back to option 1, radioactive spider-bite, but don't quote me.) Of late, George Lucas has cornered the market on cinematic retcons with all his Star Wars prequel nonsense rewriting Jedi history.

I bring it up because: The summer movie season has a lot of retcons going for it, either from Wolverine's rewriting of X-men movie history to Terminator: Salvation's resetting the date of Judgement Day--again--and ignoring pretty much everything that happened in The Sarah Connor Chronicles (which was just cancelled). Retcons should not be confused with reboots, which is when a franchise just chucks everything and starts over, much like Batman Begins basically ignored the Tim Burton/Joel Schumacher lineage of batfilms. Thankfully.

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Nerd Word of the Day: Fanboy

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Fanboy (n.) - Quoth Merriam-Webster, "a boy who is an enthusiastic devotee (as of comics or movies)." Once upon a time this was perjorative within geek circles, describing fans who had lost objectivity about the subject of their passions (like, say, people who can't admit that recent Star Wars movies are pale imitations of original Star Wars movies). Female fanboys are called fangirls. The term has of late been reclaimed by by geeks as a self-described badge of honor, denoting "true" geekdom as opposed to the passing contemporary coolness of being called a "geek." Bottom line, if I call myself a fanboy--as I do in the right column of this blog--it's okay. If you call me a fanboy, it's usually an insult.

I bring it up because: The movie Fanboys, about a group of guys trying to break into Skywalker Ranch in 1997 to see Star Wars, Episode I before its release, comes out on DVD tomorrow. Also, because of the recent backlash against the I am a Geek campaign, which conflates using a computer (or, more specifically, Twitter) with actual social geekdom. The term fanboy has some nuances that both these memes highlight, to varying degrees. Discuss.

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Why are sci-fi conventions dying? It's not just the economy, stupid

Image via Wikipedia

Over at SF Signal, the gang asks if sci-fi conventions are dying.

I wrote about this myself a while back, and as a guy who has helped run convention, my general take is that...

A) The economy is enemy #1 right now and since most cons barely make it in good times lean times will see some culling of the herd.

B) The Internet is hurting "traditional" conventions because these cons are holding onto activities that were vital in the 1970s or earlier but that the Web has made unnecessary.

For example, how many cons still have movie rooms? These were awesome back before VCRs and the only way you could see stuff no longer in the theaters--or even obscure when home movies first came out--was at conventions. How many cons still have LAN parties, when with the exception of casemodders there is no reason to pay to network game when you can do all that online from home today. And so far as dealer's rooms? Name me one item you can get here that you can't get cheaper online?

I'll even take it one step further and ask why do we need masquerade skits when we have Youtube humor videos? Why do we need filking when we've got Jonathan Coulton, MC Frontalot and Paul & Storm--all with stuff free online? Why do I need single-author panels when I'll get less out of that one hour with person than I can get with that author's blog.

These are all legacies of a bygone convention era, and most cons waste their energies catering to the dying throngs of fandom that NEVER WANT CONS TO CHANGE. Yes, the old guard are your most reliable customers, but it's a shrinking market and focusing on them means you won't grow new customers fast enough to replace them.

The conventions that succeed today are the ones that offer me experiences I can't replicate from my PC or in the regular course of my life. Some of that is primacy--SDCC let's me see clips and hear announcements first. Origins and GenCon do the same with game debuts and playtests. Other cons simply offer scale--if you like costuming, enjoy the DragonCon parade, it's HUGE. Smaller cons win by specializing. PenguinCon, for example, combines sci-fi and Linux enthusiasts, with a decide sci-tech bent. That crossover appeal is key here.

Cons can offer experiences I can't get from my PC. First of all, multi-author panels are awesome, because the interplay between multiple experts and celebrities is an experience that can't be matched through blogs and online interviews. Genuine, in-person tabletop games with experienced game masters offer an untouchable con experience--I get to try new stuff with people who really know how the games work and are excited about them. (Personally, I'd love to see a convention that combined the above to experiences--a celebrity gaming con that let me play D&D with Wil Wheaton or Scott Kurtz.)

Stop selling me miniature wargaming models or boffer nerf swords and run workshops that show me how to paint minis are build boffer blades. Don't show me your fan film, let's make one over the course of the con. Don't just show me anything, interact with me. That's the only way conventions will survive.

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