1. The amount of complication grows exponentially with the number of people involved. Probably more than exponentially. What’s higher than exponentially? Super-exponentially? I’ll put it like this: try getting 150 people in the same place at the same time. Then try feeding them, sheltering them from the elements, getting them to follow a schedule, entertaining them, arranging them for several cameras, and praying they can all get along for five hours. Then get them all drunk. It’s basically your typical TV commercial shoot, only you don’t get to cast the relatives.

2. The level of fun is directly proportional to the level of pain. Take any really awesome, fun game. Chances are, the more fun it is for you, the more pain went into it. The same goes for events. Everyone at the wedding told us they had an amazing time. We spent six months banging our heads on hard surfaces to make it happen. Worth it? Completely. But we’re kind of masochistic.

3. Choose your collaborators carefully. We feel extremely fortunate to have a group of extraordinarily brilliant, talented friends and relatives who just happen to be DJs, photographers, dress makers, stylists and budding party planners. Seriously: really really lucky. We also carefully thought out who should play what role and whether we’d be better off with someone else. While it all worked out in the end, some parties were a lot harder to work with than others. (*cough*OaklandParks&Rec*cough*)

4. Just fork out the cash. We all like to think tough budgets can be smudged and smeared to cover an unlikely amount of costs if we simply step in and just do a bunch of stuff ourselves. This is sort of true. But if you’ve ever had a client tell you he’ll just finish the design himself, you know how this ends. (We did much of the the design ourselves. But we’re actually designers. But it still didn’t get finished the way we wanted it to.)

5. Trust. The hardest part of a project that depends on a whole bunch of people to work? Depending on a whole bunch of people. As designers who have to constantly explain and justify our work to clients, creative directors, interns, and strangers, it can be hard to remember that everyone else on a project genuinely wants it to be awesome, too. Just because a big project is your brainchild, doesn’t mean you have to control every aspect of it through completion. At a certain point, you have to kick back and let the experts do their jobs. If you did good on number 3, you’ll end up with something better than you ever expected.

In order to do this, it has two functions:

1. Replicate

2. Mutate

Both of these are essential. It has to replicate because time and matter destroy it. It has to mutate because the universe is constantly changing.

Both of these need each other, because in order for mutations to be implemented, they must be replicated, and in order to replicate in a changing universe, DNA must mutate.

Mutation is random because DNA has no way of predicting how the universe will change.

Your business, website, ad campaign, video game, or [insert whatever project you're working on now] also has one basic goal: survival. Try asking yourself two questions:

How will it replicate?

How will it mutate?

[Image via Molecular Station]

If you have about half an hour, I strongly encourage you to watch this talk by Jesse Schell. It’s fun. (Also, embedded at the bottom of this post.)

But if you don’t have half an hour, let me sum it up for you:

Games are spilling into reality, and reality is becoming more like a game. More and more actions in your daily life are rewarding you with experience points.

It basically ends there, with a nice note about how your grand kids will be able to find out just exactly how much of a loser you were, because your entire life is being recorded.

I don’t think Mr. Schell went far enough. What happens when people realize they can trade points for real things? What happens when the guy who sucked at regular, money-earning jobs finds out he’s really, really good at getting points for stuff he was already doing anyway?

What happens when we realize we no longer need money?

What are the implications of a currency that, instead of being printed in limited supply by the government, is infinite and generated by our own actions as individuals?

Just some thoughts.

Obviously it’s a great tool for telling how fast some guy pacing around in your office is going. Also, robot armor and smart windshield HUDs. But what else could this possibly be used for?

1. AR racing games. With actual racing! My Hotwheels versus your Hotwheels. Cat versus dog. Little Timmy versus the lawnmower. Anything can now be raced with accurate 3rd party judging right on your mobile phone, including the mobile phone itself!

2. An app that knows when it’s raining and tells you the closest place to buy an umbrella. This sounds boring and lame compared to the others, but next time it starts raining on you, you’ll wish you had this. You know it’s true.

3. An app that knows when you’re running and shows you the best place to catch a cab, buy pepper spray, or take cover in a gunfight.

4. An app that alerts you when cars/bullets/freakishly fast zombies/dinosaurs are coming at you. The alert would have to be sort of urgent for this to be effective. Maybe an electric shock?

5. Gambling. Mobile radar generates another set of statistics on the world around you. What else do non-marketing people use statistics for, really?

6. Outdoorsy stuff. You’re in a forest. There’s obviously tons of animals around, (duh, it’s a forest,) but where the eff are they? Mobile radar will show you! You might even find Bigfoot.

Thea: Zombies versus Triffids: who wins?

Richard: From what I know of them, Triffids will eat rotting flesh, but Zombies aren’t really interested in vegetarianism, therefore the Triffids win. But I like to think they could live in peaceful harmony in a world free from humans.

Richard: Thinking about bottom line quality of controls and user experience. And just taking more pride in themselves in general. Big or small. Hopefully with the public being more picky nowadays the quality level will improve and shovelware will not be seen to be profitable. That sounds a little idealistic in hindsight though.

Richard: I think game designers will need to be more in tune with how people in general want to be entertained and not just your stereotypical gamers. ‘Games’ are user experiences nowadays, and need to cast off the stereotypes and lazy expectations of the past. But at the same time not be ashamed to look at the old school games and see that simple mechanics are more relevant than ever.

Richard: I hate to be pedantic (actually I love it) but I’m a Bejewelled Blitz addict. I just love the combination of quick thinking, bite size gameplay, depth of discovery, elegant simplicity and shiny brightly coloured things. I used to be a snob about Bejewelled when I first saw it but having played Blitz on Facebook I have a lot of respect for Popcap. Peggle is also a masterpiece if you haven’t tried it.

This is the point that the info-tech-media-tainment industry is entering. The rate of change and the level of complexity have come to a point where nothing is ever finished, because in between the prediction of a successful product and it’s launch, everything’s changed, and seven other jerkfaces have already launched an identical product.

Crap, what do we do now?

We get creative.

No, I mean really creative.

Because nothing is ever finished. You used to launch a game and that was that. Maybe a sequel was in the works, maybe it wasn’t. Now we can send out updates on any game to anyone. With social games we have to constantly update them, because if we don’t, people get bored and stop playing them. Advertising is even needier, especially now that companies are realizing that they’re their own best media buy.

Because ideas are free. Everyone has them and every day more people are actually executing them. Gone are the days of the selfish inventor who has one great idea and spends years desperately trying to sell it. Someone else just gave away your idea for free, dude. The good news is that human brains work in groups, and other people’s ideas give us better ideas, which give them even better ideas, which over a few hundred thousand years leads to the Internet and rocket science.

Because everything is content. How useful or interesting is that third paragraph on your home page? Seriously?

Because uniqueness is valuable. What is that stock photo of the chick with the laptop really doing for your brand?

Because the human brain doesn’t understand things that it can’t create. We understand how a pencil works because we know what all the parts do and we’ve reconstructed it in our minds. We have no clue how our iPhones work, unless of course we’ve created one, or something similar to one. There are only two ways to know when that lightning bolt is going to strike. You can wait and watch, or you can create it.

The only way to predict the future is to create it. You can’t afford to sit back and see how everyone else uses this new _______, because by the time you’ve made your observations, they’ll be obsolete.

In conclusion, stop laying off your creative people already.

So what will work be like in 2020?

1. Harder

This brat is buying your company. Bet you wish you'd gotten him those autism-inducing swine flu shots now, don't you?

Guess who’ll be entering the workforce between now and then? They’re younger, smarter, faster, and cuter than you, and they don’t remember before the Internet. I like to call them Generation Omega. (Because it sounds more dramatic than Generation Z.) I’ve met some of these kids, and they’ve completely shamed me in both Wii Tennis and coloring. You know what I was doing wen I was that age? Playing with sticks. In the woods. Yeah. If your job isn’t obsolete in 2020, your inferior synapses will be.

2. Faster

In 2000, people still sent letters and made phone calls. Ten years from now, the term “email” will be akin to “horseless carriage”.

3. Shorter

"To book a United Airlines flight, press one. For utter, soul-destroying incompetence, press two."

The four-day work week is a total win and everyone knows it. Only suckers and outsourced customer service bots will still be at the office on Fridays by 2020. (The other three days might be spent playing Farmville.)

4. More fun

Programs like Ribbon Hero are taking game design to surprisingly practical heights, and UX is working its way onto the wrinkly crevices of even the most reluctant creative directors, as it slowly dawns on them that traditional media is, in fact, maybe starting to feel slightly under the weather. The line between useful apps and games is getting blurry fast.

People are realizing that fun gets it done. The most successful companies, (unless something really drastic happens,) will be the ones that employees actually like coming to. A lot.

Just one question: If the line between games and work blurs, what will we be taking a break from, and what will we use to procrastinate? (Actually, nevermind. There’ll still be plenty of porn in the future.)

Special thanks to Lost Garden for inspiration, and my favorite quote of the month: “Let’s start with the assumption that people are amazing.”

So how do you make a game (or anything else) not just addictive, but sustainably addictive? There are games people are still playing after years – decades even; World of Warcraft, Diablo, Dungeons and Dragons. They all have something in common: user-generated content. Yep, that custom +12 flame sword or whatever you spent 26 hours on is actually a hot marketing buzzword. In the game industry, it’s sometimes called “player-generated content,” because they’re fancy like that. LittleBigPlanet, one of the most highly-acclaimed games probably ever, is based almost entirely on this concept. Mad Libs, arguably the original mass-market UGC-based game, has been around since 1953. The pillars of our modern Internet – Wikipedia, YouTube, and social media – depend on it entirely. No one’s getting bored of those.

The fourth pillar, obviously, is Lolcats.

When you invest time or money into something, it gains value. When you invest your idea into something, it becomes priceless. Everyone has time and money, but only you can create this content in exactly this way. This investment creates a sense of ownership toward the greater whole that you’re contributing to, because you literally created a part of it. The more the framework depends on your contribution, the more ownership you feel. Mad Libs might be at one end of this spectrum, Wikipedia at the opposite end, and your average democratic republic somewhere in the middle.

There’s two points I’m leading up to here. One is that frameworks and tools are more sustainable than static content or product, and creating the right environment for life may be a far better investment than trying to create that life from scratch, when it comes to content for games, websites, or probably any other medium.

The other point is that FarmVille should have a laboratory feature where I can create my own genetically modified super crops and sell the seeds to my friends. Get on it, Zynga.

1. Porn. Now that that’s out of the way…

2. Shopping. Yeah, that sweater looked great on the website – it even looked good on me. But it itched like an std from a mosquito when I finally got it in the mail and I couldn’t return it because it’s freezing outside and now I don’t have a sweater. Jerks. If only there had been some way to know it would be itchy beforehand…

This is what Obamacare feels like.

3. Texturtizing. Now your brand has a texture! Who’ll try to copyright “warm and fluffy” first? …Probably T-mobile. That was a stupid question.

4. Puns. “Our new product rocks!” Ad feels like a rock. (Please never do this.)

5. Menus. Frak scrolling and pop-ups. I can just dig around in my virtual bag of holding for that +5 fire augment or whatever. Warm and hexagonal ftw.

6. Blind Internet. Refreshable braille displays can only go so far.

7. Texture tones. Like ring tones, only… textures.

"Ah crap, it's my chemically-imbalanced middle-manager from the post office."

8. Tagging. Imagine a Flickr-style tag on a photo that instead of saying some inane crap about the use of lighting, it feels like dewy flower petals.

9. Texturepedia. Ever wondered what the inside of your veins feel like?

10. The other kind of menus. On the nano-scale taste is really just texture – why not sample your meal before hand with a lick? Oh. Right. That.

11. Music. Music videos are so 20th century. I shouldn’t have to be on drugs to feel techno. Drugs are expensive.

Btw I learned about haptics on Singularity Hub. You guys rock. (rollover: igneous rock texture.)

Here’s what I predict for the next ten years:

1. Augmented reality will become as commonplace and useful as the internet became in the 90s, as consumers buy more smartphones and early experimenters find out what works and what doesn’t. Remember when the first few URLs started showing up in ads? We’re there now with augmented reality.

"I could really use a cold one! Anyone else down for the fresh taste of the Rockies?"

2. Brands will embrace the new emphasis on social interactions, sometimes to extremes – think robots you can hang out with in bars who casually suggest Miller at every opportunity.

3. 90s fashions will dominate. No, not those 90s. The other 90s.

4. We’ll finally get a space elevator. It’ll be made out of carbon nanotubes. It’ll be 100% privately funded.

5. Near the end of the decade, the whole “authenticity” thing will be played and we’ll want fake stuff again.

6. Nanotech will be used for evil. Also, good. Also, marketing.

7. We’ll discover conclusive evidence of life on a another planet. It will be related to us.

8. There will be fewer, and less deadly wars, thanks in large part to communication between citizens via the internet.

9. Social games and gestural user interfaces will totally pwn traditional consoles and controllers, annoying some but finally making the industry “culturally relevant” via deep, meaningful interactions. Later in the decade, the cool kids will finally get into console games for the retro factor. Irony will win the day.

10. Social media, geotagging, augmented reality, security concerns and chronic over-sharing will join forces to completely destroy what little privacy we had left. Surprisingly few people will complain.

And to the last ten years: good riddance, I hope you burn in hell.

Happy Thanksgiving!