Bodo, Jobs and Bach

Day 1,468, 11:17 • Published in USA Canada • by olivermellors

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Hello. I’m in Texas and thinking of why I might want to move back to eCanada. The landscapes are pretty much the same: I get my 12 tanks each day, push the fight button a bunch of times and don’t have any reason to participate in the larger community. Neither community offers much outlet for creativity and both are quite ugly. The ugliness isn’t the people or the talk, it is the sheer banality of existence in the eWorld.


Bodo the medieval peasant had a similar lot: toiling from dawn to dusk. Bodo, however, had those jaw-droppingly beautiful cathedrals to build and those 150 feast days to break up the monotony. He was tied to the land and no one went much farther than 10 miles in a lifetime, but they had music everyday and sport along with plague, war and famine. Ecanada/america has the war and recently a bit of plague.


Plague is a problem. The prescribed treatment is injection of a growing number of active citizens who are devoted to their country. Devotion comes from the country’s demonstrated ability to satisfy a player’s needs. To date, needs have been conceptualized as a decent income stream and opportunity for “fights”. Those pools are now over-fished.


The creative player, able to contribute beauty to the community, has been ignored. Unless I miss my guess, however, the present and potential player base is predominantly made up of young people for whom music, art and emotion are vital. We see a fair amount of unfocussed and destructive emotion. We think of it as childish. And so it is, or perhaps “youngish”, and so it should be. It is a great unharnessed force.


Here is one way to harness it, improve player retention, increase immigration and take care of some of the plague:

Issues: attract a modest number of foreigners to join ecanada. Retention.

Motivation: an income stream not available elsewhere. Personal prestige. Aesthetic creation.

Unexplored capacities: artistic creation – music, art and graphic design.

Synthesis: weekly wage of $1,000 earned by creating new works of music and art.

Analogy: Canada Council for the Arts

Obstacles: Existing paradigm: “it’s a war game”.

Big Idea, Big Question: (is it sensible to think that…) players would become more engaged if given an opportunity to earn greater income by creating art and entertainment for the community’s consumption. Steve Jobs thought it was and he knew there was a market eager to pay. He built unmatched brand loyalty based on those insights – as have many before.

Market Research: Dear reader - would you appreciate a chance to make things for us? We’ll pay.

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