2paperdolls

[2paperdolls]

When silence isn't golden.

Shocking that the biggest brands come out lacking in this customer service face-off on Twitter...

No response whatsoever from Starbucks, Visa or Walmart, even when the queries were labeled "Urgent," or "Help needed."  Really?  (And Apple got off the hook, as it has no social media presence.)  

A recent study by Genesys (2012) cited that more than half of Fortune 500 companies are "socially shy," meaning that over half their websites fail to link to Twitter or Facebook on their contact pages, and more than a quarter don't provide links to Twitter or Facebook at all.

Looks as though brands are still seeing Twitter as a marketing, not a listening, tool.  Talk about lost opportunity.

[2paperdolls]

Brands and Twitter Fans: A Relationship in Crisis?

Brands on Twitter need to get their heads around a serious issue: They've become high-maintenance friends. They talk about themselves endlessly. They desperately want your attention. And they'll manipulate you to get it.  

Brand engagement is happening at the expense of good user experience, and it's putting the relationship between brands and fans on Twitter in crisis. 

Can't live with it. Can't live without it.

In most casual situations, you'd back off. But with Twitter, it's different. We've entered the "can't live without it" stage, and now, we're afraid that we'll be missing out if we call it quits.  So we stay, despite these annoyances that are creeping into our relationship.  A bad relationship can only last so long.

Conditional love.  

When you're infatuated, it's easy to overlook awkward behaviors. But even if you like a brand enough to follow (Twitter claims that over half its users follow six brands or more), it's hard not to feel manipulated by the growing number of desperate attempts to turn your potential word-of-mouth into lip service on behalf of a business.  

Call it what it is: Conditional love to gain popularity. 

I'd like you better if you'd just __________. 

When was the last time that worked?  How different is "RT to win…" or "List 5 friends to earn… " from these:

     Tell everyone how great I am. Go on.      I'd like you better if you'd just do this one thing for me.      I'll make this date really worthwhile if you bring your 5 friends along, too.

What all that's really saying is, "Change for me."  Do something you hadn't wanted to do in the first place, and you'll be rewarded. It's conditional, it's manipulative, and it's obviously not genuine.  

Desperation is a turn-off.

Businesses are understandably clamoring for attention, trying to emulate something as organic and viral as word-of-mouth enthusiasm.  Ironically, this struggle to build a likable online persona often results in a turn-off with a desperate edge: spam.  

The Boost Needed.

Conversation, sharing, complaining and playing together are natural. Spam and promoted tweets are not.

What's needed is a way to boost what comes naturally in the relationship between businesses and consumers, between brands and fans.  

The introduction of Twitter Cards has the potential to make this boost possible. By creating more room for genuine involvement and interaction, Twitter might just deliver the space and variety every good relationship needs.

2paperdolls are social mobile game developers + makers of Twitter discovery game Mind of Man®. The 2paperdolls team has a history of building tools to improve the relationship between businesses and consumers: Tyrant (mobile field service workflow processing), iCommunicate (the first eCRM SaaS), Microsoft CRM and, currently, Boost.us. 

[2paperdolls]

David Howard, Editor of One Hit Pixel, takes a look at Mind of Man to find a more connected (and more social) future of gaming

[2paperdolls]

Orwell, Obama, Big Data and Mind of Man

Pop-Culture Editor Anastasia Salter takes a closer look at Mind of Man, here:

It's a brilliant concept--a slick combination of visuals, data analysis, and the disquieting reminder that even users not plugged into MOM are fodder for analysis.

...what else can we expect from an Orwellian Illuminati app-game so well-fed on the big data we've produced that it can indeed 'ask us anything'?

Anastasia Salter is a talented rebel living in a permanent state of exhilaration, according to MOM.  She is also the Assistant Professor of Information + Communication Technology at UBalt, as well as the Pop Culture Editor at CC2K: The Nexus of Pop Culture Fandom. 

[2paperdolls]

Our new Supermodel!

Check out our new supermodel @fieritacatalano sporting his MindPrint Yourself t-shirt on the AM show... MOM loves you, Fierita!  Click here to watch video.

How's your Spanish?  

[2paperdolls]

Jillian Scharr for The Border House

1984’s Big Brother. Brave New World’s Mustapha Mond. The Matrix’s Architect. Always our dystopian future overlords are overwhelmingly male. If feminine imagery shows up at all in these ravaged political landscapes, it’s as an agent of chaos that operates in reaction to the masculine hegemony.

That’s why I was particularly interested in Mind of Man, a quirky and frankly creepy smartphone app. It’s sort of a game, and sort of a really well-designed Twitter aggregator, so it’s a little hard to talk about. There is a narrative and a game world; tweets are presented as the primary means by which an entity called MOM (Mind Of Man) enforces social control. The aesthetic is a 50s-style blend of wry and kitschy: cracked cement walls, posters with block letters and solid colors, and propaganda scrawled over every digital surface.

Mind of Man assesses your Tweets and creates a visual output of the sentiments expressed in them, as with Lady Gaga's "MindPrint," above.

And this narrative persists even through the Terms of Use contract you have to approve to let the app have access to your Twitter feed, with declarations like “Knowledge is power. And MOM never shares power,” and “This software may be used for Good and Mayhem. MOM appreciates both, but prefers the latter.”

Basically, what it does is read public Twitter feeds and perform something called “sentiment analysis.” It rates users’ tweets based on a variety of factors and then synthesizes a “MindPrint,” your personal equivalent of an ID number in MOM’s surveillance regime.

By making the means of our oppression a personalized emotion-based MindPrint instead of a number or an invasive procedure, Mind of Man’s feminine overlord does incorporate some of the traditional tropes of the gender it presents. However, it completely avoids the trope of making a powerful woman’s sexuality the seat of her authority. MOM does not have a body–MOM is never referred to by a gender-specific pronoun. For an otherwise extremely Orwellian app, Mind of Man completely lacks the gendered power play that defined 1984 and its Big Brother figure.

All in all, is this a big deal? Probably not. Mind of Man is a little app, and what attention it’s received is due not to its narrative of maternal overlordship, but rather to the A.I. that powers it. An article on Gamasutra a few weeks ago, for example, discussed the ways that Mind of Man’s complex moral spectrum algorithms could bring more nuanced and personalized choices to traditional RPGs.

Still, I liked the app’s tongue-in-cheek presentation of the omniscient and ominously benevolent MOM. It got me started on thinking about presentations of dystopia, and how they usually come in a paternal or fraternal vessel instead of a maternal one. I’ll definitely be keeping my eye on MOM–and I know MOM will be keeping an eye on me.

Jillian Scharr is a recent graduate of Vassar College and a lifelong daydreamer. She floats between jobs and cafes in the greater NYC area, writing about videogames and computers and fictional characters.

[2paperdolls]

"New gaming app uses your tweets to create in-game personality profile."

Just in case you were getting bored with the App Store, here comes Mind of Man (or MOM) to inject a little Orwellian dystopia into your Twitterverse...

[2paperdolls]

Mind of Man. Like the trailer? Share it to spread the love...

[2paperdolls]

"If you are already slightly concerned about the amount of information that is available about us online, and particularly who may be watching us, you may not want to read on. Mind of Man (MOM) has been released for iOS devices and is set to blur the line between our digital personas and the game itself..." 

Thanks to Mark O'Beirne | The Indie Game Magazine 

[2paperdolls]

"For most people, the internet is a handy tool, a helpful item used in day to day life to provide information. Did you ever stop to think about how much information you are handing out at the same time as you receive it? Mind of Man is a new iOS app designed to blur the lines between your real, digital life and the lives of in-game characters..."

Thanks to Jessica Citizen, Editrix of Player Attack

[2paperdolls]

Under "Cool Stuff, Twitter Clients & Apps" by Mary C. Long, Editor of AllTwitter

[2paperdolls]

El Pais calls Mind of Man "impeccable..."

El Pais, the highest-circulation daily national newspaper in Spain, calls Mind of Man "impeccable."  Story, here, by Rosa Jimenez Cano @petezin.

[2paperdolls]

Inside the Mind of Man

Evan Broderick of ThePlayer.ie takes a look inside the Mind of Man.  Here is what he has to say about Mind of Man for Twitter, available for iPhone and iPad on the App Store...

The modern gaming landscape is defined by choice, or at least the illusion of choice. Even though some games do gymnastics to make it seem like it isn’t so, all of this choice is binary. Crucially, this choice is something the player is always explicitly aware of and as such may not take into account how they are really feeling or would really act in that situation. They are usually given infinite time to consider their options and what the consequences may be. This is something that Paddy wrote about a few weeks ago and I recommend that you read through that article before this one, because it couches perfectly the incredibly interesting work being done by 2paperdolls.

I met with Andrea Ravenet and Paddy Murphy of 2paperdolls to chat about the possibilities offered by the technology driving the Twitter discovery game Mind of Man, a game that could drastically change the notion of choice in games. As Andrea puts it “the world far too engaging and exciting to be limited to thumbs up or thumbs down. If you can step beyond polarity you have a richness of emotion and data behind an experience that you can then use.”

At the moment, the way 2paperdolls will do this is through interaction with a users twitter account. Combing through data that can influence a game through people’s subconscious actions, as Andrea says “no division between your personality online and the game experience.” Currently the game simply tells you about who you are online but the applications are obvious. Games driven by unconscious decisions driven by who you actually are, not the gameplay benefits or how you like to think of yourself.

She confronts the core issue that some people might want disaffection or not want to learn difficult truths, but swats it away curtly by saying that the notion is “so last decade! A core value people now have is just shoot straight with me, don’t keep me in the dark!”

Paddy says that testing of the technology has already revealed that “younger people seem so less concerned with sharing things and being open to the entire world” – before Andrea adds that “a whole generation of people have been raised not believing in politicians and what they are being told.” Once one hears these statements and gets a look a the playfully Orwellian imagery used on the Mind of Man site, you get the distinct impression that 2PaperDolls think people will get a rush from the subversive thrill and perhaps risk that comes with learning things about oneself.

So, the concept is undeniably an interesting one and has obvious applications to both gaming and other technological spheres, but what about the Mind of Man? The place where the technology is already growing. Andrea explains it thusly: “If you are on twitter you are already on the Mind of Man. Who you are on twitter is being unveiled to you. Did you know that this is where you lie when it comes to one issue or another? It will even show you your evil twin or a celebrity that is like you. You can unveil the information that is already there but there are real world rewards.”

These rewards will be based on cards you obtain by playing the Mind of Man. For instance I earned a card that noted that I tweeted frequently but other players may find that they are Saints or Sinners. Andrea gives the example that these particular cards could entitle someone to freebies at a café or bar. Crucially, to unlock these cards you must earn points and to earn points you essentially do task for the Mind of Manand in turn do data-gathering for the program. This will ultimately strengthen the system and make it more accurate and powerful.

The 2paperdoll’s team was eager to impress upon me the importance that the “Mindprint” has to Mind of Man. It is a unique online identification system that is currently indecipherable to people outside of 2paperdolls, although the decryption method will be made available. Paddy describes the Mindprint as an “online fingerprint. You can condense someone’s online identity into something completely unique”, adding that his experience with the Mindprint allows him to “read people and know how they are feeling. I can tell if someone is happy or a little bit spiky!”

Though putting your personality out into the world could strike some as being the antithesis of privacy, Andrea explains it as being simultaneously open and more private than other online profile images or avatars. “(Mindprint) Is really a different kind of avatar, a greater reflection of who you are. It also does privacy. You are looking at something that is a unique representation of me that I can throw out there that is not an actual photo of yourself.”

One of the real questions I had about the technology was if it would be seen as robbing the player of choice, in one way by essentially doing things without their permission. Paddy cited the example of the recent Walking Dead game published by Telltale Games. He said that a player could “play through a game once making your own choices in the usual way and then through with pre-determined choices based on your personal data from Mind of Man.” If you think of Mass Effect 3′s RPG and action modes then you can see that this isn’t a far-fetched proposition.

It is hard not to disagree with this assessment considering how conditioned many of us already are with the idea of playing through games to see all the content. I would certainly be more interested in narrative rewards for playing through something twice rather than an additional weapon or character skin.

Paddy left me with the tantalising prospect of technology such as MOM applied into the real world. He posed a hypothetical situation in which “you get into your car and it says ‘you like your seat like this and this station on.’ The future is having the things you like and having them prepped for you.”

The game is also an addictive thing and though has much in common with other social-media based games has a far more rewarding outcome. I found that my tweets portray me as a genial and friendly person. Considering that I’ve been making an effort to appear nicer on twitter over the past several months it is eerily accurate. In my brief time with the game I feverishly hunted for points in an effort to reach my next landmark and find out that other part of information. The formula certainly works, it just remains to be seen whether it gets that crucial break that propels this kind of social game into the stratosphere.

The game won’t see an official release until June when everything about the project will be revealed. However, you can experience what Mind of Man is all about by downloading the app from the Apple App store or pointing your browser to the MoM website.

Our first review, reprinted with thanks to Evan Broderick & ThePlayer.ie

[2paperdolls]

Sharing is Cool. Or not.

@barryoneill

     RE:  Mind of Man (MOM) for Twitter User Experience

Hi Barry:

In getting ready for our global launch of Mind of Man next month, we're collecting reviews from our Irish and UK early adopters.  Among our favorite reviews to date is "Weirdly Cool!" But our second favorite is yours: "Not Cool."

It's not that we're glad that was your first impression. It's that you took a moment to respond with your reaction to Mind of Man's auto-sharing your Celebrity Twin on Twitter.  

We designed Mind of Man's Orwellian tone and atmosphere to address issues surrounding digital privacy in a pointed yet playful way. We're pushing the limits of sentiment analysis beyond mere polarity, while weaving into the user experience --among other things-- a tongue-in-cheek exploration of the personality each of us cultivates online.  The concept of an omniscient entity that slowly unveils aspects of your online persona, including those celebrities most like you, was intended to be entertaining social satire.  Maybe we got caught up in that.

You're the first to raise this concern over sharing, and it begs the question, "Why weren’t the login screen and the EULA explicit enough?"  

Here’s the first image, from the login sequence, disclosing MOM’s intentions:  

Next, our EULA was written in good fun to communicate that sharing is an instrumental part of the Mind of Man experience. Below are a few screen captures, to illustrate that intent:

…. and, the EULA goes on to explain that the User to whom each MindPrint is granted has an "unlimited license to his/her respective Mindprint™ and, in turn, grants MOM the permission to display said Mindprint™."

In keeping with the tongue-in-cheek attitude, the EULA continues:

and...

So, what gave us pause was the fact that your MindPrint share surprised you.  

This points to our failure to clearly disclose MOM's intent to auto-tweet a user’s Celebrity Match.  For this, we apologize and have decided to implement another strategy.

In fact, your reaction has inspired two versions of MOM: a free version to those who wish to "pay" with an auto-tweet (illustrating that there's still no such thing as a truly free lunch), as well as a paid version. Both versions give users a one-year subscription to all future features and functions as we evolve the application.  

We’re proud of what our organization has built and hope that early adopters -- like you-- will continue to shape the future for this awesome technology.  As the saying goes: Sometimes, you can't see the forest for the trees.  Your comment helped us see the bigger picture a bit more clearly.  In fact, we feel that your response inspired an even better solution.  

Thanks again for taking the time to give us a shout. Your response illustrates the emotional impact of the choices we make everyday online, and especially, in the cultivation of our online identities.

Best,

Andrea 

@andrearavenet

[2paperdolls]

Welcome, Paddy!

We're thrilled to announce the arrival of Paddy Murphy, game designer and community manager by trade, who's joined us as we blur the boundaries between your real life and online persona.

  Here's the release...

2PaperDolls Games Studio hires Paddy Murphy

DUBLIN (2 May 2012) - 2PaperDolls mobile games studio today announced the addition of Paddy Murphy to its development team as a Community Manager.  Murphy, former CEO of Open Emotion Studios, was instrumental in the production and launch of more than a dozen games released globally across PC, iOS and console platforms.

Happy to have his "infectious enthusiasm and creativity behind our upcoming launch of Mind of Man," 2PaperDolls founder Louis Ravenet cites Murphy's experience in games production, development and community relations as an opportunity too good to pass up.

2PaperDolls is a game development studio currently blurring the boundaries between real life and your online persona.  Our latest project, Mind of Man, plays with crowdsourcing and sentiment analysis, gaming your life on Twitter.  To find out more, visit 2paperdolls.com.

(Early adopter? Mind of Man is now available on the iTunes Store, pre-released in UK and Ireland.)

Contact: andrea@2paperdolls.com

# # # 

[2paperdolls]

Thanks to the folks at Bone-idle.ie for their kudos!  They're celebrating Irish Video Game Developer Week, and they've invited 2PaperDolls to the party, so to speak...

Needless to say, we're thrilled to be doing what we love in a place we're proud to now call home.

And, they've featured yours truly with both a review + an interview, and some especially nice words regarding our upcoming release, Mind of Man.

Aw, shucks.  Thanks, guys. 

[2paperdolls]

Startup Redux

As a repeat startup team, we bear the distinctive battle scars that can only come from launching technology startups — fast & hard startups.  When the going got tough (and inevitably, it always does), it seemed as though we were entering a zone where only those who gave a damn (not to mention blood, sweat and tears) were allowed to work.  The dedicated people at our companies all suffered the same obsession: commitment to a single vision while working round the clock to the point of losing all semblance of personal life.

Scars like these heal, but they still act as markers to a chaotic —but creative— time in our lives. There’s little that compares to the satisfaction of having created something both beautiful and original.

This time around, though, I’d do a few things differently.

Choose Functional.

The fruits of those productive few years gave each of us the freedom to innovate in new directions, grow (a few more) businesses, start an investment firm and roam the globe.  After a decade of exploring the world with my family and living in Paris, I decided to start a new venture focused on casual gaming for mobile devices. It became apparent that a startup in France would present too many challenges to a group of American entrepreneurs.  As a team, we looked at Amsterdam, London and Dublin as alternatives. In the end, Dublin’s cool factor swayed us.  Six months later, it’s clear we made the right decision.  Dublin is an amazingly easy place to do business, and there’s a wealth of local talent and strong government support.  Plus the Irish are warm and welcoming.

A startup is essentially fighting a war for its life, demanding desperate and intense effort.  There is little time to waste on protocol and subtleties.   Things are moving very quickly, almost as though there are dozens of spinning plates, all ready to collapse. And in most cases, they will. This is why it’s important to eliminate background noise by choosing a friendly environment that won’t get in the way of work. 

Beware the Fallacy of Composition.

We expected this time around to be easier than ever before.  We’d honed our tools, not to mention our team.

The “tools” part seemed to be an obvious win: After all, there’s an abundance of open source and collective code available to anyone with bandwidth these days.  Modern programming languages are easier, while hardware is faster and cheaper than when we created our first SaaS offering in 2000. It seemed reasonable to assume less time would be needed to build a product. Especially while a huge potential market was out there, hungry and online. It was clear: We’d (again) create something great and the world would want to use it. Perhaps an oversimplification of our build-it-and-they-will-come thinking, but it’s more accurate than not.  

Did I mention that the powerhouses from our previous startups agreed to come play in Dublin, too?  Steve McLelland and Jim Lears: This is where “team” becomes “dream team.” Seems we’d all grown restless and were excited about creating something unique in the mobile games market. Supernatural is the only way to describe their technical abilities… and the creative combustion that ensues.  Now we have a great team with evolved tools in a near-perfect environment. 

So, this should have been easy.  Only, it wasn’t and still isn’t.

Ready.  Aim.  Create.

Startups are about pointing an organization in a direction and hoping it lands somewhere near the target.  

I remember learning to shoot competitively, how the instructor kept emphasizing that closeness to the bullseye didn’t really matter.  What counted was grouping all the shots together. “That shows control of the gun. And I can work with that.”  

Sometimes, however, it seems that leading a startup requires just the opposite: The more control exerted, (somehow) the more unpredictable the creative results. And in our business, creativity is half the magic, with most of the rest coming from passion.

Embrace contradiction.

But as with any group of visionaries, each has an agenda driven by strong convictions that his/her approach is The One. I can’t think of anything that becomes wobbly faster than a room of talented, passionate minds on fire, trying to solve a big problem. There’s no “right way” to harness this talent.  And you certainly can’t process innovation.   It’s an intense and emotionally charged environment:  Intense, because of the unrelenting pressure to breathe life into an idea; Emotionally charged, because communication becomes fast, raw, stripped of nuance or niceties, and typically, this occurs at critical junctures, like when evaluating builds.  

The startup exists in a state of contradiction:  Both everything and nothing are personal. 

Communicate.  Continuously.

This is where teams without mutual respect fall apart.  I’ve watched this happen in earlier endeavors, powerless to stop the collapse.  Defections and doubt can ruin everything.

The successful team builds a functional communication system, separating the personal from the passion.  This is clearly the foundation of growing a successful startup. Especially an agile and fast-moving one.

Agility over Perfection.

Having a motivated team comprised of smart and creative people is key, but it doesn’t guarantee success.   As a team, we’ve created successful technologies. Good, solid technologies.  So good, Microsoft purchased one.  And we’ve sold a few since then, too. But these are no guarantee of future success, either.  They are awkwardly always “in-the-room” no matter what we say or do.  A barrier, of sorts, compelling the ego not to risk launching anything less than perfection, when in fact, what’s needed is speed, continuous improvement, feedback from early adopters, users and even technology pundits, to help form the product.  

It’s better to launch an amorphous mess amendable to change, than a highly finished product with zero plasticity and even less marketability. In fact, this was the single biggest lesson for us in the first six months, even as a seasoned development team.

Ear to the ground.

So this time, it’s a different proposition (both easier and less risky) to build a technology, thanks to the ability to include consumers early in the development process.  Today it’s called “customer co-creation” or customer participation.  

During my brief (not brief enough) tenure at Microsoft, I’d watch non-programming Program Managers lock themselves away in a room for days at a time, emerging with the equivalent of application blueprints for the developers, bereft of input from the coders (which always generated resentment), but strangely, with no feedback from the intended consumers of the app. It may seem insane today, but there was a belief then that consumers didn’t understand their own needs or wants. It was as though the Program Managers were masters of reality, and consumers were clueless. We think of this as “the time of Software Tyranny” and even created an application called “Tyrant.”

Ironically, the company we sold to Microsoft gave businesses advanced ways to communicate with —and especially listen to— their customers. But today, listening doesn’t just give you an edge, it defines what and how you create.   

While we’re no longer hand-rolling each of the technologies in our machine, we’re still building ahead of the market. Open source makes the process of building applications easier, while the proliferation of amazing online communities such as Stack Overflow and Github lets us truly listen to the early adopters in the industry and in our marketplace. 

Trust Your Intuition.

I’m a firm believer that an entrepreneur’s vision is born from intuition. So, like most entrepreneurs, we’ve learned to listen-while-not-listening to the technology chants of various pundits and tech influencers. These are after-the-fact folks, not the earliest adopters. No slight intended: They are among our most constructive critics and great storytellers.  After all, there’s a big difference between creating the news and reporting it.

Tell a Great Story.

And there is a great story here, one that’s easy to tell.  Crowd sourcing, sentiment analysis and entertainment.   An endless stream of conversation, confessions, self-revelation, and breaking news surrounds us, waiting to manifest in a personalized world, where each individual can contemplate their world and the role they play in the world of everyone around them.  

We’re building the ways to experience that world.

Louis Ravenet/CEO