How to Coach Yourself and Others Beware of Manipulation | Page 260

Materially improving users’ lives is a tall order. But attempting to create a persuasive technology
which you don’t find valuable enough to use yourself is nearly impossible. There’s nothing immoral
about peddling; it’s just the odds of success are depressingly low. You’ll lack the empathy and insights
needed to create something users actually want. The peddler’s project tends to end up a time-wasting
failure because fundamentally, no one finds it useful or fun. If it were, the peddler would be using it
instead of hawking it.
The Entertainer
In fact, sometimes makers just want to have fun. If a creator of a potentially addictive technology
makes something that they would use but can’t in good conscience claim improves the lives of their
users, they’re making entertainment.
Entertainment is art and is important for its own sake. Art provides joy, helps us see the world
differently, and connects us with the human condition. These are all important and age old pursuits.
Entertainment, however, has particular attributes which the entrepreneur, employee, and investor
should be aware of when using the Manipulation Matrix.
Art is often fleeting; products that form addictions around entertainment tend to fade quickly from
users’ lives. A hit song, repeated over and over again in the mind, becomes nostalgia after it is replaced
by the next single. A blog article like this one is read, shared, and thought about for a few minutes until
the next interesting piece of brain candy comes along. Games like Farmville and Angry Birds engross
users for a while, but then are relegated to the gaming dustbin along other hyper-addictive has-beens
like Pac Man and Tetris.
Entertainment is a hits-driven business because the brain adapts to stimulus. Art is about creating
continuous novelty and building an enterprise on ephemeral desires is a constantly running treadmill.
In this quadrant, the sustainable business isn’t the game, the song, or the book — it’s the distribution
system for getting those goods to market while they’re still hot.
The Dealer
Creating a product that the designer does not believe improves the user’s life and which the maker
would not use is exploitation. In the absence of these two criteria, presumably the only reason you’re
hooking users is to make a buck. Certainly there is money to be made addicting users to behaviors that
do little more than extract cash; and where there is cash, there will be someone willing to take it.
The question is: Is that someone you? Casinos and drug dealers offer users a good time, but when the
addiction takes hold, the fun stops.
In a satirical take on Zynga’s Farmville franchise Ian Bogost created Cow Clicker, a Facebook app
where users did nothing but incessantly click on virtual cows to hear a satisfying “moo.” Bogost
intended to lampoon Farmville by blatantly implementing the same game mechanics and viral hacks he
thought would be laughably obvious to users. But after the app’s usage exploded and some people
became frighteningly obsessed with the game, Bogost shut it down, bringing on what he called, “The
Cowpocalypse.”

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