Better, not simpler

I love this presentation from Daniel at LostGarden on the design of RibbonHero, his MS Office learning game plug-in. I love the point about culling features and complexity being an answer, but the wrong answer. The right, but difficult, answer is to help people to master the complexity.

Wordcamp 2010 public

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Author offers free Excel e-book, experiments with biz model

To my post the other day about experimenting with business models, Bill Jelen is offering his e-book on using Excel 2007 for free at a good-enough-for-montor-but-not-for-print resolution. Why?

My goal is to get this version in the hands of 5 million people. You can help by downloading the book and passing it on to your co-workers, etc. Some percentage of people who get the book will buy a print copy or will buy a printable e-book, so I believe that the counter-intuitive strategy of giving the whole book away in one download will work fine.

Kudos. Seems like a cool idea. I hope it works out well.

Thought exercise: Again, what would the game equivalent be? This is different than a trial or demo. This is the full thing, but at low res. If you had a game with high replayability, would this just be the non-HD, low-fi-shaders version?