Social media, SEO, marketing and writing
It’s been said that preparation is perhaps the single most important part of successful negotiations. To that end, here are three PDF worksheets to help make your next negotiation your most successful yet:
1. Differentiate yourself from your competitors (if you can’t, you are only selling an alternative)
2. Create viable products or solutions (passion for a product or service is instantly recognizable and highly contagious)
3. Keep in touch with old friends and business colleagues (and never burn bridges)
4. Focus on target markets (niche markets are less saturated and are usually more open to new ideas)
5. Join a business organization and network (what better way to bond with someone new than to size them up and shake their hand?)
6. Give something back to your community (good deeds are rewarded eventually)
7. Fulfill your promises / follow up on what you say you’ll do (some day you will move on to ther things but your reputation will follow you wherever you go)
Solution sketching is a lot like brainstorming. (I happen to be the world’s foremost expert on solution sketching because I just made up the term three hours ago).
Solution sketching can help unleash your create energies to focus on solving a problem. It starts a lot like brainstorming—a process of releasing your thoughts as rapidly as they come into your mind and capturing them for consideration. By coming up with a wide variety of creative ideas, you greatly increase your change to solve a problem in a bold new way.
A related technique is visual mapping—which is a process of following your natural intuition and freely associating seemingly random concepts so that a patchwork of uncensored ideas begins to develop.
The key to solution sketching, brainstorming and visual mapping is allowing for the free flow of ideas—good and bad—and then sort, edit and prioritize at a later time. Find yourself short on ideas? Got creative writer’s block? Try this simple exercise I like to call Out of Body Visualization. It’s a fun way of placing your mind into unusual situations in order to stimulate creative solutions. It’s like batting practice for your brain!
Many creative artists tend to get hung up on the fine details…editing their creative thought process as they go. This can limit the number of creative possibilities you might consider, but switching your mind from ’solve it now’ mode to a more artistic mode (such as sketching) forces you to focus on an alternative activity, which may lead to capturing thoughts that might normally slip away from your mind.
So without further adieu, here are my five simple tips for solution sketching:
Now that you have your new project idea–whether it’s a book, video game, or some other type of creative project, you will want to go out and sell it so you can get the money and support to bring your project to life. You’ve made your cold calls and leveraged your LinkedIn connections to set up your first pitch meeting. You have one objective: impress those in the room enough to warrant another meeting. Here’s how you do it.
First, size up the room. How many people are there? If there are only one or two individuals, your job will be much easier. Create an intimate space. Make eye contact. Remember, they need to feel your passion. What are people wearing? The gals in suits tend to like statistics, facts, and demographics. The guys dressed in blue jeans and T-shirts with want the creative stuff. Adjust your pitch accordingly.
Second, beware of small talk. Sure, you’ll need to be friendly so people in the room but watch out for conversation traps. Many of those who pitch projects have fallen into a seemingly innocent exchange of pleasantries, then, the trap.
Allow me to demonstrate:
SUIT BEHIND THE DESK: “What do you think of our multiplayer game, Rebel Conquest?”
Panic strikes. You’ve never even heard of the game, much less sampled it. You quickly improvise.
YOU: “It’s great. Very state-of-the-art. Kids seem to really like it.”
SUIT BEHIND THE DESK: “What I meant was, what’s the buzz? The product doesn’t roll out ’til March. Perhaps you’re confusing our game with some other product.”
OOOOPS! Somebody just put their foot in their mouth! Let’s try that scenario again.
SUIT BEHIND THE DESK: “What do you think of our multi-player game, Rebel Conquest?”
Panic strikes. You’ve never even heard of the game, much less sampled it. You answer truthfully.
YOU: “If it’s anything like your last online game, Crash Test Kids, I’m sure it’ll be a winner. But to be honest with you, Mr. So-and-So, I don’t know anything about Rebel Conquest.”
SUIT BEHIND THE DESK: “We have high-hopes for the game. Multiplayer experiences are the future of Super Duper Game Company. I’m anxious to see what you have to show us today.”
Two rules of small talk:
Blow your audience away with a passionate , solid pitch. This takes lots of practice. I repeat, lots of practice. Keep your presentation brief and to the point. Be animated when necessary (flap your arms, grit your teeth, bark like a dog). Use visuals sparingly (your oral pitch should stand on its own).
How to Improve Your Pitch
I upgraded to a new laptop computer the other day (a Dell Studio 17 with lightning fast Mobile Broadband USB Modem connection– sweet). I decided to upload some old documents to my hard drive and after a few minutes, I found myself reviewing some ancient Word documents. Suddenly, there it was. A book proposal I had written in 1997 titled, Silicon Stories: Uncensored Tales From A World Gone Wired. The internet had only been accessible to the masses for a few short years when this book concept was first dreamed up. Even back then we all knew the internet was going to be big and would likely change our lives– but I always felt it would be the little stories– the honest, emotional, funny and heartwarming tales of real people that were impacted by the internet that would make this new medium worth all the hype.
Here is my original book summary, along with a sample submission I received from a member of the Apple Developer Program who was kind enough to respond to a request for story submissions. I have other small tales similar to this one that I may post in the future on this blog. In the meantime, enjoy your trip back in time to the year 1997…
Book Summary
If you’re a hard-boiled Silicon Valley entrepreneur, Silicon Stories: Uncensored Tales From A World Gone Wired is chicken soup for your hard-wired soul. If you’re just a plain old reader with an interest in technology and anecdotal storytelling, there’s something here for you to enjoy as well. This unique book captures the contradictions and everyday insanity of the computer industry and the Internet, while at the same time chipping away sardonically at the myths, legends and lies that have built up in our own time. Silicon Stories balances humor with a genuine appreciation of both the technical and not so technical accomplishments of real people who have found ways to meet the challenges of work with humor, ingenuity and imagination.
Submission from an Apple Developer
X-Sender: sperling at sojourn.com
Mime-Version: 1.0
Date: Fri, 11 Apr 1997 10:35:34 -0400
To: samsel at gte.net
From: sperling at sperling.com (tedd)
Subject: Inspirational Developer Stories
Hi Jon:
I received the Apple Developer News #52 today and read that you’re looking for “inspirational stories that explore the humanity behind the digital revolution”. Well… I got one.
First, a little back ground. I was contacted by the Wall Street Journal last year. They wanted some advise on the net which I gave them. In talking to the reporter, he inquired as to my background and my “story”. I told him.
After a couple of months, this reporter contact me again and said that he wanted to do an article about me. He asked if I could put together some things for him. I wrote and sent him the attached story “Net WORKS”.
He liked it, but his boss said that they needed more people like me to make a story. His boss didn’t want to do one story about one person. As such, he never found another person like me and that’s the end of that story.
Now, you come along asking for a story, well here’s one. You may use as you wish. Everything written herein is true.
Good luck, and let me know what you think.
tedd
—
Net WORKS
We’ve all heard about the young whiz kids, cyberdudes, and computer jocks who are doing something new, hot, and fascinating with computers and the internet. But, who are these people? The answer may surprise you.
Let’s take a look at one of them. He calls himself “tedd” and has an email address of “sperling@sperling.com”. He provides Macintosh programming and consulting to the net. He has done a lot of exciting things and people have taken notice. His client’s range from large companies (like DOW Chemical) to the small “mom & pop” independants. His accomplishments are many and perhaps too many for his youthful image. Let’s peel away the cyber-veneer and see who this person is.
Tedd F. Sperling is a 50 year old professional who was originally from California and now resides in Lansing, Michignan. Tedd graduated California State University in 1975 with a BS degree (cum laude) in Geology. He later received an MS in Geophysics from Michigan State University.
In 1977, he started a Geophysical exploration company (Sperling Geophysics Corporation) and provided geophysical services for the petroleum community. In the 1980’s, Tedd found over 100 producing wells and generated over 2.5 million in consulting. He developed the first micro computer (Apple II) based seismic modeling workstation and was credited with the first micro-computer oil discovery.
The business was successful and life was great. However, it all ended in 1992. The oil and gas industry, which had been on the decline for several years, finally dusted for his business. While his business did not bankrupt, he found himself “unemployed”. A condition found far too often in today’s business climate that has been producing large numbers of unemployed middle-aged professionals due to down-sizing, layoffs, and the new practice of hiring cheap young replacements.
During the next one and a half years, Tedd sent out over 1,000 resumes and received 11 interviews. All interviews ended with “I’m sorry, but you are overqualified for the position.”. His last interview ended with his interviewer saying “Well… we were actually looking for somebody a little younger.” At that point, Tedd thought would his next position be one that includes the phrase “Will you have fries with that?”.
During a continued and determined effort to find employment, he logged on to the internet and started sending out more resumes. He opened several freenet accounts in places like Detroit, Youngstown, Denver, Columbus, Traverse City, and Buffalo, New York. He sent email resumes to every lead he could find. But, he received little response. However, in the meantime he became net savvy.
A friend of Tedd’s, from the oil industry, had to go to Malaysia on business and commented to Tedd about the communication problems he was going to have keeping in touch with his wife in Arizona. So, Tedd got on the net and found several avenues for his friend to communicate with his wife for little, or no, money. In a similar situation, he helped another person in Michigan who was from Argentina establish communication with his family through the net for no expense. The more time Tedd spent on the net, the more his focus became providing assistance for others.
Tedd started frequenting several news groups on the net and helping others with questions. As he did, he became aware of what actions and conduct the net accepted and rejected about employment. He found that selling yourself on the net was much different from what he expected. Tedd said “No one wants to hear how good you are. They just want answers. Whoever provides the answers, will get the attention.”.
The key to Tedd’s success on the net has been his willingness to help others. Every time he posts an answer to a question posed by some newbie, his answer is posted with a subtle signature block that simply states “mac programmer” and includes links to his email address and his web resume.
Tedd explains that potential clients looking for computer professionals will often “lurk” around news groups and observe the question and answer exchange. If they like your answers, and need your services, they will check you out, and contact you.
Tedd likes this new way of doing business. He now consults with no cash outlay for advertising, no meetings, no suits, no regimented work day, and no comments about his age. To the majority of his clients, he is a young computer whiz kid. An image that Tedd doesn’t discourage. In fact, Tedd has picked up the jargon of the net and often uses terms like “kewl” in business proposals. Tedd says “It’s almost expected to be unconventional. If the employers can’t have you under their thumb in the conventional 8 to 5 environment, then they react the other way and want the eccentric programmer.” Many clients find it novel to pose a problem to Tedd and then forget it while Tedd provides a solution.
His work on the net has been so successful, that he has other programmers working for him. Tedd says “I find programmers the same way as those who find me, I lurk. When a person has the right answers and I like his style, I contact him. I commonly provide sub-contracting work for a 20% commission and most of the work is done without any contracts.” As Tedd puts it “If you don’t trust your people, don’t hire them. Besides, many of the contacts I have are global and the expenses of global litigation make contracts a moot point. I just don’t have time for it.”
Tedd adds, “The net has been one of the most fascinating experiences of my life. The people there are brilliant, honest, caring and very giving of their time and talents. The generosity I have seen on the net is unbelievable. The net provides an avenue for people to put aside non-relevant discriminatory practices and deal with other people on a pure aspect of worth.”
Tedd
____
|[ ]| mac programmer tedd f. sperling
|[__]| mailto: sperling at sperling.com
|___-| http://www.sojourn.com/~sperling/resume.html
—
Michael Joyce is a prize-winning novelist and a professor of English at Vassar College. Joyce’s works include the hypertext fiction novel Twilight, A Symphony, and the much celebrated afternoon, a story. Joyce has been active in the interactive and collaborative arts communities for many years. I had the pleasure of interviewing Michael via phone some years ago. Here is an except of that conversation.
Q: How do you define hypertext fiction?
Joyce: From the beginning, I referred to hypertext fictions as multiple fictions. Not because I wanted to steer attention away from the technology or the modality of the telling, but because my own experience reading and teaching these fictions is that they are, in some sense, almost lifelike structures. I say this because a good deal of my recent writing life has been devoted to steering people away from the notion that these things are branching fictions and to try to elucidate what, in fact, they are if they are not branches. For me, the term “multiple fiction” gathers much more the sense of what these things have (which my students tend to call an “oddly lifelike quality”).
Carolyn Guyer, the hypertext writer, says “the thing about hyperfictions is that, for art, they tend to be extremely lifelike.”
Hypertext fiction tends to be closer to our normal experiences—the narratives that make up our lives. Closure is a matter of rhythms and of transient episodes…where we find the story of our lives and the story of the things that are important to us in successions and recurrences. The term “multiple fictions” or “multiple stories” seems to capture that for me. [Laughs] Of course, after using it for a decade and not seeing it catch on, I leap at any opportunity to mention it.
Q: What are the common misconceptions about hypertext fiction?
Joyce: Sometimes when I give a reading someone will say, “Isn’t this every writer’s dream? You can throw in all your back story—you don’t have to cut anything. It’s so undisciplined.” Usually, those comments are from people who haven’t read really good hypertext fiction. Many writers fail to realize that there is a great deal of composition in this format.
Another misconception is thinking of hypertext as branching. Hypertext is not about a story and its variations, but, rather, the inner possibilities of the story. A better term is multiplicity. We don’t go about our lives like branches.
We choose our lives instead by inclination, by urges, by happenstance, or seductions. A third misconception is to think that links are notes or annotations. As soon as the reader clicks a hyperlink, one must ask, How much more does the reader understand about the way this story is unfolding? It shouldn’t be simply that you are getting another episode; it should be that you are coming to understand the way the characters think or see their lives. Too often, you see a poorly crafted narrative Web site where you see the word “sex” and you know that if you follow that link, you will go to a sex scene. If you click on “soccer,” you will get a sporting contest. Language and storytelling rarely work that way. The things that are sexy to us sometimes are soccer matches—sex can sometimes seem like a contest. You want to evoke for your reader a sense of discovering story. The link doesn’t just get you to another part of the story, the link is part of the story.
Q: How does Twilight, A Symphony differ from afternoon, a story?
Joyce: I am willing to claim that some things I did in creating afternoon, a story were original. In fact, I’ve been deemed the originator of some art form, or at least, a first something. But when you are a first, you come to a certain humility. You become aware that what you set in motion is not under your control.
If somebody deems your creation a literary art form, they will create works which test your understanding of what it was you thought you were doing. In Twilight, there were a lot of obvious changes. Unlike afternoon, I included graphics, sounds, and QuickTime movies in Twilight. I tried to be very careful not to just seed things throughout the work because it was possible. I tried to define the relationships between the sounds, images, and the text. There were also hypertextual changes. In afternoon, there aren’t any long screens. Part of that was due to the fact that Storyspace, the hypertext system Jay Bolter and I created, was designed for the Macintosh classic and its little ice block–size screen. We only had so much textual space to work with. Partly though, it was due to the fact that we wanted to move the story along in bite-sized, pulsing rhythms. When I came to write Twilight, I bridled under my own discipline and went back to very long scrolling windows in some cases. I love the sense of the text sort of taking you beyond the point were you can hold onto it.
Another change is the overview or libretto. For over a decade now, I’ve been interested in whether there is such a thing as true interactivity. Because true interactivity, to me, means that the story would change as a result of my reading it. I don’t know of any stories or systems as yet that are truly interactive according to my definition. It strikes me that a fundamental aspect to creating true interactivity is that the reader in some sense, has to share a conceptual map with you. To share an idea of what the scope of the work is so that she can, at various turns, test her sense of how this landscape is evolving against what she perceives to be your sense of it.
In Twilight, it starts with a screen I like to think of as a libretto, something that says, Here’s what was going on before you got here. However, it is written quite consciously in the prose of something like the Texaco Saturday Opera. At a time when Texaco used to sponsor radio operas, they would have these librettos where there was this odd third person telling of the story to come. It sets in motion a set of expectations and rhythms and thematics that are not met by the opera.
Where afternoon gave you few cues of its wholeness (and the user had to discover the big picture through its linking), in Twilight, there is an overview of sorts. An overview, which is, in itself, part of the work. It’s not really front matter. It’s not direction. It turns out to be an active part of the story too. The question I pose in Twilight is, who is this voice here?
Q: Tell me about your most recent project, Twelve Blue.
Joyce: Twelve Blue is the first project I’ve written directly for the Web. It was co-published online by Eastgate Systems and Postmodern Culture.
In Twelve Blue, as in all of my interactive fictions, voices come and go. It’s a pronominal sense of English—the fact that language allows you to have one character merge into another. Not in a morphing way, but in a way that, viewing the same screen or similar screens in different sequences, it can seem to be one or another of the characters.
For example, one scene in Twelve Blue finds two drowning men. One is a very bad man and one is a good and very innocent man. At different times, they share the same language on the same screens. The technique allows my themes and variations to become almost musical. When readers come upon these voices, they see the text differently.
Twelve Blue (excerpt) “a white witness”
He settled like the tide, then sank eventually, floating aimlessly and softly, not at all like a log but languishing and plump, a white witness to the darkness.
After the first spike of pain and the panic there was a settling sense of inevitability, the body pitted against itself, both longing for breath and at the same time snuffing it with each gulping inhalation of the frigid, pungent water. The first swallow tore against his lungs but successive ones softened them and made him heavy. Soon he was beyond panic.
There was a pinging echo as if someone hammered against a nearly empty air tank with a wrench.
A sense of someone swimming nearby in dark water.
A woman came to visit him bearing a garland of dried vines strung with flowers of various shades of blue and a few stray blossoms of pink and yellow. She sang a strange song of a Portuguese sailor and a witch. Above him water lilies floated like green clouds. They were tethered to the muck on swaying cords of soft green. Another girl signed his name over the water, singing as she formed the letters.
Q: Is multiple fiction a new art form?
Joyce: There is an absolute newness to it, but before I even talk about that, it seems important to point out that newnesses don’t spring out of nothing. Newnesses are, in fact, a result of successive attempts and experiments. It seems obvious that throughout the twentieth century, there has been an attempt on the part of various writers to open up the ability of the story to talk to itself, to talk to its readers, to contain multitudes. For instance, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf. The computer has not created these media as much as enabled them. There has been this longing for multiplicity and complexity throughout the twentieth century.
That said, the absolute newness that I think exists here is that—here let me digress a minute. . . . There is an odd backlash going on now in the mainline culture where, with the advent of the Web, hypertextuality is establishing itself as a cultural reality. I find colleagues and literary critics saying, “Well look, the book did all this. The book can do all this. The book sustains multiple stories and can reflect consciousness and do all the things that you want to claim as unique to hypertext.” What the book doesn’t do—and that is the newness here—is change every time you read it. I mean literally change the presentation of the text in a way that a very complex disk-based hypertext fiction does. Even Web fictions, which have less complexity yet have the advantage of being increasingly universally available; any reader on two successive occasions reading the “same hypertext” will discover that the work presents itself differently. So that when you come to discuss your experience of reading a hypertext work such as afternoon, a story or the Web fiction Twelve Blue, with someone who has read it, one of the things you inevitably have to do is discuss with one another what your experience with the text was. What is it that you saw? What is it that you read?
Now I realize that if you put a few students together and ask them to read and discuss Madame Bovery, each of them will have had a different interpretation of the text too. If you ask them to explain their thoughts, they will point to different pages in a way that someone could argue that the reading changes depending on the reader. But, you wouldn’t say to the group of readers, “Did you read page fifty-seven after reading page fifty-six?” In hypertext, you find yourself in that position. Did you see this screen? Did this happen? In my reading, this scene followed this, which made me think she was afraid. Someone else might say, “No, in my reading, the second scene came first and I found that she was much more confident.”
These conversations sound vaguely game-like when you first hear them, but they are actually very old literary questions—how we see character and how we see event. They are, in fact, the satisfactions of the form. What is it that sustains the form? What sustains them is the psychological reliability of knowing that as we view the events of our lives from multiple perspectives, they seem to show up differently.
Many Luddites and others in the academic community argue that our ever increasing reliance on visual communication will kill the word. I don’t think that’s going to happen. The word now takes on a very interesting power. Words can do some things that images can’t. Words in conjunction with images can do some things that neither can do alone.
Hypertext, like life, is subjunctive—as in, “it could have been otherwise.” Had I only made this turn, my life would have been different. Our lives take on a certain sadness and a certain glory because when you choose one path, that means you haven’t chosen another hundred.
Q: That reminds me of the famous stanza from Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken”: I shall be telling this with a sigh, Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.
Joyce: That is true. There could be someone down the other path who could be saying those same or similar words. That’s what makes great stories. It’s what keeps an audience coming back.
Writing assignments are commonly rewarded to people who are not best for the job. How can this be?
I am reminded of a phrase from Budd Schulberg’s endearing novel What Makes Sammy Run? When asked about the secret to achieving a successful career in Hollywood, one of the characters answers, ‘Take elocution and singing lessons.’ The implication being that in certain industries, the act of selling yourself may be more important than your core writing skills.
I tend to think that a successful writer owes homage to both. The quality of your ideas and the way your express those ideas to others can often make or break you. Success is never easy, but writers often hurt themselves by not learning how to pitch and sell like the best of them.
So next time you are up for a writing assignment, do me a favor. Throw on a black top hat, grab a wooden cane, jump up on the nearest table and sing– Hello, my baby / hello, my honey / hello, my ragtime gal….
Interactive writer/designer Deborah Todd says:
There are dozens of ways to say something, and as a writer, you get to use most of those dozens of ways in the field of interactivity. It’s not linear. It’s not one right answer, or one straight story line, or one interpretation. In fact, you have to prepare for people who will play the game, or explore the title, in ways that you don’t necessarily intend them to, and write for that.
The very best part for me in the whole process is the initial brainstorming and how collaborative it is. When a team is really coming together, it’s unbelievable how much fun that can be. And the ideas feed upon themselves, so they just keep getting bigger and better and these meetings can totally blow your mind. It’s great. Then, once you’ve got the concept outlined, it starts to mutate and morph and grow and it takes on a life of its own and you get to be there and witness it and work with it and see it turn into something truly amazing.
If you have really good character work, with bibles that have significant backstory, everybody gets into the characters and you get to watch them develop into “real” people.
I’ve been lucky enough to be involved in casting and directing as well, and let me tell you, when you’re a writer who gets to direct, that is heaven! The most fun I’ve had was doing rewrites on the spot with our director. We had some lines that weren’t doing it for us, so we just stopped and rewrote them in a frenzy, had the talent say the new lines right there, did a little more polish, then taped it. It was great fun. Very exciting. Very in the moment. And it made the product better, which was what we were after.
Writer/designer/producer Larry Kay, says:
I like to play games and solve puzzles. One of the things that drew me to this field was the opportunity for a larger quantity of my writing to remain in the final product, unlike in film and television, where so much of what you write just can’t fit on the spine of a linear format. It’s an eleven-minute cartoon, or it’s a 120-page screenplay, or whatever, and that’s that. In multimedia, it’s still possible to push those barriers out a lot further.
That doesn’t mean a writer should engage in hyper-creativity. Every project must have a solid narrative spine, a clear beginning, middle, and an end. If you do not know what the end of your game is before you start writing, you will probably get lost trying to get there. I spend a lot of time creating this macro-structure before I actually write the design document and/or screenplay.”
Writer/designer/producer Larry Kay says: “I can’t really afford writer’s block. There is nothing like a good swift deadline to kick in the creativity! I think writer’s block often occurs when you don’t trust your ideas. Creativity is like a muscle, the more you use it, the stronger it gets. I don’t subscribe to the notion that every writer has a finite amount of stuff to say and uses it up. But, on the other hand, I know that I, like most writers, must be careful not to burn out. I definitely have some days that are surprisingly productive, while other days I have to trudge through on technique. When I get a little rest between projects or drafts, I tend to start a little fresher which makes me feel more free and spontaneous with my creativity. Ideas generate more rapidly and I throw out a lot of bad material on my way to finding the good stuff.”
To show proof of concept, many writer/designers painstakingly produce working prototypes or demos of their ideas. Sometimes this is done to secure financing. Other times it’s to demonstrate a concept. Demos or prototypes can also help you land a new job.
Whether a published blog or a fully-functional interactive game, a demo or prototype can serve as an ideal calling card to exhibit the quality of your work. And in business, companies tend to want to work with writers and designers who understand their industry and needs. Demos can sort out the wanna-be’s from the true contenders.
What is a prototype?
A prototype is an application made up of several key elements loosely thrown together to demonstrate a basic sense of what the project is and how it works. A prototype can be as simple as a sketch-up of several screen shots, sample music, and some narration. Or a prototype can be deeply interactive, including elaborate graphic designs, maps, and concepts ‘borrowed’ from other projects for illustrative purposes.
What is a demo?
A working demo looks and feels much like the final product. A website demo might include a home page, several interior screens, active hypertext links, interactive tools, along with several design variations to consider. A game demo might include an interface that illustrates the basic navigation, interactive methodology, game play, music score, sound effects, sample puzzles and other obstacles.
Beside the obvious benefits (landing a job), prototypes and demos can also serve a myriad of functions:
