Geekularity

On Saturday night I joined at least four hundred other geeks at the San Francisco Apple Store to watch Will Wright, the creator of the online games “Sim City” & “The Sims,” as he demonstrated his new game, Spore, which is scheduled to debut on September 7, 2008.  In addition to the opportunity to truly geek out, I observed two points of Mr. Wright’s presentation style that I both admire and hope to mimic in my own presentations:

1. True passion cannot be faked. When you are truly passionate about your project, your audience will recognize its authenticity almost immediately. In terms of building emotional capital with your audience, this is possibly the largest deposit you can make in a single transaction. Mr. Wright shows tremendous passion for this new game and we, the audience, locked in on it within the first 60 seconds of his presentation.
2. You can be “The Dude” with out ever having to utter the word “dude.” First of all, it helps to wear a Tommy Bahama aloha shirt when you’re at the podium. But even without it, Mr. Wright was incredibly laid back while at the same time eloquent and responsive to the audience and to the game. During his demo, he exposed several significant bugs and without batting an eye, he called them bugs, and moved on. The tone of the presentation was simply: I’m going to show you some really cool #$%^! Not all of it’s going to work, but who cares? Let’s have some fun!

When all is said and done, this was effectively a sales demo. I bought a copy of the Spore Creature Creator, a character editor program which serves two goals. First, it’s a teaser for the upcoming game. Five minutes playing with the editor and you’ll be hooked. Second, it’s a community catalyst. The fan base gets to help build the species inventory for the game a good three months ahead of the game’s release. Here’s my first creation Zweedoo: