Entertainment Media Council is my latest company, a new association for interactive entertainment entrepreneurs and corporate leaders. I've been bringing people aboard since the start of last year. We decided to formally announce ourselves and a little bit about our plans today. Here's the press release:

Entertainment Media Council was announced today as the new interactive entertainment association for entrepreneurs and corporate leaders. Entertainment Media Council is pursuing a broad agenda for advancing the interactive entertainment business in the United States.

As the announcement indicated, we remain interested in talking to folks who want to join our founding team. If you would like to self-nominate, go ahead and send us an e-mail to the address listed.

From my Gamasutra blog:

A few weeks ago, Kimberly Unger wrote about The 'Ideas' Guy. One element that struck me was her reference to design documents as things. While that's true, I think looking at design as a means to produce things, documents, can set you on the wrong path.

Like meeting minutes, the design document is a record of the decisions made during the design process. The purpose of keeping and sharing a record, of course, is to facilitate communication of those decisions to anyone that should care.

Raise your hand if you've participated in a planning meeting and the outcome of that meeting ended up on a dusty shelf. That's where many strategic plans end up and that's exactly what you don't want to happen. The outcome should not be merely tangible.

After all, if communication is the goal, then the record is secondary. As the designer, you ought to engage those people who should care in the design process and mobilize them to take up your vision as their own. As the designer, you ought to recognize that your responsibility is not only one of design but also one of leadership.

Facebook recently rolled out significant changes to the design and layout of the user portal and Pages. For some, these are welcome revisions, and for others—like myself—they're not.

drop.io CEO Sam Lessin wrote an article for PC World with great praise for the new look-and-feel.

Having spent an initial few days playing with and thinking about the changes Facebook is making to their fan page system, I must admit that I think it will radically effect the way in which we as a brand can and will use Facebook--this time for the better.

Like many others, Lessin fails to account for the variety of organizations that were using Pages and the many ways they were used. I had four Pages: two for nonprofit corporations, one for a services corporation, and one more for my music. None of my pages had remotely close to "3,000 Facebook fans."

So my opinion is a perspective from the trenches. The number-one problem with the new design is that the barrier to entry has been greatly heightened. Small organizations, from independent musicians to fledgling charities, will now have a tougher time of getting to the point that drop.io has already achieved.

Lessin actually points all of the main problems out. He just doesn't connect the dots.

Over time, Facebook actually degraded the presence and power of fan pages by hiding individual brand 'fan' status on a secondary tab in the profile, and changing the ability of a brand to even reach out to fans.

Older versions of Facebook did not make heavy use of menus and tabs. You could actually find content easily, such as which Pages your contacts were Fans of, without having to navigate any deeper than one level. Now Pages of which your contacts are Fans are two levels deep not including the scrolling down you have to do with more comprehensive user profiles. Although Facebook has attempted to circumvent the problem by allowing Pages into the Stream, Pages continue to have a degraded presence.

As of the latest change, pages now have a look, feel, and function largely consistent with user profiles on Facebook. [...] While this might sound cosmetic, it actually makes all the difference in the world in terms of how we as a company can and will interact with our customers through the service.

Lessin believes this integration is a positive, and he's right. But he's also wrong. Facebook didn't heed the lesson also ignored by MySpace: people do not like astroturfing. Some companies hired actors to sit at tables in public places and talk up their products. That did not go down well. An infamous Sony-Zipatoni campaign for the PlayStation Portable also received harsh, negative criticism. (Hint: astroturfing is a con.) On the other hand, Pages can interface with constituents on a more social level, but the forced-astroturfing design was completely unnecessary. I unpublished all but one of my Pages as a result.

[O]ur brand not only has static presence on Facebook with the ability to receive wall posts and the odd rating, but we have an active and evolving voice that we can use.

Unfortunately, that active and evolving voice is no longer an option. This is where the higher barrier to entry comes into play. Because Pages are designed to showcase activity, if you're an independent musician who's not an active performer or if you're a startup with not much to say, your Page will appear inactive, unused, and boring. You are now required to have "an active and evolving voice" to grow your fanbase.

For those of you who remain interested in Pages, consider the new changes. In brief:

• Facebook Pages now look exactly like user profiles. Think advertorials. Ick.
• The Wall has become the focal point. Everything else has been shoved under the rug. For musicians, your audience will have to scroll down to find your music because Facebook, in their infinite wisdom, has decided that you should not be able to decide what's important to your audience.
• Expect to spend more time on Facebook. You might want to hire someone to do just that because if you don't keep your Page updated, your Page will end up where neglected blogs do: off the radar.

Good luck to those of you who want to tough out the new ways. I sure don't, not without help.

Steam is both software and a storefront that facilitates the digital distribution of entertainment products. Steam is developed by Valve Corporation, makers of the Counter-Strike series and other properties. Valve periodically solicits data from users about their computer hardware. The results are made public.

In the Steam Store, there are system requirements for each title. Why not make more use of the collected data at an individual level? Integrate automated data collection (that requires user activation) into the Steam software so that system data can be surveyed regularly and reward users with a new way to shop.

A new sorting feature would give users the ability to browse the Store for only titles that their computers can handle. Steam could also recommend specific changes (e.g., "upgrade your video card") when users view titles that would likely not perform well on their computers.

For users, the benefits include:

• a convenient way to browse the Store and find products that "work";
• no more squinting at fine print to compare requirements with actual specifications;
• no more trying to remember forgotten, or figure out unknown, actual specifications;
• no more pre-purchase guessing about how a title might perform on a given system;
• and greater satisfaction because buying products that "work" tend to be happier experiences.

For Valve and third parties, the benefits include:

• an always updated specifications database to inform development of future products;
• finer trending can be also be performed (e.g., when do users upgrade and how often);
• more sales all the way down the long tail as customers narrow their searches and are introduced to titles within reach (e.g., recommendation of titles that require only minor system upgrades);
• more partnership opportunities (e.g., manufacturer-specific upgrade recommendations);
• and perhaps lower technical support and quality assurance costs for everyone.

While discussing how to tackle the "World of Warcraft problem," my friend Raph and Matt Mihaly seem to have concluded that return on investment (ROI) is the most significant metric for gauging the success of an enterprise or product. Gentlemen, gentlemen! ROI isn't everything.

ROI is a financial measurement. In an accounting-driven organization, financial measurements can mean everything. A by-the-numbers approach can certainly make for a more efficient use of money throughout the pipeline and quite possibly stitch deeper wallets for shareholders.

For a market-driving organization? Not so much. These companies are built to help their founders create meaning. Using financial measurements exclusively to set strategic directions and determine the value of a venture is highly risky, undesirable, and, well, quite a soulless way to operate.

When you're knee-deep in financial statements, forgetting why you're in business is easy. Yet, even Jim Lenskold, in his strongly "profit is everything" book Marketing ROI, noted:

Goals are set by the company to provide common vision and purpose. Measurements are then aligned with the goals to track actual performance relative to the goals and to provide feedback that can help guide future decisions. While profits are necessary to stay in business and to satisfy shareholder expectations, executives must have a vision and purpose that goes beyond just profits to maintain the company's success.

Executives, in particular the founders and corporate leadership, would do well to remember that money is only a means to do something, that financial measurements are overshadowed by something greater. The bottom line is not a number. As the great Peter F. Drucker also once wrote:

Profit is not the primary goal but rather an essential condition for the company's continued existence. Other responsibilities, e.g., to employees and society, exist to support the company's continued ability to carry out its primary purpose.

Lewis Pulsipher, an educator and pen-and-paper game designer, has riled up the programmers over at Gamasutra while trying to argue that "game developer" is confusing and should be changed. Nevermind the outrage over his definition of programming. And nevermind that changing terminology is always futile.

Here are the problems. First, to people who don’t work for video game companies, a developer is a programmer, someone who codes software. Using the term "game developer" to encompass all of the team that makes video games is quite confusing to computer-knowledgeable people outside the industry.

Let's focus on his core argument that, in the context of computing, the use of "developer" in "game development" is confusing for many people and that we should adopt "creator" instead. I agree that, in the context of computing, "developer" does tend to mean "programmer." But that's the wrong context.

The right context is entertainment. Our use of "developer" is no different than the use of "developer" in real-estate development, community development, and business development. Game development is not software development. Game developers create entertainment. A developer is simply an individual or group that makes something. Game developers can be artists, programmers, designers, and even accountants.

What follows is a debate about the value of video games with Erin Hoffman (formerly "EA Spouse") through Twitter. If you're not familiar with Twitter, please note that the service restricts the maximum length of a message to only 140 characters, which should explain the brevity of each message.

morganramsay: Reading more about Obama's incessant admonishment of video games as having no redeeming, educational value is pissing me off.

morganramsay: We need an ambassador from the interactive entertainment business to visit and advise the White House.

gryphoness: He's said before he doesn't think games are specifically harmful, he just equates them as distraction entertainment.

morganramsay: He refers to video games as childish things to put away, equates them with toys, and uses them as metaphor for underachievement.

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