Joel’s Scattered Thoughts

Joel Spolsky has a post on How to demo software. I was thinking of applying the following to a presentation I will be giving late this winter. Rather than just doing facts I’m going to see if I can work it up into a simple story.

The only interesting way to design a demo is to make it a story. You have a protagonist, and the protagonist has a problem, and they use the software, and they… almost solve the problem, but not quite, and then everybody is in suspense, while you tell them some boring stuff that doesn’t fit anywhere else, but they’re still listening raptly because they’re waiting to hear the resolution to the suspenseful story, and then (ah!) you solve the protagonists last problem, and all is well. There is a reason people have been sitting around telling stories around campfires for the last million years or so: people like stories.

Girl Meets WoW: Akil’zon’s Gauntlet, The Easy Way sounds like it would work. Mind you it also sounds like the kinds of thing Blizzard will be nerfing ASAP.