Attention Spans, Gaming and Interactivity

For the gaming industry, there goes a popular saying, "A game has 15 minutes to hook a player in before they'll decide whether this is worth their time or not." While I personally invest about an hour, I believe this saying to be true.

Everything we interact with automatically receives a relevancy and judgmental check the moment we begin interacting with it. For instance, searching for a program that did a specific function on Google - if the result fails to provide the correct answer within 3-4 results, then either the user becomes frustrated and gives up, or the program doesn't exist. This mainly translates into the user giving up, finding a better alternative, and moving on.

This is exactly where trend hunters, interactivity experts, and marketing fall in. People need a sense of direction. Sometimes that direction can be taught. Sometimes it's innate. Combine both aspects of logic and culture and you create hype. Whether or not hype kills the product will fall onto the hands of the creator - which is the hard part - to create something new and innovative while simultaneous pleasing the market to which you are catering to.