A few years ago I was dining with a friend of mine at a new restaurant. As I recall, the establishment was a part of a chain or at least had that chain feel to it. You know the type: a little bit too much light, the whiff of a theme, people stopping by your table who all spontaneously say the exact same thing. My companion looked down at the very nice new menu and mused aloud “I wonder what their mission statement is?”
After a while her guess was “Hit the right price point, show in the demographic area and screw the food.”
That the food should be secondary to the establishment’s mission baffled me. If it wasn’t for the food, what possible excuse could they have for luring me out of my cave?
Of course I am being naive. There are plenty of restaurants out there where the food exists only as a necessary convention. Who needs food when you have a plastic rainforest, or deliberately rude waitresses, or waitresses who do double duty performing fabric stress tests with their chests, or partially animated bears. In the end, the food, the exploding clown, the pinwheel with my name on it, are all part of an excuse to charge me money. Not that it seems anyone really needs and excuse, at least when it comes to my money, but it beats “stick ‘em up” or a dunning notice.
The majority of business plans amount to: I need money; here is who intend to get money from; and here is how I intend to get that money. And there’s nothing wrong with this approach, logically. But it does fly in the face of the old convention about building a better mouse trap and the world beating a path to your door. By following the logical dictates of this grand plan of things, many a mousetrap designer has wound up in the stray cat adoption business—the focus being ‘people with mice’ as opposed to the trap. Besides that, the guy in marketing will tell you “If you sell a good trap, you get a dead mouse. If you give away a cat, you create a demand for shots, kitty litter, food and the like. It’s called upselling.”
(Thus Mr. Frisky becomes a ‘loss leader’ and the fate of Mr. Mouse is rendered inconsequential.)
It is by this logic that many of our restaurants have decided that they are in the entertainment business and have thus turned their focus away from the silly food thing. Taken to an extreme, your waitress, a baseball player, the newspaper and even myself are all in the entertainment business. I only cite this ridiculousness because it is the prevailing view and, in my mind at least, one of the core reasons things get so screwed up.
Of course the ‘new paradigm’ states that we should focus on all ends of the process, equally and absolutely. To quote from every single Mission Statement ever written “Remain focused on customer centric fulfillment while profitably insuring outcomes in an ethical manner and reducing step costs.” This, in a roundabout way, brings to mind Douglas McArthur’s lines “Old soldiers never die. They just fade away,” to which President Truman reacted with “What the hell does that mean?”
All of that said, Mission Statements aren’t completely useless. Which brings me to my subject: What the heck am I doing with this website? It is not that I am clueless or aimless or keeping it a secret or working it out as I go along. (And I will repeat that until I believe it.) No, no. Rather, my disclosure here is for the purpose of informing the consumer. (You.) Nothing sucks worse than undisclosed ulterior motives.
At present I am not out to sell you anything. I want to help you help yourself and your pals waste a whole lot of time on socially interactive games of my design. I have no philosophy-- political, religious or otherwise-- to sell you on with these games. I barely have matching socks most days. My intention is to give away Weird Detective Mystery Adventures, both online and as a download perpetually. As time goes on, I will be bringing other products online, most likely as part of sister sites or a larger commercial website. This means that I will probably have to migrate this site to another server and perhaps a new domain. Nothing is set in stone as yet, except for my commitment to this approach.
Our editorial content, including downloads, will remain free of charge. Any products or services advertised on this site are from third parties and not Hil-Gle Mind Rot Quality Creative Newsstand Fiction Unit or Mark Lax. An announcement as to the availability of a commercially printed version Weird Detective Mystery Adventures or any other product will appear here. The download or online versions will NOT be taken down once the printed product has been made available*. This is not to say that the printed versions will be identical to the downloads. In the cases of Union City
I will also be reformatting the site, as my experience and aptitude with this format grows. If anyone knows of a pill that can help me grow THAT, please contact me.
I have three new games which will appear very shortly. The one I can mention is Alley Tanx, which was copyrighted back in 1980. The others have 'name problems' which I have to clear.
It is my intention to use this website as my test kitchen. My approach is to open up the windows and let people take a whiff.
Gosh, I hope that last line doesn’t come back to haunt me.
Mark Lax, Chicago 2007
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