As a software developer I deal with “bugs” a lot. If you’re not familiar with the term: a bug is really anything that happens in your program that differs from how it was designed. In the worst case this is a crash, corruption or loss of data. More often a bug is just something a user can do with your program that falls outside of the “rules” you wrote.
I’ve been dealing with a lot of bugs in Wordabble as we’ve been beta testing the next release. Even after I published the release (yesterday) a few minor bugs have been discovered. That can be terribly frustrating… so when I stumbled across this video today it really put a smile on my face. A user of the new Tiger Woods PGA game had discovered a scenario where you could get Tiger to walk on water.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZ1st1Vw2kY
EA put together a brilliant response. It’s not just the “BLAH, we had a bug, so what” response that all developers love to give… they’ve turned it into a viral marketing spot. They can’t release an update to the game to fix this kind of thing, so their bug fix is to actually make Tiger Woods walk on water.
Absolutely brilliant!
You’ve found me. This is my blog. I write things no one reads. This is my contribution to the noise: everyone gets a voice.