Idea Lab

After the last meeting we had we have now finalized an idea for a card game. We were inspired partly by the card game Clue. The board will be divided in two parts: one part will show a set of cards representing questions and the other part of the board will be divided in different areas that will represent each facet of the issue. Each area is made of different cards, every card is a fact/answer. The player, maybe with a roll of dice, will have to reach the specific area and then decide which card is the answer to one of the questions presented on the other part of the board. When the player reaches an area, all cards within the area will become visible.

We envision at least one question for each area. We still don't know other details about the game mechanics but we wanna keep it pretty simple. We like this idea because it seems to be easy on the newsroom side as well as the player side. The first step is to create a paper prototype and test how interesting the game will turn out to be.

At the same time we are also planning our testing because we want to be ready to start sometime in the end of September, beginning of October. The test subjects will be drawn from people who are already interested in reading the news, either in the newspaper or online. Our idea is to collaborate with the University newspaper and the Minneapolis newspaper to draw some users.

As of the moment our collaboration with Distill Interactive from Ottawa is on hold. I think right now the prototype we have is good enough for testing.