Idea Lab

When a Game Only Looks Like a Game

by Bobby Schweizer
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

In our research on newsgames, we proselytize the power of videogames to model events in the world small and big, simple and complex. But there is, of course, a discrepancy between the values we espouse and newsgames that get made. Making games is difficult. As researchers, we critique them to encourage certain practices and discourage others. But it's just as important to understand what people actually make and why. One aspect we've largely ignored is the videogame as a form supposedly imbued with identifiable qualities. Games have become objects in the popular imagination to be referenced with little regard for...

• December 23, 2011
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Cartoonist Prototype Tackles the Most Visible News

by Simon Ferrari
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

At a recent demo day hosted by a Georgia Tech research center, our studio showed a working prototype of the Cartoonist engine for the first time. The whiz kids at UCSC's Expressive Intelligence Studio have been working overtime on the guts of our system in order to link together our user interface, the tool that converts user input into machine-readable form, the library of action verbs that drive each game, and a playable output. While still in incredibly rough form, we can now generate a large number of games based on a small amount of information drawn from a current...

• November 11, 2011
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Why Newsgame Development Should Look to Paper Prototyping

by Simon Ferrari
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Although the practice might not be widely known outside game design circles, "paper prototyping" is a common pedagogical methodology in game design education. The idea behind a paper prototype is that the design for a videogame can be tested by approximating its concepts in the form of a rough, turn-based board game. That said, not enough attention has been paid to the values of paper prototyping and the digital distribution of rough, paper-based games (called "print-and-play") for journalistic purposes. Some of the most popular game design education texts, including Tracy Fullerton's "Game Design Workshop" and Brenda Brathwaite & Ian...

• September 16, 2011
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The Frightening, Real-World Strength of Channel 4's 'Sweatshop' Game

by Simon Ferrari
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Sweatshop is a new browser game, developed by Littleloud for Channel 4 Education, in which players fill the role of a factory floor manager in a developing nation. Taking design cues from the tower defense genre, the game tasks you with placing skilled workers and child laborers along a conveyor belt. It's also one of the most compelling and effective political games I've seen in recent years. Orders for different kinds of garments -- including hats, shirts, bags and shoes -- come down the line, and laborers assemble these products at varying speeds according to their specialty (or lack...

• July 27, 2011
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When Moral Systems Miss the Point in Newsgames

by Simon Ferrari
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

In "Newsgames: Journalism at Play," we argue that the news quiz "is an incredibly simple type of game, but one that nevertheless can transmit factual information in a refreshing way." Perhaps our favorite example is an op-ed suite from The New York Times called "Turning Points, 2008 Edition," which couples a Trivial Pursuit-style question card with a series of short columns on the 2008 presidential campaign. While I can't speak for my co-authors, I personally believe that we were being a bit generous in this assessment. The truth is that I'm tired of quizzes, and I'm not convinced that the...

• July 1, 2011
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What Augmented Reality Can Do for the Media Industry

by Retha Hill
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

I attended the second annual Augmented Reality Event conference in Santa Clara, Calif., in May and it was ... interesting. OK, it was a huge geekfest. The opening session was interrupted by people dressed in hazardous waste -- or maybe they were supposed to be pseudo-astronaut -- outfits, yelling about "free space," while wrapping the audience in yellow caution tape. Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist, composer, visual artist and free thinker best known for coining the term "virtual reality," opened his keynote speech by playing the khene, a traditional Laotian wind instrument that he says was the earliest conveyor of...

• June 14, 2011
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Three 3D Newsgames Produced Within a Week of Bin Laden Raid

by Bobby Schweizer
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

In the course of researching newsgames over the past few years, we've been able to roughly categorize them into certain types, which we've previously written about on Idea Lab. These categories were based on how genres of games are able to support types of news stories. Current event games tend to be short, 2D, and built with Flash because it's easy to produce something playable quickly. Documentary games are often 3D and highly visual because they can afford longer production times. So while it was no surprise that a number of Osama bin Laden games were released soon after the...

• May 24, 2011
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Designing a Newsgame Is an Act of Journalism

by Bobby Schweizer
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

A common thread woven through our various projects in the Newsgames research group has been our subscription to the tenets of journalism. Our first endeavor was not related to games at all. We bought a stack of copies of Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel's "The Elements of Journalism" book and immersed ourselves in not just the business of news but rather the practice of news. Sure, we could have seen videogames as a way to add exciting features that would draw readers to websites -- and if we were an Internet startup, we probably would have -- but as...

• April 20, 2011
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Newsgames Can Raise the Bar for News, Not Dumb It Down

by Ian Bogost
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Earlier this month a group of journalists, game designers, and academics gathered at the University of Minnesota for a workshop on newsgames. I was there, as was fellow Knight News Challenge winner and San Jose Mercury News tech business writer Chris O'Brien. After the event, Chris wrote a recap of the meeting here on Idea Lab. TechCrunch's Paul Carr penned a grouchy reply, and O'Brien responded in turn. As an early advocate and creator of newsgames who has spent the last several years researching and writing about the subject, I'm encouraged to see debate flaring up on the subject. But...

• April 13, 2011
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Why TechCrunch's Paul Carr Is Wrong About Newsgames

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Over the weekend, TechCruch's confessed "old media snob" Paul Carr posted an interesting response to my call for more newsgames. In the post, Mr. Carr was quite complimentary to my overall reasoning, but differed in one fundamental respect: Maybe I'm getting old. Certainly I'm an old media journalism snob. But the fact is, when faced with the fact that an increasing number of people can't process news without a game element, my instinct is to reply... well... fuck 'em." And of course, he wasn't alone. I have seen a few tweets from folks who were sympathetic to his view: News...

• April 12, 2011
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Why Are Newsrooms Resistant to Creating Newsgames?

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

This past weekend a group of 25 game developers, academics and journalists gathered at the University of Minnesota’s Journalism Center to examine the state of newsgames. While it can be a slippery term to define, generally speaking newsgames covers a wide range of game-like experiences from puzzles to graphically-rich presentations that convey some kind of interactive news content.The use of videogame-like narratives is one of the many promising new forms of digital storytelling that have emerged over the past 15 years. And yet for all the potential, and some extremely successful examples, newsgames have not been widely adopted by news...

• April 8, 2011
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How to Design a Simple Newsgame Authoring Tool

by Bobby Schweizer
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Our teams at Georgia Tech and UC Santa Cruz have been working on an authoring tool that helps journalists quickly create bite-sized newsgames. The Cartoonist has been the working title for the tool because our intention is to create games akin to editorial cartoons, in terms of the amount of information being conveyed and the style of representation. But despite this small scope, the promise of this tool requires intense research and design. Over the past half-year, we have been faced with a daunting question: How do you create something that can generate games for a seemingly endless list of...

• March 8, 2011
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Why Huffington Post's 'Predict the News' Game Is No Galaga

by Bobby Schweizer
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Fellow Knight News Challenge winner Chris O'Brien recently posted on this site about "gamifying" the news. The idea behind the  movement O'Brien is speaking of, which Brad Flora touched on in another recent Idea Lab post, involves adding incentives -- pop-up achievements for tasks completed, progress bars to fill, badges to display, online leaderboards for score comparison, and virtual goods -- to activities. The idea is to reward repeat patronage and reframe participation as if it's like a playing a game. A Brief History of Videogame Scoring Videogames have long used scores to track player performance. In 1976, Sea Wolf...

• February 2, 2011
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3 Excellent Videos Explain the 'Game Layer' Conversation

by Brad Flora
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Want to learn more about the gamification of news that Chris O'Brien wrote about here last week? I did, so I spent the last few days digging into the web for videos and talks about taking game mechanics outside of what we typically think of as "games." Sure there's tremendous potential for news organizations that build games around their content, but it's just a darn interesting idea in general. In my searching I dug up three videos you should check out to get a sense of what people talk about when they talk about adding a "game layer" to something....

• January 26, 2011
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How Can We 'Gamify' the News Experience?

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of the biggest emerging conversations over the past year in Silicon Valley is around "gamification." Simply put, this is the idea of applying game mechanics, particularly those found in videogames, to all sorts of non-game experiences. After following this conversation for many months, I've come to believe that over the next decade gamification will profoundly reshape the way we experience the web, to the same degree that social media and networks redefined the web last decade. To that end, I've been thinking in the broadest terms what that could and should mean for how we can reinvent digital news....

• January 19, 2011
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A Brief History of Newsgames: Combining News + Videogames

by Bobby Schweizer
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

The newsgames project, which this year won a News Challenge grant, began two and a half years ago with a single question: What is the relationship between videogames and journalism? With the help of the two dozen fellow students at Georgia Tech who've joined us over the past five semesters, we identified and explored seven categories of newsgames on our class blog and in our book, "Newsgames: Journalism at Play". Below is a brief overview of the book in order to encourage people to read the findings of our research. Current Event Games The earliest examples of newsgames were games...

• December 14, 2010
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Understanding How Political Cartoons Intersect with Newsgames

by Bobby Schweizer
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

We are midway through the semester and the newsgames project studio at Georgia Tech is running at full steam. Newsgames: Journalism at Play, a survey of the field of newsgames by project director Ian Bogost, graduate assistant Simon Ferrari, and myself, is out and is available online and in bookstores. We've spent the semester breaking down popular arcade and Atari games to find relevant structures for game generation, and identifying elements of meaning that we're calling "micro-rhetorics." Each student has also sought out related topics for analysis and critique on our research studio blog, which we update two to three...

• November 10, 2010
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Journalists Should Play and Discuss Newsgames Like 1378(km)

by Bobby Schweizer
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Evangelizing newsgames is not just about convincing journalists that they should create and use games to express ideas and inform the public. It's also about getting journalists to recognize newsgames that are created outside of professional institutions as works in dialogue with their field. Even if a person cannot produce a game on his own, newsgames can still be shared and discussed. Expending a modest amount of effort in this capacity would go a long way toward the adoption of newsgames as a form. 1378(km) Last week we wrote on our project blog about the media's reception of a German...

• October 21, 2010
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The Cartoonist Aims to Bring Newsgames to the Masses

by Ian Bogost
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Cartoonist, our winning entry in the 2010 Knight News Challenge, emerged from two research programs. For the past two years, my research group at the Georgia Institute of Technology has been cataloging and analyzing the burgeoning genre of "newsgames" -- videogames about current and past real-world events. That research produced a book, Newsgames, which will be published next month by MIT Press. Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, professor Michael Mateas and his Expressive Intelligence Studio at UC Santa Cruz have been working on the problem of game generation by creating artificial intelligence tools to create a...

• September 2, 2010
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What Can Virtual Goods Teach Us About Paying for News?

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Why will people spend $1 to send you a virtual beer on Facebook, but not to read a news story online? On the surface, it defies logic. I think most people would agree that whatever economic value news and information has, it's greater than a virtual piece of clothing, or something that gives your avatar a special power in a gaming environment, or that gives you elevated status on a social network. But in terms of consumers' actions, the exact opposite is true. I've been thinking a lot about this issue because the market for virtual goods has exploded. People...

• February 8, 2010
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How Gotham Gazette Used Games as Storytelling Devices

by Gail Robinson
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

With the launch of its energy game Switch, Gotham Gazette this fall completed a two-year Knight Foundation-funded project to create several news games about New York City policy issues. We think we produced some good games (to view and play them go here.) And we learned a lot. Most satisfyingly, we confirmed that for some issues, games -- or perhaps "policy simulations," just so you don't expect Grand Theft Auto here -- provide an informative and engaging way to tell a story. People who played our Garbage Game, for example, told us that it gave them a whole new appreciation...

• December 2, 2009
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Virtual Street Corners Connects Neighborhoods and People in Boston

by John Ewing
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Virtual Street Corners, our Knight-funded project, is scheduled to be installed in Boston between June 8th and June 30th of this year. We have formed an exciting collaboration with the Boston Cyberarts festival, which will be our fiscal sponsor. I thought I would use my first post on Idea Lab to describe the project and fill everyone in on the work and thinking that has already gone into the piece. For those not familiar with the project, I'll offer a quick description. Large glass storefronts in two Greater Boston area neighborhoods, Brookline and Roxbury, will be transformed into video screens,...

• October 16, 2009
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New Partnerships and Game Possibilities

by Angela Antony
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

In September, we were approached by a major national magazine to help produce content for a new monthly green column in their print magazine, which has a subscriber-ship of 900,000 and a readership of over 6 MILLION. As they are entertainment-news oriented, but have been trying to implement a green column, their editorial team had trouble creating environmental content that was relevant for their target audience. Thus, when they came across Beanstockd.com, they wanted to meet with us immediately. The best part of our arrangement is our idea to including Beanstockd Game clues in the green column of their magazine....

• October 9, 2009
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Fashion Week 2009!

by Angela Antony
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Hi everyone, So just to stray for a moment from the topic of the Game, I wanted to forward on an update from our fabulous fashion editor, Sarah Jacobson, on Fashion Week 2009: "Fashion week was drama filled but oh so fabulous. in the months leading up to september, i spent time contacting designers and PR folk and asking for invites to the shows. once invites were secured, i compiled a calendar of our events and began setting up interviews and such. during fashion week, i interviewed scarf designer taiana geifer, whose felted wool pieces are to die for. i...

• October 9, 2009
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Best Week Ever!

by Angela Antony
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Recently, the Beanstockd team experienced (and, of course, celebrated!) our Best Week Ever! In August, we finally surpassed the 100,000 weekly hit mark (specifically 110,566 visits) and on Friday, August 14th we threw a long overdue regional Beanstockd get-together, with staffer from NYC, MA, PA, and DC coming in to join the festivities. We have since leveraged this momentum and are experiencing over 114% quarterly growth, which is extremely exciting. We also have had a few of our staffers move to NYC over the summer so we used the occasion to welcome them to Beanstockd HQ. Cheers!...

• October 9, 2009
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Beanstockd Class Field Trip to NC

by Angela Antony
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's the start of the fall semester at UNC and Beanstockd has just taken a trip down to visit the class, present on Beanstockd, and answer all their questions. Prior to our arrival, the 20 students in the class had already done their preliminary research on us. They were very engaged, asking insightful questions throughout the class, and after our presentation proceeded with a 45-minute Q&A session. In December, at the end of the semester, we will go back for the most exciting part of this course: the final presentations! Each team of 5 will present to us their step-by-step...

• October 9, 2009
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Introducing Switch, A News Game About New York City's Energy Gap

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Our latest (and last, for now) news game, Switch, is live. It is no Energyville but we think it is pretty awesome. Not only is it live, the source code and installation instructions are already available. With gadgets guzzling evermore energy, New York City faces a looming energy gap. New Yorkers will have to cut back on our electric use or start generating a lot more power. Our game lets people explore the options that are on the table, along with a few that aren't. Should the city ban air conditioning? Harness the tides? Go nuclear? Warning: the game is...

• September 30, 2009
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Source Code for Balance

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Okay, so you haven't been waiting for this with baited breath the way everyone was waiting for the EveryBlock code. Nonetheless, after a few months of wrangling on and off with Git Hub I finally sat down and worked through a bunch of nagging authentication issues and managed to post the code for Balance! our game about balancing city budgets. Assuming we haven't made any terrible mistakes (I already spotted one little error. If you spot it too you can buy me a beer!), we'll post cleaned out versions of the other games we've developed in the next week or...

• August 10, 2009
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Public Edition of The Beanstockd Game

by Angela Antony
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

With the help of some new summer meat (haha... MBA interns... gotta love them) we have begun storyboarding the public edition of The Beanstockd Game. Our beta edition has received amazing reviews in our beta tests, but for our big launch we are taking the core functionalities of the game and brainstorming new ways to GAMEify the process. We are coming up with some very exciting ideas and in the process of teasing them out. After over a year, we almost forgot how fun the drawing board can be, especially with a few fresh sets of eyes... A big shoutout...

• July 17, 2009
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Beanstockd UNC Case Study

by Angela Antony
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

The University of North Carolina's marketing strategy course has elected to use The Beanstockd Game as the case study for their fall 2009 course! The Beanstockd Team will be traveling down to Chapel Hill, North Carolina to meet the students, present all the ins and outs of Beanstockd, and answer any questions they have during the course of the semester. At the end of the year, the students will present to Beanstockd their recommendations for a course of action in both marketing and revenue generation for the Beanstockd Game and Beanstockd at large. We are flattered and excited about this...

• July 17, 2009
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Focus!

by Angela Antony
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

The entire Beanstockd Team has been running on full throttle with producing the public edition of the Game, rolling out new/better/frequent video content, preparations for serving as the University of North Carolina's marketing course's fall 2009 case study, implementing advertising and other business model/administrative initiatives, and increasing our traffic across the board (which has been off the charts lately!!). In light of this, and with incredibly valuable advice from our Board of Directors (special thanks to Robert Kraft of Fox Music!) we have decided to push back our preparations for a Beanstockd environmental film for the time being. It will...

• July 17, 2009
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Beanstockd Class Field Trip to LA

by Angela Antony
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

First, lots going on at Beanstockd in past weeks. This Spring, we signed our new video host Chet Cannon, from MTV's Real World Brooklyn! Chet and several members of The Beanstockd Team (minus myself and Sandra, sadly...) trekked out to Los Angeles for 2 major events. First, the Global Green USA Annual Millennium Awards took place, and we were there to cover the action. Beanstockd Classes Up the Global Green Millennium Awards Second, we covered the Spike TV Guys' Choice Awards and asked the attendees how they go green in their lives. Chet Cannon Works the Green Carpet at the...

• July 17, 2009
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Bump: Getting on the Ballot in NYC

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Gotham Gazette released our fourth game in our Knight-funded game series this week. Bump, which revisits the maze theme from our Budget Maze sends players through a whole new labyrinth: ballot access. If you can't imagine how ballot access is even remotely interesting, I suggest playing the game! Seriously: we knew we wanted to do two things: to build a game that would stay relevant through the New York City campaign season and to find a topic that would fit nicely into the existing code base for one of our earlier games. Ballot access is an important and relatively obtuse...

• July 8, 2009
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Another Budget Game

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

I like to think that Gotham Gazette's Balance! inspired the folks over at the Washington Post to create an even better budget game of their own but I am open to the possibility that they came up with it all on their own. Take a look at both if you haven't already. The Post's works a lot (a lot!) like our game, but I'd say the layout that they came up with is a far more effective way to display the available information. On the other hand, I really like the way we handled revenue, by creating a menu of...

• June 29, 2009
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Stuck in a Maze

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last week, we were honored with an Honorable Mention in the first Knight News Game Award competition, for our (pretty excellent) budget maze. The honor was made sweeter with the knowledge that our little maze -- we estimate the budget at $65,000 -- was up against a massively multi-player multi-issue networked news game project with a budget just over tenfold ours. With competition like that, an Honorable Mention is honor a-plenty. All the finalists in the contest were invited to share their games at the Games for Change Expo where I watched a handful of people play our game for...

• June 12, 2009
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Beanstockd February/March Updates

by Angela Antony
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

[by Kim Zeigler for Beanstockd.com] February was an eventful month for Beanstockd! Global Green USA Annual Pre-Oscar Event in LA Beanstockd attended Global Green USA's annual "green carpet" event in Los Angeles. Maria Menounos wore a milk fiber dress with recycled glass layered necklaces. Heather Graham noted the enormous magnitude of what will happen to our planet unless we all start acting fast. Rosie Perez was having a hard time walking in her super cute runway shoes from all the pain. Dominic Monaghan was there as well as always participating in a number of other green movements. Gavin Rossdale has...

• March 5, 2009
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Getting Ready for Testing

by Fabio Berzaghi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Finally after a lot of project and design changes we are approaching the starting line of testing. Right now one prototype is ready to go. We just have to set up the server and upload the content. We decided that on-site testing was the best choice for our purposes. Since we are dealing with online content and games, it makes more sense to leave the subjects undisturbed in their offices and homes and give them freedom to take part in the test at their discretion. We also count on reaching a much wider user base via mailing lists. Initially we...

• February 22, 2009
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Games that Create Value

by Sandra Ekong
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Online, multiplayer games open the door to a new form of group collaboration that can create value. Take, for example, the Google Image Labeler, originally the brainchild of MacArthur Grant-winner Luis von Ahn. The game pits two players against each other in an image-labeling challenge, as images are displayed on the screen in succession (for example a naval orange, or a pregnant MIA) players enter the name of the image, "naval orange", and every time both players enter the same word they are both awarded points. Players engage for the entertainment value innate to the game, yet little do they...

• February 22, 2009
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Playing the News Ready for Testing

by Kathleen Hansen
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

After a lot of fits and starts, we are ready to deploy two different versions of the "Playing the News" prototype games. One uses a simulated environment that allows the user to visit various locations to interview stakeholders on the topic of the use of ethanol as fuel. The user plays the role of a legislative research assistant helping a U.S. Senator prepare for hearings on the topic. The user can visit a variety of locations and talk to auto dealer sales reps, farmers, advocacy groups for and against corn ethanol, environmentalists and others. After the user visits the locations...

• February 21, 2009
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Balance the Budget: Gotham Gazette Game 3

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

After a series of false starts on an energy consumption game we decided to skip ahead to a timely game of balancing the budget . The game is actually a reprise of a popular budget balancing game we created in 2003 -- we're regularly asked for the source code for that game, and while we do have it, it is a bear of a maze of a mess that no self-respecting programmer would want to try to wade through in search of numbers and texts to change. For this game, we did use Flash, which made it significantly easier to...

• February 12, 2009
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Other fun stuff Beanstockd is up to..

by Angela Antony
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Each week, we look forward to keeping you apprised of changes, developments, and progress happening with the Beanstockd Game. But, this week, I wanted to amend our weekly report card with some of the fun stuff happening on the media side of Beanstockd! This month, we were able to send several of our writers to the Presidential Inauguration, and even got a special invitation to attend the Green Inaugural Ball in Washington, DC. Our writeup of the event can be found here: Beanstockd Goes to Washington: The Green Inaugural Ball After the inauguration, a few of our team members flew...

• January 28, 2009
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Bigger and Better Betas

by Angela Antony
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

2009 is already proving to be a big year for The Beanstockd Project. After a few rounds of successful internal beta tests and user feedback, the Beanstockd team is preparing for our first institution-level test of The Beanstockd Game at the United Nations International School in New York City. Due to the academic calendar and feedback from current users, we will be holding two, 2-week long game cycles at the school for the test. Those two cycles will be broken up by the students' Spring Break, during which we will survey players on how well they are able to keep...

• January 28, 2009
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Beanstockd Players Give Feedback on Beta Test

by Sandra Ekong
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Happy 2009! Here at Beanstockd we're kicking off the new year with a bigger and better Beanstockd Game. 2008 ended with a cliffhanger: We'd just wrapped up our first beta test and were preparing to survey players on their gaming experience.This week the results are in, and we've got answers to questions that will determine the updates we make for version 2. When we started developing the Beanstockd concept, one of the first questions we asked ourselves was: What will incentivize an individual to daily log and track his lifestyle habits? We considered several forms of incentive such as social...

• January 12, 2009
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Beanstockd Internal Beta Test

by Angela Antony
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last week, members of the Beanstockd Team participated in the inaugural Beanstockd internal beta test of the Beanstockd Game. Members of the Beanstockd Team spent one week taking environmental actions and getting credit for it through the Beanstockd interface in order to brainstorm ways to make it better, find any bugs, and compete for a team prize: organic sweets from Manhattan's finest green bakery. After a 5-day, head-to-head battle between Team Apley and Team Wigglesworth (we arbitrarily split into two teams), only one winner could remain. Congrats to Team Wigg! They will be handsomely rewarded at the Beanstockd Holiday party...

• December 15, 2008
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Beanstockd Application Internal Beta test

by Sandra Ekong
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

This week we're running a private beta test of the Beanstockd application internally; members of the Beanstockd editorial, business development and tech teams will be competing against each other as they take the game for a test drive.

• December 8, 2008
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Tough Economic Times Put New Spin on Beanstockd Game

by Sandra Ekong
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's official: the US economy is in recession. The reality of our current economic crisis has hit corporations hard and is now starting to affect the American consumer. Reports on this year's Black Friday show that the annual post-Thanksgiving shopper has a new attitude, one that is cautious about what and how much is bought. According to an article in the New York Times friday&st=cse, "this year there were more shoppers than shopping bags. Even many die-hard Black Friday shoppers -- the ones who camp out on sidewalks overnight to be first through the doors -- said they were cutting...

• November 30, 2008
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Happy Thanksgiving! Love, Beanstockd

by Angela Antony
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

As Thanksgiving approaches, we wanted to take this opportunity to reflect on the past few months and offer a few words of thanks. This past August, after winning the MTV-Knight Foundation Young Creators Award, appearing in Entrepreneur Magazine, and participating in the summer-long DreamIT Ventures incubator program, Beanstockd relocated to New York City. Since the move to the Big Apple, we brought on 5 new staff members including three interns, a PR Director and an SEO Website Marketing director. These are some of the most hard-working staffers we've ever had, and it's been great having so much fresh energy on...

• November 26, 2008
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Market Research for The Beanstockd Game

by Angela Antony
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

We're doing a bit of market research to understand how different communities perceive and can benefit from The Beanstockd Game. Because the competition is so community-centric, tailoring the nuances of the game (prizes, length of game cycle, competitors, etc.) to different types of communities is profoundly important. Since we are quite solid on the university demographic, we're asking for your feedback re: the business version of The Beanstockd Game. We wrote up a handful of multiple-choice questions to learn how The Game can benefit companies and individuals in the corporate realm. We're asking if you could help us out by...

• November 23, 2008
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Two Different Media/Game Approaches to Delivering Content

by Fabio Berzaghi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

There are a couple of new things happening in our research group. Just a quick reminder first: we had an outside contractor for our mini-games idea that we decided to part with, and then we were also working with Distill Interactive for a game-like environment. In the meantime we totally changed approach and discarded the mini-games with embedded bit of information, and we designed a card game that, in my opinion, seems quite interesting. We also just finalized our decision of assigning the development to a team within the University of Minnesota. We hope the proximity will make it easier...

• November 21, 2008
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Reporting for Games

by Gail Robinson
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Much of the discussion about online games focuses on the technical issues, and that's not surprising since the technical aspects make a game a game or a simulation and not a conventional story. But as Gotham Gazette continues its efforts to create interactive features to involve and educate New Yorkers on key policy issues, we have discovered that the reporting piece can be far more complicated than we originally imagined. Games, at least those that entail budget numbers, carbon emissions or other figures, require a level of precision most stories simply do not. This is not to say that reporters...

• November 17, 2008
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Beanstockd Is a We Media Game Changers Award Finalist

by Sandra Ekong
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

We are happy to announce that Beanstockd has been named one of 35 finalists for the We Media Game Changers Award, which recognizes people, projects, ideas and organizations leading change and inspiring a better world through media. We're honored to share the finalist list with major digital influencers such as Twitter, Digg, Huffington Post and of course the Knight Foundation. We Media defines Game Changers as individuals and projects which "inspire involvement and action through media" and we think that Beanstockd fits the bill. If you agree (or disagree!) we'd love to have your support and feedback; cast your vote...

• November 14, 2008
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Plans for Beanstockd Mobile

by Angela Antony
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Recently we've been getting a lot of emails from people seeking advice on applying for the Knight News Challenge. We're excited to see so many of our friends and fans of Beanstockd applying to the contest! Good luck, and for some advice writing the full proposal, be sure to check out this article by Amy Gahran. This week, I wanted to give some insight into our plans for a mobile application and how this feature fits into the game. The mobile app will actually be an integral aspect of the project from a conceptual standpoint. The overall goal of the...

• November 3, 2008
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Scaling the Beanstockd Game

by Sandra Ekong
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Beanstockd was initially tailored to a very specific population, and as we built out the game and shared the idea with fellow entrepreneurs we received some interesting ideas and feedback that led us to consider other verticals.

• October 20, 2008
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How a Community Map Improves the Beanstockd Game

by Angela Antony
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last week, we spoke at length with 42 Entertainment founder Elan Lee, who managed to break down in 10 minutes concepts that we had derived over the course of many months of debate. Over a year ago as we pieced together our game conceptually, much of our time was spent scrutinizing the specifics of the game: the interface, the rules, and the rewards. What we boiled down was a game where over the course of one month, players earned points for minimizing their environmental footprint in 3 ways. In addition to monitoring utilities usage (a back-end function), players received points...

• October 13, 2008
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Social Issue Games Get Older People Playing

by Sandra Ekong
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Yesterday during my bi-weekly "sarah palin" "snl" google search, I stumbled upon The Political Machine Express, a downloadable version of the popular PC game The Political Machine 2008 in which, "players take on the role of campaign manager for a US Presidential candidate." Having closely followed this year's presidential campaign melodrama, I was itching to play. The Political Machine leads the surge of educational, social issue games targeted toward anyone older than young adult. Its particular appeal lies in its focus on one of the most prominent, interesting and hot social issues now: the US presidential campaign. I (the target...

• October 8, 2008
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Beanstockd in 500 Words or Less

by Angela Antony
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

If you haven't already read our mid-summer update (found here) I'll give you the abridged version. My name is Angela Antony, and my cofounder's name is Sandra Ekong. We were roommates at Harvard. Like most things hip and cutting edge, Beanstockd was born in Paris. Sandra and I lived there for 6 months during our junior year in college; it was there that we discovered that we were an unstoppable duo, that snails are ocassionally edible (it's really a personal choice), and that our chic Parisian lifestyle revealed some fundamental problems with the way we lived our lives in America....

• September 30, 2008
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Card Game Prototype on Its Way

by Fabio Berzaghi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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...

• August 25, 2008
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New Idea: A Card Game

by Fabio Berzaghi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

We had a brainstorming session and an idea of a board game came up. Then a card game followed and it seemed interesting enough to be explored in detail because of the low cost prototype that we could make. The idea is that the player would gather cards by talking to the stakeholders that are involved in whatever issue the game is about. The end of the game would be a player vs computer card game. Every card can have 5 parameters, each parameter can affect positively or negatively or be neutral to a certain facet of the issue. Yet...

• August 6, 2008
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Changing Our Contractor

by Fabio Berzaghi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I have a few news about our project. We were working with the development team at Pine Tech, the Johnson Simulation Center. After almost one year into the project we decided to part ways with them. I think we need to work with someone on campus, in the house, to work closely with. We struggled to work with them since they had other projects to work on and could not put much effort into ours. But at least we got something out of it. A learning experience, bits of a design process and something that in my opinion is close...

• July 26, 2008
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Virtual Voting: Finding Our Audience Where They Roam

by Liz Nord
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Now that we are several months into the project, we thought we had conquered, or at least tackled, most forms of new media. Our Street Teamers’ work appears regularly on mobile video carriers, a mobile wap site, several websites, and on-air via MTV’s broadcast networks.

Then, a few weeks back, I was approached by an MTV colleague about a whole new area of distribution that, I have to admit, I had hardly considered before: THE VIRTUAL WORLD. I’m talking about something right outta web 3.0: a 3-D, interactive, virtual reality experience where one can have a “second life” via their avatar persona—a walking, talking, digital version of their better selves--online.

• July 18, 2008
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Games with Legs

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

I've gotten a small handful of emails commending me for my fine work on our latest game, the NYC Voting Arcade -- the only problem is that we launched that game in 2004, long before I got here. We did link to it in a story earlier this week about state campaign filings, though, and the voting arcade games are altogether timeless (unless you happen to know that Doug Kellner left the city Board of Elections in 2005). This has gotten me thinking again about games, gaminess and complexity. Most of our voting arcade games are downright silly. Most of...

• July 17, 2008
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How Can a Game Make You Go Green?

by Sandra Ekong
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

We believe that entertainment, immersion and competition, as embodied by games in general are powerful qualities that can be harnessed to drive an individual or group of individuals to change the way they perceive social issues, to change the way they live their own lives, and to change the world itself. To give you a sense of the power of gaming, Alternate Reality Gaming celeb (yeah those exist!) Prof Jane McGonigal writes "I'm trying to make sure that a game developer wins a Nobel Prize by the year 2032." We're clearly not alone in our thinking.

• July 16, 2008
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Report from the Knight conference at MIT: 2nd and 3rd day

by Fabio Berzaghi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

report from the knight conference at MIT June 11-13

• July 14, 2008
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The Next Newsroom in Second life

by Chris O’Brien
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In April 2006, I was sitting in a Durham, N.C., sports bar with Gary Kebbel, who runs the Knight Foundation's News Challenge grant program. Gary was officially letting me know I would be getting a grant for The Next Newsroom Project. Our plan was to research and design the ideal newsroom for The Chronicle, the independent student newspaper at Duke University, which was considering building a new facility on campus. I was so giddy that something he said at the time flew right by me: "As part of the grant, we'd like you to build a version of the...

• July 7, 2008
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When Will Video Games Become Easy to Create?

by Paul Grabowicz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

When will we have a software program that makes it as easy to create a video game as iMovie makes creating a video? That's a question I've been asking myself a lot, as we prepare to launch our Remembering 7th Street video game project, something we've been working on for nearly three years. We hope that our re-creation of Oakland's old blues and jazz club scene might inspire local media companies to produce their own virtual world replications of aspects of a community's heritage. But to create a video game like ours would require several game programmers and a budget...

• July 2, 2008
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We Need a PowerPoint to Make Games

by Fabio Berzaghi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

"Playing the News" Update - Distil Interactive I just returned from Ottawa where Nicole Rinerand I went to collaborate with Distil Interactive. We spent two days in their office and it was a positive learning experience. I should make a premise that Distil is trying to build a system that will allow non tech-savvy users, with little knowledge of coding, to create a game or game-like environment in a simple way and in a short time. The system is based off XML, flash and C. Right now the XML code is what controls what is being displayed on screen and...

• June 6, 2008
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Collaborating with Distill for Games

by Fabio Berzaghi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Finally I am able to post independetly, and after the semester is over I will have a chance to work more on the news project. As a matter of fact I already started working on it. I have an internship for the summer at the Johnson Simulation Center and I worked 3 days of this weeks on the news game. I mainly tried to understand the code, and try to implement some features in one of the mini-games, a breakout clone. The mini-game is still in an early stage, as well as the whole system actually. Other projects have been...

• May 24, 2008
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Into the Budget Dungeon

by Gail Robinson
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Today, Gotham Gazette unveils the second of its news games: The Budget Maze. With challenges and a dash of humor, the game presents an entertaining way to educate New Yorkers about one of the eternal mysteries of policy and politics in the city: How the budget is determined. To make the topic engaging, we created three mazes. Players must navigate these labyrinths in a castle dungeon to try to win funding for a favored program or a tax cut. Each chamber presents a new challenge: How do you get information, who should you meet with, who holds the power? We...

• May 19, 2008
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Insights into News Games through Eyetracking / Usability

by Nora Paul
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Eyetracking and usability studies of online news games reveal the issues of creating these kinds of approaches.

• May 5, 2008
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Open Source Flash Games

by Fabio Berzaghi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Here is another update from our research assistant on the "Playing the News" project. The team has been exploring "mini-games" that would provide a challenge as players move through the information from the news stories. Fabio has discovered some open source flash sites that might help. "As I mentioned in my earlier post, this week I started looking into open source flash games that could be adapted for our purpose. After some research on the web, I found this website http://www.flashadvisor.com/movie/index.php?viewCat=24 . It's called Flash Advisor and it's a collection of resources for Flash programmers and what not. I went...

• April 25, 2008
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Old and Young Playing a Video Game

by Paul Grabowicz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Can a virtual world bring together young and old people to explore a community's history in a shared video game experience? This is a question we're pondering in the wake of some user testing of our Remembering 7th Street video game. We previously showed a video version of our game world to people who remembered Oakland's 7th Street blues and jazz club scene from the 1940s and 1950s, and were surprised by their generally positive reaction to the virtual re-creation of what they had actually lived. Several also said they hoped the game would help young people in Oakland learn...

• April 20, 2008
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Testing News Game Concepts

by Kathleen Hansen
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Here is another report from our research assistant Fabio Berzaghi on the progress we are making on "Playing the News." Our struggle is to come up with embedded games that do not clash with the content of the topic or issue being addressed by the news organization. One of our "test" issues is a feature-type article on whether a potential pet owner should consider getting a cat or a dog. Here is a glimpse into what Fabio and Jesse Crafts-Finch were testing. Today I finally had a chance to work closely with Jesse, the producer/game designer at the Johnson Simulation...

• April 14, 2008
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The Long Shelf Life for News Games

by Gail Robinson
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

People who run news sites can be resistant to encouraging the developing games and other interactive feature. Perhaps it's that "game" sounds too playful, although given that most newspaper feature comics, crosswords and Sudoko, to say nothing of the latest celebrity photos and gossip, it's hard to see why. The interactivity may make some editors nervous as well as pairing a light approach -- a game -- with a serious issue such as the deaths in Darfur, hurricanes or legislative redistricting. The amount of staff time and resources -- technical experts, designers, writers, editors-- that go into a game can...

• April 8, 2008
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"Serious Game" Design 101

by Kathleen Hansen
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

As we continue to develop the "Playing the News" game, we wanted to share the inside workings of the process. Our partners at the Johnson Simulation Center submitted this report on their production process. An Overview of the JSC Production Process This is a short description of the Johnson Simulation Center's production process; that is, how we go about designing and then producing a game. There are two stages to this process, pre-production and production. Pre-production is a time during which everything about how the game will play and be built is written down on paper. We define the...

• April 7, 2008
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Mini-Games As Bait?

by Kathleen Hansen
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

As we work to create a news game that will engage readers, we are exploring what types of incentives we can use to meet the "gaming" expectations of hard-core players. We've decided to try embedding "mini-games" into the news game scenario. For example, a news game might create an environment where the reader is exploring the different aspects of the use of ethanol fuel. The player moves from one NPC to another to talk about the pros and cons. But before the player can talk to each of the NPCs, he or she will have to successfully complete a mini-game...

• March 24, 2008
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Creating a Game-Building Tool for Newsrooms

by Kathleen Hansen
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

For those of us working on creating "serious games," the experience we've had with the "Playing the News" project might be instructive. We are working with the Johnson Simulation Center at Pine Technical College in Pine City, MN to develop a tool that will allow journalists (read, non-techies) create engaging games built from news coverage of ongoing coverage in a community. After much to-ing and fro-ing, we think we've hit on a strategy for the type of utility that will work. But it has taken some "technical fortitude" to get to this point. The JSC folks are working on what...

• March 17, 2008
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Gaming, Seriously.

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I crossed paths with "serious gaming," in a serious way twice in one week. First at the Knight Digital Media Center's Editorial Writers seminar in Los Angeles last week. Later in the week, I attended a gaming session at the Computer Using Educator's conference in Palm Springs. Both of the gaming presentations were intriguing and relevant for my work. Much of locative media work I do is with HP proprietary's Mediascape software. It's been in beta for a couple of years, but finally HP landed in a partnership with the UK's Futurelab in Bristol to put a friendly face (and...

• March 14, 2008
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Is it a Game Without Moving Parts?

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

We're knee deep in our second game and I realized that I never came through with my promised recap of our last minute technical decisions on the Garbage Game. For one thing, as I mentioned, we jumped ship from OpenLaszlo in the interest of expedience. As I've noted here before, the game design field isn't exactly awash in programmers eager to work in anything but Flash. We found a local programming shop that was game for the challenge, though, and sat down with them to iron out our technical specifications. They'd never worked in OpenLaszlo before, but it looked like...

• March 3, 2008
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Databases as Entry Points to Investigative Stories

by Paul Grabowicz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

If you want to know what the future of investigative reporting might look like online, check out what the Las Vegas Sun has done with its special section on Flight Delays. It's an interactive map and database on plane delays at McCarran Airport. You can check a particular flight, look at patterns in delays to other airports and find out how long it takes to go through security checkpoints at different gates at different times of the day. And there's a video of interviews with people at the airport, along with time-lapse videos showing planes arriving at the airport and...

• February 18, 2008
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Wearing Your Media on Your Sleeve

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Some really interesting experimentation is being done with "wearable media" these days. Wearable media is simply clothing or other accessories that allow for the transmission or display of digital information. Some examples... Wearable Resistance a dress adorned with LED that can be programmed to depict images or text. Check out some of the other work being done by Dutch artist collective De Geuzen, "a foundation for multi-visual research". The Internet of Things: The University of Washington is conducting an experiment to understand the next step in social networking by connecting objects and people in a wireless, monitored network. Beginning in...

• February 17, 2008
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Place-Based Video Games Could Transform Education

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

After reading Paul Grabowicz's post Why Journalists Should Develop Video Games, I thought I'd chime in and riff off of that statement and ask: What is the value of video games in education, formal and informal, and in the delivery of information. Paul makes great point about who determines perspective. In my field of digital storytelling, we often talk about what I call "the fading glory of the third person editorial overlay." Just look at community-created content; it's a form whose hallmark is the lack of editorial overlay, which may or may not be appropriate, but often the lack of...

• February 11, 2008
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Why Journalists Should Develop Video Games

by Paul Grabowicz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

When I describe our Remembering 7th Street video game project to journalists, I often get a puzzled look. Why is a journalism school doing a video game? How does video game storytelling square with the craft of journalism or the mission of news organizations? Aren't video games about entertainment, not news? The pat answer to such questions is that kids are increasingly using game platforms to consume information, and news organizations need to embrace games if they're going to reach young people. For me personally, a video game also was a way to tell a more engaging story about the...

• February 6, 2008
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Lessons from the Garbage Game

by Gail Robinson
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

In the almost three months since Gotham Gazette launched the Garbage Game about New York City's refuse, we've learned interesting things - some about on-line games and some specific to this game and this topic. For a roundup of responses and reactions, presented on Gotham Gazette last month, click here. First, even people playing games on a relatively wonky site like ours want to have a game experience. That means they want to win or lose. Our game did not explicitly provide that, so people sought to provide it for themselves. Some wanted to compare their score - on money...

• February 5, 2008
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Ubiquitous Networks: The Trails Of Our Digital Identities

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

For a while now I've been describing the locative process as overlaying a virtual landscape on the physical world. I've been describing locative media as embedded content in place. Some people do ask, "in place of what?" In the end, it's all a way of saying Locative Media is the hybridization of the virtual world and the physical world relying upon location-enabled mobile devices (eg, 50% of cellphones) leading to the formation of ubiquitous networks full of cultural content. Sounds good. The only part of that statement that's a bit tricky is the "ubiquitous networks." Not being a particularly dedicated...

• January 15, 2008
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Progress on 'Playing the News'

by Kathleen Hansen
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Hi folks. Our top-flight research assistant, Fabio Berzaghi, has written a narrative of the work we've been doing on the "Playing the News" project. Our goal is to design a game creation tool that allows news professionals to author engaging games around ongoing news issues in a community. The intention of the tool is to allow journalists to create a game that takes no more than 20 - 30 minutes to play through. We've been through quite a number of iterations on game design and Fabio provides the background. "The very first idea for our project was to focus on...

• January 2, 2008
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Video Games: Moving Between Virtual and Real

by Paul Grabowicz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Should virtual world video games offer a parallel game experience in the real world? This is something we've discussed adding to our Remembering 7th Street video game project, possibly using GPS devices, such as GPS-enabled cellphones. Our game currently exists entirely inside a virtual world - a re-creation of the jazz and blues club scene on Oakland's 7th Street in the 1940s and 1950s. Game play is confined to that virtual world, with the player exploring the jazz and blues clubs and engaging in game-play quests to learn about the history of 7th Street and its music. Adding a GPS-component...

• December 28, 2007
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Finding Overlap Between Locative Media and Location-Based Games

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I should disclose upfront I'm not much of a "gamer." When I was younger, I found myself in a few endless games of Risk, never did understand the appeal of Monopoly, and always wanted to overlay a romantic narrative on Chess. (How did the Queen convince the knight to battle the Bishop to death?) But I did like sports. Not so much because of the gaming aspect, but because sports are generally played outdoors. Whole summers playing running bases, hide and seek, and any number of make believe games. Like locative media, location-based games take place outside. Due to this...

• December 5, 2007
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Common Lessons Learned about Video Games

by Paul Grabowicz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

At a video games seminar last month at MIT sponsored by the Knight Foundation, several of the MIT folks talked about lessons learned from games they developed that resonated with our Remembering 7th Street jazz and blues clubs project. One of the games MIT produced is Revolution, a video game recreation of historic events in colonial Williamsburg. You can read more about it on the blog of Henry Jenkins, director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program. There were a number of parallels with our game: - While the Revolution game is designed to be educational, the designers believe "much...

• December 2, 2007
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Old World Meet New World: Exploring History with New Media Tools

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Here's an interesting post about a mobile game called Amsterdam 1550 that was designed to teach local students about the old city of Amersterdam. "The game uses 3G cell phones and network to allow students to compete in finding answers to questions about the old city of Amsterdam, for history class excursion and assignment. Frequency 1550 explores the social potential of location-aware devices, inspired by the use of tracking technology and wireless media, human relationships, movement and identity; the project seeks to extend and re-appropriate the functions of locative technologies by exploring ways in which they can be socially constructive...

• November 18, 2007
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Making a Video Game Educational and Entertaining

by Paul Grabowicz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I mentioned in my last post how we're balancing the sometimes conflicting demands of education and entertainment in our Remembering 7th Street video game, especially deciding how much explanatory text should be included in the game. Here's a note from Becca MacLaren, one of the journalism students working on the game, about our discussions: One puzzle we're trying to solve in our Remembering 7th Street video game project is how to reach as broad an audience as possible - from people who lived in the neighborhood in the 1940s and '50s to teenagers who know very little about West Oakland's...

• November 17, 2007
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Announcing: The Garbage Game

by Gail Robinson
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

After many nervous moments and late nights, Gotham Gazette's The Garbage Game is on our site and ready for players. This is the first in a series of six games on key policy issues facing New York City that Gotham Gazette will be producing over the next two years. As we hope you'll see for yourself, this one focuses on managing the almost 7 billion pounds of residential trash that New Yorkers produce every year. The idea behind the games is to let New Yorkers not only read about policy dilemmas but play an active role in addressing them. And...

• November 14, 2007
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Text in Video Games: How Much is Too Much?

by Paul Grabowicz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

At a session on video games at the Online News Association conference last month, the panelists discussed how much text can be included in a game - a topic my students and I have been grappling with in our Remembering 7th Street video game project. A couple of the speakers on the Using Serious Games to Engage Readers panel cautioned against including long textual entries in games because they tend to turn off game players. "You can't provide reams of text, because they won't read it," said Duane Dunfield of Red Hot Learning, a video game company based in Canada...

• November 12, 2007
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Free and Open Source Games

by Gail Robinson
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Our Technical Director, Amanda Hickman, is not a formal Idea Lab blogger, so I'm posting this on her behalf. This won't be the last you hear from her on the Idea Lab. --Gail As the Gotham Gazette prepares to launch our first Knight-funded news game, I've been thinking a lot more about their requirement that we produce our games using free and open source software. It is only fair for me to start with a couple of observations about where I'm coming from: I think that software freedom matters, a lot. As a Circuit Rider at the LINC Project I...

• November 2, 2007
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Navigating World News With a Wii

by Dan Schultz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Most of you have probably heard of the Nintendo Wii, an increasingly popular video game system that features motion controls. Some of you may have even played it. Part of the reason I'm mentioning it here is because I'm a dedicated Nintendo fan, but the real motive is a very interesting (and free) feature that I haven't heard much talk about: the News Channel.

• October 30, 2007
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News Games

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Some interesting work being done interactive games for use by the news media. For example, ImpactGames (makers of Peacemaker), is working on expanding its business strategy to encompass a model of interactive participation in current events. ImpactGames is in talks with some of the major news sources about creating portals that would allow viewers to "Play the News". Hear more about this latest work and how it relates to current events and the concept of interactive news...

• October 27, 2007
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Educate: Journalism and Teaching Technologies

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Many who spoke at the Online News Association conference in Toronto defined education (of the public) as an important part of journalists' work. Most of us clearly do not feel the need to fulfill Toronto-raised Mary Harris "Mother" Jones' injunction to educate, agitate, organize (and not doing so is a disservice news organizations do to themselves and to society, I will argue later), but what would taking seriously the responsibility to educate, by itself, mean for news? The related content to which this connects is an online video recommended at the conference by Jeff Young (of the Chronicle for Higher...

• October 23, 2007
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Lost Connection Opportunities...

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Once again, another conference that didn't fully leverage technology tools to help people connect, make new friends, and collaborate instantly and on the fly....I am speaking of this week's Online News Asscociation Conference in Toronto. Here's how it might have been different: • Conference attendees provide some basic profile information and tag key interests using one of many web based tools like Confabb.com or intronetworks.com. • Rather than having to go around the room and make introductions or describe projects, those introductions/project descriptions could have been available on the Web or on your mobile device as a session was in...

• October 19, 2007
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Playing the News...The Challenge of Gaming Reality

by Nora Paul
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Our Knight project is to create a toolset that would make the creation of a news simulation environment / game space easy for a somewhat motivated newsroom. The goal is to see if it would work to use a highly graphical and interactive environment as a way of presenting those "important but (too often) boring" issues in a community. Would this kind of presentation of the often complex and conflicting facets of an issue lead to greater citizen engagement, understanding, and action taking? We had some experience with creating a game, a mod of Neverwinter Nights that we used for...

• October 16, 2007
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Playing the News Project Moving Forward

by Kathleen Hansen
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

We haven't posted much until now because we've been busy getting the "beta" version of our game engine off the drawing board. We now have an initial build that Nora will demo at the ONA conference in a few days. After some serious brainstorming sessions with game designers, news professionals and people who actually play games, we have a good idea about the type of game environment we will be prototyping. We have some questions and comments for the others in the group who are also working on games and news applications and I'm sure we will have much more...

• October 15, 2007
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A New Way to Tell a Story

by Gail Robinson
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

One reason Gotham Gazette has long been intrigued by the idea of so-called serious games is that they offer another way to tell a story. And the more methods one uses to tell a story, the more people will read (or hear, or watch, or play) that story. As a site on NYC policy and politics, it's been our mission from the beginning to try to attract people beyond the base of Wonks and City Hall habitues (no offense intended; they are, after all, a loyal and helpful audience). To do that, we try to tell present complicated issues in...

• October 15, 2007
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Ideas for an Online Game

by Gail Robinson
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

The staff of Gotham Gazette is counting down to the day later this fall when our first online game goes up on our site. It's been an interesting process getting us this far. First, of course, we needed a concept. In some respects, this was the easy part as brainstorming sessions over the summer produced literally dozens of ideas. We'd like to do them all -- and we will do some of them in the next two years -- but we decided to do the first one on garbage. What to do with tons and tons of garbage has long...

• October 15, 2007
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The Second Life Option

by Paul Grabowicz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

A lot of people have asked me why we didn't use Second Life to create our Remembering 7th Street virtual world and video game (if you aren't familiar with Second Life, Mark Glaser, who helped set up this weblog for the Knight Challenge Grant winners, did a recent story for MediaShift on Second Life and other online virtual worlds). When we started our project about two years ago, we took a long look at Second Life and discussed hosting our project there with some of their executives. Second Life offered a number of advantages, such as a relatively easy tool...

• October 15, 2007
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Old Timers React to the 7th Street Video Game

by Paul Grabowicz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

A big concern we had when we started our Remembering 7th Street video game project was how older people who lived and worked on Oakland's 7th Street in the 1940s and 1950s and frequented the jazz and blues clubs there would react to our virtual world rendition of it. Would it look like what they remembered? Or would it seem an alien world to them? Worse, would the game just trivialize a precious memory? On Oct. 8 we got a chance to test this when my journalism students and I went to the West Oakland Senior Center to interview people...

• October 13, 2007
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History and Heritage Through Video Games

by Paul Grabowicz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Can new technologies be used to tell old stories about a local community? That's the question we're trying to answer with our "Remembering 7th Street" project that uses a video game to tell the story of Oakland, California's old jazz and blues club scene. During the 1940s and 1950s, Oakland's 7th Street was a vibrant community and a mecca for jazz and blues musicians from all over the country. But in the late 1950s and 1960s the area fell victim to a series of ill-fated redevelopment schemes, and barely a trace of the jazz and blues clubs remains today. We're...

• October 13, 2007
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