Idea Lab

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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Newspapers Struggling Online, Not Just in Print

by Paul Grabowicz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

As disturbing as the recent numbers on declining print circulation and plunging advertising revenue at newspapers have been, less attention has been paid to ominous signs of a slow-down on the online side as well: - Most newspaper chains reported online revenue growth in single or low double digits this quarter, compared with growth rates of 15-20% or more a year ago. - The amount of time the average visitor spent at most newspaper web sites declined in February compared with a year ago, according to an Editor & Publisher report on Nielsen Online data. E&P reported similar data for...

• May 4, 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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What Journalism Needs: A Product People Want

by Paul Grabowicz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

When journalists were asked in a recent survey to identify the most important aspect of their work, 91% said "make my publication successful by creating appealing content for its audiences." What a turn-around from the not too distant past when such sentiments would have been denounced in many newsrooms as pandering to the public and giving people what they want, not what they need. This shift in perspective was predictable in the face of hemorrhaging print circulation and broadcast viewership and the recent precipitous decline in ad revenue, at least for newspapers. But I think it also should inform some...

• March 30, 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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