We have prepared two surveys that will be delivered before and after the test. The test itself will consist of either reading a web page or playing the game. We have three variations of the web page. One is a list of articles organized by area, one is a chronological order of facts and one is a story. We tried to simulate a couple of approaches that readers find while navigating online news pages. And we added the organized page to simulate the organization that the game presents. So we could have something closer to the game, to make a more fair comparison.

Each subject will access only one of the four options. And we will distribute the users equally among the pages and game.

Another important change that we made to the game was to change the setting. Originally the player covered the role of a reporter working for an news agency. After some thinking and a discussing with professor Ian Bogost, we decided to change the story. Now the player covers the role of a legislator. The reason for this change was mainly due to the fact it seemed more interesting putting the reader in the shoes of a legislator. Since legislators have to take into account all the parties that will be affected by new laws. (or at least that's the way it is supposed to be...)

So hopefully next time I will be able to write about some of the first results will we gather in the next month or so.

Stay tuned.

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 for us to work closely and follow the progress of the project. The card game itself will have a board in which the cards are grouped by stakeholder in a particular issue, ethanol will be our first topic. The player is dealt a stack of cards with questions and will need to navigate through the board in order to find the matching answer card. We will also try to incentivate the player to answer all question because each question will provide a puzzle piece to be used after the game is over to compose an image.

On the other hand we have started the first round of test on the Distill game. This first round is focused on the user interface functionality, ease of use. Mainly it is a usability test to help us with the final tweaking of the game before we throw to the crowed to test if it's a good way to present a complex issue.

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**** Actually, the game is on-line, and if any feedback would be appreciated. here is the link** http://www.inms.umn.edu/games/ you can post any comments on my blog here or just send me an email at berz0012 [at] umn [dot] edu

I think it is great that we are taking two totally different approaches to the problem, and working with two different developing teams that are using different technologies and technical designs.

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.

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 to be determined is how the card game will be structured and played-out.

Also, it seems feasible to build an interface that could make it easy for the newsroom to enter values for each card and the questions associated to it.

Another option would be to explore the possibility of creating a large pool of cards, and forcing the player to pick a limited number of cards that can be played in the final battle.
We thought that limiting the number of cards might add to the re-playability of the game and make the end game a little different. There could be two approaches to the collecting the cards aspect: one would be to able the player to collect all the cards through asking all the questions. The other would be to limit the number of questions that can be asked to a character. The latest would definitely improve re-playability but it can limit the access to information.

The next step for me is to research two players card games in which the cards have different parameters. I also need to find how to make this card game intriguing with a minimum level of complexity. The mechanics shouldn't be too complicated because of the nature of our game targeted to the occasional video-game players or non-players at all.

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 to being a testing prototype.

The approach we had with them was to embed key information into mini-games and have the player go through different locations where a brief overview of the stakeholder point of view on the issue was presented. Then the mini-game would have tried to add a game/entertaining/fun component to the whole experience.

Right now we have two mini-games that are working. With a map and different accessible locations and and introductory part. I think at this point we should try to save as much as possible of what was done and with a little more work we can make this testable.
In order to do that we are trying to open a collaboration with a development group within the University of Minnesota. Next week we will meet them and discuss the technical details.

On the other end we keep working with Distill and we had made a few changes to the first version. Right now we are debating on the linearity of the story and whether to use an oracle or something like help points, in a form of payphones perhaps, to help the player in case he/she needs some directions.

Second day of the conference. We start in the morning with a couple of sessions of MIT research projects. There is definitely a good variety and each session is followed by a digging deeper section in which it is possible to talk individually to every single speaker to ask more questions about his or her project. All the projects presented are part of what was presented the previous night in the different booths. After lunch there are 3 breakout sessions. Two sessions are very appealing but they take place at the same time: one is about game design and tools to build a game and another one is about playing a game with a portable device with GPS system, an augmented reality game. During lunch I have a chance to talk to the co-director of the Civic Center for Future Media and I ask him to explain a little bit more the concept of Star Trek representing modern society. I also seek advice from him on which of the two breakout sessions to go to. He suggested to attend the augmented reality game session. So here I go to the session and I notice that only 5 people, including me, show up. It actually seems that a lot of people ditched the breakout sessions, which in my opinion were one of the best part of the conference. I liked the session because they were hands-on and not just listening and asking questions. Anyway. The augmented reality game was played in groups. Every group had a pocket PC with GPS navigation system. The device had a map of the MIT campus and a few points that had 6 interactive points. Once the players were in proximity of a point, a dialogue would pop-up. The scope of the game was to educate people about the possible consequences of global warming in Cambridge and the impact on the surroundings if certain decisions were taken to prevent global warming. It was interesting to play the game and then see what kind of tools could be used to create one adventure. The tools seemed pretty easy but the overall structure of the game could not be changed. I still thought it was an interesting way to have an augmented reality interactive multi-group game play.

The third day had two more sessions of MIT projects showcase which showed again some very interesting ideas. Especially the session on decentralized news was the most interesting for me. Cell phones and portable devices spreading news and information about the local community without the need of a centralized station. What followed that morning was finally what I was waiting for, getting together with the other games creators. I had a chance to meet the Gotham Gazzette group and Paul from the Oakland Jazzfest. Unfortunately only one external person was present at our session, and I wish that more people came about so we could have some external opinions. But it was still good to learn about the struggle and ideas of the two other groups. Many problems turned out to be the same: how to deal with real people being part of a game, using outside contractors, making a game challenging, avoiding too much text, limiting mouse clicks. It was also interesting to hear the motivation behind some game design and technical decisions. Overall this only discussion was worth a big chunk of the trip.

Overall it was great to be there, I thank the Knight Foundation for giving me a chance to network and participate, and the Center for Future Medias to host the event. They did a great job on the organizational side.

Yesterday after registering I assisted to the welcome speech by Alberto Ibarguen. He believes that what Knight is doing is the next big thing happening. A mix of technology, local communities. A new way to educate and inform people and make news accessible to everybody and reported by common people and not necessarily only journalists. Following Alberto's speech the Co-Director of the Center for Future Civic Media talked about how young people are getting more involved with politics and how star-trek really represents our society. Obama resembles Spock, and there are a lot different races that in star-trek that represent our current multi-ethnic society. Doesn't make sense to you? Well, that's what he really said. A parallel between star-trek and modern society. After dinner a couple of dozen stands where set-up to show demos and after going through all of the stands I stop by 3-4 that I thought were interesting and/or related to our project. One stand was dedicated to a project on interactive narrative, which was tested at an elementary school. The kids created interactive stories with a simple plug-n-play open source software called ######.

Another project was a sort of game on a portable device connected to a GPS. The user would talk to characters and pick-up objects whenever it would get close to it moving in the real world. There are many different projects related to different topics: radio, products, connecting people in rural areas, an audio blog for kids, comics, women and technology. For now it was quite overwhelming but after a bit I talked to a few people and had a chance to talk to Alberto, the CEO of Knight and I really enjoyed the conversation.

More later.

Fabio

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 what C written functions are used to generate certain responses. They are also creating shells of code that perform certain functions that are fetched via XML, in order to hide part of the code.
The morning of the first day Kenton White, one of the founders of the company, walked us through the XML code and how their system works. It was quite overwhelming and I started noticing that the XML code was partly automatically generated and it contained no comments. Most of the references and the names of the variables were semi-arbitrary names that the development team used, which might have been intuitive for them but not for external people looking at the code. So I already knew it would have been hard to tweak the code. Anybody who has done some programming knows that working on someone else's code is like trying to read someone's sloppy handwriting. Also the four games that Distil has available right now have been created from scratch and by coding and not with any high-end tool. This means that they were tailored for a specific issue and have a specific game structure. The game we worked on was a game that is meant to train employees or managers about safety issues in a boat factory. It only had one location and a good amount of characters. The structure was set up in a fashion so that the player would only be able to choose one option for every character, and then the character would become inactive. This is because the player had to make a decision and then the decision was final. On our side we had a different structure. Our theme was all of the issues surrounding the use of ethanol as a fuel and the player was a reporter investigating the various facets of the issue. The dialogues were back and forth between reporter and interviewee with multiple questions to be asked of every single character and in different locations. I have to admit that having some experience coding in other languages, but not much in XML, helped me and made it possible for me to change a few things. Definitely though, it was not an everyday person user-friendly task. I was able to add/remove characters, modify the questions asked and the answered, create different locations, make the active characters glow or not glow if inactive, and move the screen directly to a new location after all characters were interviewed. One thing we had to compromise was that the reporter could only ask one question, which limited the gaming experience. Also changing such structural element was not easy nor a quick task. In fact I tried to directly ask the person who worked on the code and he said that he had never done it before and it would have taken some time to change the code. Another thing that we had to compromise was that to display different locations we had to create one big flash background and not separate ones like I originally wanted to do. Right now all locations are on the same map, which was not what I wanted. The people at Distil also said that setting different locations in separate scenarios was feasible but they couldn't do it on the spot and it would have required some time. Nicole on the other side had access to a great library of art assets and did a great job at creating four locations.
Some of their games don't really have any game elements at all, aside from the game-like feeling they provide. But the latest they have produced are closer to being defined as games, since they present some challenges for the players.
My conclusion is that Distil has a great idea and has created a good structure to begin with. On the other hand, right now their higher end tools are still in an early stage and building games requires a good knowledge of the internal dynamics of how the system works. For example the programmer who helped me couldn't apply certain changes on the fly and had gone through a month of training to get acquainted to how the system works. So they are clashing with the same problem that our research group has been clashing with: the trade off between making a general set of tools and the amount of code/work behind it. I think the experience and what I saw at Distil just reinforced my thesis that I have been building during this past year: the more general the game creation tool aspires to be the more complexity will be needed "under the hood". I believe though that with time, competent people and funds it is possible to create some sort of PowerPoint that will allow someone to make a game in 10 minutes. I actually had an interesting conversation with Kenton about the ubiquitousness of tools. For example when PowerPoint did not exist, there were people in charge of creating presentations; now even the busy manager can do it in 10 minutes. Obviously the average quality of the presentations has gone down but at least it is a tool accessible to a lot of people. And of course the tool doesn't prevent someone from creating better presentations than others. The same has happened with music in the last 10 years. Now it is possible to create high-definition music at home, and recording studios are blossoming everywhere. The average quality of music has gone down, in my opinion, but the tools to record it are more accessible. People like Kenton and Nora Paul are trying to make it accessible to everybody to create a game. I am confident that sooner or later it will happen. Sure, the average game quality might go down, but people with good design ideas could be able to put them in practice without being a game designer for a game developer.

Stay tuned.

Fabio Berzaghi

On the other hand we are gonna start an interesting collaboration with Distill. I look forward to meet with them next Tuesday in Ottawa. I have been playing their games so I can be ready for the training. So my next post will be about my experience at Distill. They have a few games that try to education employees about safety and quality at work. We might try to plug-in our data and see how it goes. It will be interesting.

stay tuned.

Fabio Berzaghi

"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 through and played almost every single game, since the descriptions of the game aren't really that explicative.

I found out that most games did not suit our needs. But there were a few concepts that could be used. One is a memory game, which we already talked about with the Johnson Simulation Center, but this one is ready to go, it's pretty simple so I am not even sure if the developers would like to edit this one or just create one from scratch. Here's the link http://www.flashadvisor.com/movie/display/141.html . I also bumped into a website with a couple of quiz/find-the-words games that could be used, since we mentioned using a crossword type of game. Here the links http://edufun.bravehost.com/housegame1.html http://edufun.bravehost.com/wordsearch.html .

I thought that the adventure with the quiz was somewhat interesting, because you could see yourself proceeding in the game towards an objective. The last one I'd like to mention is a logic game, http://www.flashadvisor.com/movie/display/250.html, I really liked the concept but I didn't understand why the squares don't disappear. I think I would use it and put the information behind the squares, so the players slowly unveil the information. That is another concept we are trying to exploit. Or maybe the squares could contain part of sentences and the players need to construct a complete sentence.

Stay Tuned.