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 are sloppy. But in doing a story involving numbers, we can explain differences in a narrative. Who among us who has covered demographic data has not resorted to such phrases as "statistics are available only for the entire metropolitan area," or "numbers are not available for individual community school districts."

When only a statewide figure on recidivism rates, say, exists, we use it, noting perhaps that New York City accounts for such and such a percentage of New York State prisoners. As an example a recent prominent graphic in the New York Times on voting patterns among different groups since 1980 noted that figures for Asian Americans only dated back the 1992 and left a blank space.

Many types of games simply will not allow for that. If a game asks players to balance the budget, the revenues and expenditures they can add and subtract must all be for the same jurisdiction over the same period of time. If one number is for the county and the other for a city, the game becomes confusing and even meaningless.

Right now, we are looking to create a game on electricity use. Ample data exists but the difficulty comes in comparing it. The city projects its use looking at 2030 as an end date; the state uses 2015. The city only considers the five boroughs; the state looks at the entire state and the local electric utility, Con Ed, includes New York City and some suburban counties. Some data is pegged to peak use, others to total yearly consumption. And so on.

Other than hiring a professional numbers cruncher (a suggestion we've actually received), any other ideas? How have other games dealt with this? And a word of advice to those creating games: Don't forget the reporting.

State political reporters salivated -- until they heard how DA David Soares was issuing the material. Instead of putting it on-line, the county clerk released a CD and charged $90 for it. "I'm just starting to go through it, and it's an absolute mess," complained the LoHud.com blog. "Every page is its own PDF file and not even scrollable or searchable."

Soares went somewhat further than most officials but his release that is not a release is all too common. Public officials boast of putting material on-line and then do so in ways that stymie average citizens and even Web journalists trying to review data that should be a matter of public record. Even when material is available, it is, like the Albany documents, often difficult to search and manipulate in a way that provides any kind of meaningful information.

Those of us trying to find information about New York City government encounter this again and again -- despite Mayor Michael Bloomberg's not so deserved reputation for transparency. In a recent article for Gotham Gazette, Kristofer Ri­os and Joshua Breitbart describe how difficult it can be to get information about city government -- despite a path-breaking city law requiring that city documents be posted to the official Web site promptly. "With no method for enforcement, compliance has been spotty," the authors write. Most information that is available, they say, is in the form of a PDF, "which takes information and turns it into a two-dimensional document that cannot be manipulated or transformed into other kinds of data."

And those PDFs can be difficult to find. Last fall, to much fanfare, the city Department of Education graded every school in the city. It boasted all the results would be on-line -- and they are. But finding them requires a familiarity with educational jargon, tireless fingers and a second sense about the workings of the minds of Bloomberg's educrats. Comparing schools, which is what many parents seeking a school for their kid want to do, requires repeated downloads.

And, as EveryBlock has found, some information is not available at all. The service wants to provide New Yorkers with detailed timely and local information about crime in their neighborhoods. Ri­os and Breitbart report, "In Chicago ..., residents wanting to know what crimes have occurred in their area simply type in their address or neighborhood and receive a list of reported offenses. Clicking on the crime brings more information, including a locator map. This comes directly from the police department's records. By contrast, all the New York EveryBlock site offers is a weekly compendium of crimes by precinct, with no details on the reports and no indication of where in the precinct the alleged offense occurred."

This is not for lack of trying on EveryBlock's part. But rather, Ri­os and Breitbart say, the NYPD's weekly Comp Stat report does little more than break citywide data into seven broad categories and is only available to the public as a PDF: "The department provides the information by precinct, but city residents cannot search for crime statistics by their ZIP code, neighborhood or even borough." As a final touch, the link for "Department Statistics" on the police department site has been down for weeks.

Knowledge is power and politicians or adept ones anyway (and Bloomberg is nothing if not adept) are unlikely to provide unvarnished meaningful information voluntarily. Should civic media, particularly on-line media, play a role in trying to force government's hand? And, if so, how can that be accomplished?

In some instances, the denial seems like out and out political retribution. Leonard Levitt, a former Newsday reporter who now writes the blog NYPD Confidential, lost his pass. Levitt has been a persistent police critic, dating back to his days in print. But once he moved on line, the city had an excuse to pull his credentials.

The New York Civil Liberties Union has filed suit on Levitt's behalf against the NYPD, demanding it reveal the criteria for press passes. Interestingly, the department's own instruction page for getting credentials makes no distinction between on-line and other reporters saying that credentials are for "are for those individuals who are full-time, news staff employees."

The police also revoked press credential for Rafael Martínez Alequin, a bit of a gadfly whose questions apparently irritated Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Martínez Alequin had had a small print publication but switched to on-line only with a blog called Your Free Press. In denying the permit, the department reportedly said Martinez Alequin had failed to prove that he was "a full-time employee of a news gathering organization covering spot or breaking news events on a regular basis."

As for Gotham Gazette, the denial of credentials is ironic. Until a few years ago, we published a small hard-copy newsletter that went out to maybe a couple of thousand New Yorkers and was handed out free at city libraries. Our reporters had press passes. Starting in 1999, we began moving operations on-line, picking up thousands more readers in the process -- but putting our press credentials in jeopardy. We are now exclusively on-line.

As long as hardly anyone read us, we were real reporters in the eyes of the police bureaucracy; now that tens of thousands of people do, we're not. And to use the department's own words, Gotham Gazette is a "news gathering organization"; Courtney does cover "spot or breaking news on a regular basis."

In Courtney's case, the department has resorted to evasive tactics. There is a right to appeal but the department's Office of Public Information has delayed setting a date for one. Calls go unanswered.

The department's action raise a number of issues. Why does an agency headed by a mayoral appointee and replete with politics get to decide who can cover that mayor and the city government? And as the barriers separating journalists from everyone else fall, what defines a journalist? Everyone seems to have a blog. Should the NYPD give all of them press credentials. Is that realistic in light of security concerns? Probably not. So then, back to square one: Who gets to decide who is and who is not a journalist and what criteria should they use?

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 envision this game being used in schools, by community groups and by curious citizens. And as befits a news game, it's timely. The mayor and City Council here are in the midst of budget negotiations now with an eye toward finishing a balanced budget by the end of June. And the U.S. attorney is investigating how the City Council has spent some of its earmarks -- known as member items here. To provide more verisimilitude, players in our game face going to jail too.

Play it and let us know what you think.

So it was distressing when our technical director, Amanda Hickman, using Technorati, found many sites using our material. These were not links -- we are delighted when people link to Gotham Gazette stories. Instead these sites simply took the full text of our article and put it on their site in some cases, with little or no attribution or credit, even to the extent of making it look like their own original material. Needless to say, none of them had requested information or permission (in most cases, we do allow other publications, particularly non-profit or educational ones, to reprint our stories with proper credit).

In the past, other sites have not only reprinted our material but deliberately distorted it. In a particularly egregious case, a neo-Nazi site reprinted an article we had written about a group of Israeli furniture movers who had been detained immediately after the 9/11 attacks on suspicion of having been involved because they were Middle Eastern in a appearance and had a truck. Our story was about the legal labyrinth these men found themselves in; the neo-Nazis reprinted parts of it in an effort to argue that Jews were responsible for 9/11.

This was obviously an extreme case. But my sense (though I'll bow to he experts at the Citizen Media Law Project on this) is that all of this unauthorized reprinting is not legal. Practically, though, what can Web sites do to protect their content? And should we even bother or is this the price we pay for having so much access to so much information all the time?

The amount of staff time and resources -- technical experts, designers, writers, editors-- that go into a game can prove daunting, particularly in an era when all news organizations are looking to cut corners.

These issues were discussed at a meeting earlier this year of the Committee of Concerned Journalists earlier this year. Much of the discussion revolved around how to convince newsrooms and news site managers to invest in games.

One clear argument: Games, if done properly, can have a long shelf life. At the session, Don Wittekind, now at the University of North Carolina, discussed a game he helped create while at the Sun-Sentinel about how hurricanes form. The science has not changed -- so the game holds up. And years after it was launched, people still get a sense of the tension and tedium of working airport security from MSNBC's baggage screening game. (For a description, link here, though the link to MSNBC seems to be down).

Even seemingly ephemeral issues can acquire legs -- if the presentation is inventive enough. Gotham Gazette's Plan Your Future Park game appeared about four years ago. It remains on our site, as an interactive exercise in what kinds of tradeoffs go into parks (dog runs vs. kid runs, say). This year the city of San Jose linked to it on their site. In the last five months, about 6,700 people have played this four-year-old game, adding up to more hits than most of our new features.

Obviously some worthwhile games -- ones involving elections, say -- don't have this kind of longevity. But many others focusing on government process (the topic of Gotham Gazette's next game), science, history and eternal human truths (some people go to parks for peace; others to play ball) can keep attracting interest and readers for years to come.

One way to get around that is to give people the same or less and make it look like more. Is that the idea behind the New York Times redesign revealed this week?

For those of you who haven't seen it, the Times seems to have exported a Web idea -- summaries of lots of stories divided by section -- to its print edition. Pages 2 and 3 of the paper are now, aside from ads, entirely devoted to "Inside the Times" describing key articles in the rest of the paper. Page 4 offers the Times' self important (and sometimes inadvertently hilarious) correction section along with a guide to some features available only on the paper's Website.

The concept seems a little puzzling. Sure these summaries work on the Web site when you can just click on the story you want to read. In print, you have to shuffle pages and sometimes even go to different sections to get the stories you read. And while summaries on newspaper Web sites tend to be short -- I've heard 25 words cited as an upper limit -- many of these hover around 50.

It seems like a waste of valuable (and expensive, given paper and printing costs) real estate. I, for one, would rather see stories on those pages, although articles, of course, have to be written an edited by people who tend to like being paid. And it seems irritating to have to go through some many pages before getting to anything "real." In fact, because of ads, the first inside story in Thursday's Times did not appear until Page 6. And as an added fillip, that story jumped (to page 15).

But maybe I'm missing something. Is something else going on here? Will we be seeing more such "Web-like" features in print media? And is this likely to accomplish its goal which, one must assume, is to keep people buying their copies of the Times or, if that's a losing battle, to bring more people to the Web site, where they can click on those stories rather than wonder where the heck they put the Sports section.

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 spent, landfill space filled and energy consumed - to what the city does now. For a variety of reasons, many having to do with how the NYC government breaks out information, that would have been hard to provide.

Others decided the key to winning the game was keeping garbage out of the landfill. Interestingly we never really said this, but in this time of heightened environmental consciousness, people saw less garbage - and not, say, money saved - as analogous to victory. Some lamented how hard it was to "win"-- no matter how hard you try not to, you still end up throwing things away.

As part of the game experience, people like to keep score. Last minute snafus kept us from providing a running scorecard - of tons in the landfill, money spent, etc. It's something to keep in mind and fix for future games.

Our game involved people selecting from one of several choices both in sorting garbage in their own homes and then moving on to the policy level to determine what the city as a whole should do with its billions of tons of solid waste. And so some people did not like the choices, a situation that would probably occur in any game.

One critic, dismissing composting of food waste (an option we did offer) chided us for not letting players opt to put their waste in a garbage grinder (a.k.a garbage disposal). We did not include that partly because this raises the thorny but tangential issue of managing the city's sewer system. And the disposals have never gained much popularity here. Still, it's a valid point.

Then there were players who objected to our choices (cloth vs. disposable) for dealing with diapers. Why, some wondered, did we not include the simple option of not having children. "The most environmentally conscious thing I can do is not procreate," wrote one player.

Perhaps but that is a matter for another game.

As to whether games such as ours are a useful tool, the responses indicate a clear yes. Many people wrote in blogs and elsewhere saying the Garbage Game had increased their understanding of the magnitude of solid waste confronting New York City and how difficult it is to do anything about it. "It seemed like no matter what choices you made, you're still shipping tons of garbage around, but that's real life, I guess," wrote Fancy Green Pants.

And the New York City sanitation department clearly felt our game helped New Yorkers feel their pain: They featured the game and linked to it on their site.

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 we hope the game format brings people, who might otherwise not read about an issue, into the discussion. In the weeks to come, we'll be reporting on the results of the game and on reactions to it. And we plan to relay the policy prescriptions to people at City Hall.

Much of the discussion here has focused on the use of open source software -- and not Flash -- for the game. We used OpenLazlo and would be interested in your reactions to that. One big concern is what -- if anything -- the game loses by not being in Flash.

But the software was just one part of the puzzle. Putting together this type of game involves hundreds, if not thousands, of decisions. It demands the kind of reporting that goes into a feature story -- but that's only the beginning. In this game, for example, we had to determine what types of garbage to include, which policy options should be offered, how to strike the balance between provding information and not cluttering the screen.how to make the game fun and substantive. And so on.

After the staff at Gotham Gazette has a bit more time to reflect, we'll probably blog more about some issues involved here. But in the meantime, please offer your comments, questions and suggestions.

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 watched a lot of organizations being priced out of upgrades to software they'd suffered through beta versions of. I watched small grassroots organizations struggle to find a functional membership database that fit their budget, while large counterparts were reaching for extremely expensive off-the-shelf packages that still didn't really meet their needs. I got involved with the Nonprofit Open Source Initiative because I was (and am) fundamentally interested in helping organizations work in a way that doesn't just lock out groups that don't have the financial resources to keep up with software advances, and that does allow them to truly own the tools that they are building their work around.

So I was impressed when I heard that Knight was asking grantees to develop games on free and open platforms. I think it shows a lot of foresight. I've heard a lot of folks grumbling about how Flash is the industry standard (it is), and about how much easier it is to just pick up a box, install Flash and get started. That if you aren't an expert on free and open source software and programming this is just one more hurdle that will discourage people from getting started down the path towards making their reporting more engaging. I don't buy it.

We had a hell of a time finding a programmer who could build what we needed without Flash. It is the industry standard and most everyone I talked to who has experience building the kind of games we're working on uses Flash and wasn't interested in changing that when Flash works just fine. I think we would have had a harder time coming up with other options if I wasn't already connected to a number of online communities specifically committed to helping nonprofits use free and open source software (NOSI and May First People Link among them) where I could count on getting thoughtful answers to my questions.

The developers we settled on, a local interactive shop called Isotope, are primarily a Flash shop. They're readers of Gotham Gazette, genuinely interested in our work and excited enough about working with us that they were willing to try something new and build the game in a software platform they've never used before, but it took us a lot of legwork to find them. That might sound like a plea for Flash, but the truth is, I believe that our work will pay off in the long run. For one thing, the guys at Isotope (who are working in OpenLaszlo) have added to their repertoire and now there's one more OpenLaszlo developer out there. For another thing, we're planning to release the source code for our game, so next time someone wants to write a garbage game about their own town they've got a place to start from, and they can see how we approached the problem in LZX. That is about how most people learn Flash: they look at code snippets that people have published and try to build from them. So by using OpenLaszlo, we're contributing to a community of OpenLaszlo users and making it a little bit easier for other people to pick up the language.

Which brings me to another thing we've been hearing over and over: the day of the local newsroom is passed. Media consolidation means that your daily paper isn't your local paper and national news chains can't be bothered to with local coverage. It will be up to local web sites to pick up the slack in local coverage.

One thing about proprietary software in general is that it is a lot easier for a big budget news corporation to absorb the cost of software licensing than it is for a much smaller organization that can't pull in national advertising bucks. Building community around software that is free and open source means that we're helping keep interactive news content a viable option for these little local sites that we're counting on to cover our local politics.

Gotham Gazette has consistently tried to serve as a model for local independent news sites with a small budget. Over the years we have received countless requests for information, advice and guidance from people hoping to replicate all or part of what we do. We've always tried to help, and we see this game as part of that effort. Using more free and open source software is consistent with our values as a publication when our software choices make it easier for civic groups to launch good news sites.

We've been asked a few times whether a game made without Flash can be as good as a Flash game. Very soon, we'll be inviting all of you to see for yourself.

--Amanda B Hickman
Technical Director
Gotham Gazette

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 a clear way, eschewing jargon and acronyms and trying, when possible, to inject a little humor and humunaity into stories about the building code, sustainability and crumbling infrastructure.

With the games, we hope to take that one step further, providing people a chance to put themselves in the shoes of policymakers, thinking and clicking their way through a game that -- while we don't expect to rival Halo -- will be fun, attractive and provide important information about our city. In a several weeks, we'll try it out on some teenagers.I'll let you know what they think.

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 been a thorny issue in New York City, one that never seems quite resolved. It's something New Yorkers care a lot about and it provides policy options that can be clearly presented in a game format.

Our game will have two parts. In the first, players will be residents deciding how to sort their trash.Should it all just go in the garbage can (or, since this is New York, into a big black plastic bag). Or should some be recycled. Maybe you're willing to put your empty water bottle aside for recycling, but what about an apple core? And can you do anything with a soiled diaper?

Once the player sorts his/her trash, they move to the next portion and play policymaker. What would you do with the city's garbage. Send it to a city landfill,ship it acorss state lines, convert it to energy? And what about the recyclables?

At the end of the game, players will learn how much money they have spent, how much room they have taken up in a landfill and other costs. And they will send us their plans so we can convey their ideas to City Hall.

Now we just have to make this idea a reality -- a process we are in the thick of now. More on that in another posting.