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 of the complexity of the problem -- both how difficult it is to reduce solid waste and how expensive it is to dispose of this material.

Budget games, such as Balance (or the national one, Budget Hero), also do this. They make it clear that, whatever politicians might have us believe, closing deficits means raising taxes or cutting things most of us like, such as police officers, teachers and firefighters.

Games that are more instructional, such as ours about how the budget process works, have a role to play, too. But my hunch, based on our experience, is that unless they can be made extremely entertaining, people are less likely to try those out just for the heck of it. Instead, these games can play a valuable role for a community group seeking to inform its members, say, or a civics or political science class. (This realization owes much to a talk by Alice Robison at MIT last year.)

Building Good, Low Budget Games

Creating a good game requires a lot of work, money or both. When I spoke at a conference last year, people repeatedly expressed amazement about the low budget for Gotham Gazette's games. But for us -- and for many other small news publications -- the cost seemed huge. We never would have been able to do the games without Knight's support, and even with Knight's generosity, it often was a scramble and a struggle.

Part of this is technical: finding programmers or having one on staff. But reporting for the games is also extremely time consuming because you can't "fudge." So, for example, as we compared electricity savings for Switch, we had to insure they were all in the same units, covered the same period of time, and applied to the same geographical area. We could not use a mix of figures for the city and state, which is something we might do in a story.

If small organizations such as Gotham Gazette are to use games as one of their storytelling techniques, we need to create games with a long shelf life -- our Garbage Game gets many hits two years after its launch -- or ones that can be recycled. We are, for example, going to try to reuse Balance for the next budget cycle, by inserting new numbers. I've gotten some queries from others about how they could adapt this game to their locality.

Conclusion

Are games worth doing? I'd give a qualified yes. One great thing about the web is that it offers journalists so many tools for telling stories: conventional text, interactive databases, audio, video, and so on. Games are another valuable tool.

As the web matures, the key question we should ask ourselves is not, "Should we have an audio slide show or should we make a game?" Rather, we should ask, "How can we best engage and inform our readers about the topic at hand?"

And sometimes the answer will no doubt be, "Yes, let's make a game."

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, providing pedestrians of each neighborhood with a portal into each other's worlds. Running 24/7, these life-size screen images and AV technology will enable real-time interaction between residents of the neighborhoods.

These portals will also act as media centers for news collection and dissemination. The viewing and sharing of news will be brought out of private spheres and into a public forum to create a kind of virtual town hall meeting. Though only 2.4 miles apart and connected by the Route 66 bus, people living in one of these two neighborhoods rarely visit the other. Using technology developed to bridge geographical distances, Virtual Street Corners instead traverses the social boundaries that separate two important cultural and transportation hubs with significant historical connections.

Citizen Journalists in Each Neighborhood

There will be both planned and spontaneous interactions. Three different citizen journalists from different parts of the neighborhood will be employed to deliver daily news reports about what is happening in their area at specified times each day. There will be a website with live feeds streaming from each location. Both storefronts are located next to a bus stop, and riders (or anyone else) will be able to download podcasts or videocasts.

Virtual Street Corners is closely related to a project that I created with Liz Canner called Symphony of a City, which premiered at the Boston Cyberarts Festival 2001. Symphony of a City used headcams, projections and streaming video to paint a portrait of Boston through the eyes of eight different residents.

Both pieces evolve out of earlier work I've done that aimed to create participatory community public art projects across Boston. While doing those projects, I was struck by the diversity of culture, as well as the segregation that still permeates Boston. Residents appear to treat the situation as normal, and little dialogue appears to take place around the issue. These works invite people to confront this reality, reflect and dialogue about it. It also allows them to experience the city in a new way outside their daily routines.

Art or Activism?

Virtual Street Corners first took shape in 2006 when I received a "Public Art Incubator" fellowship from the Berwick Research Institute in Dudley Square, Roxbury. This grant provided me with an opportunity to have a studio in the middle of Dudley Square, and feedback from two curators, Susan Sakash and Andi Sutton. I was able to test early models, which culminated in a one-day trial at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT.

During this process there were several issues that came up repeatedly and are worth mentioning. One is about how to classify the project. Is it art or activism? Journalism or humanities? In fact, it fits within several different fields of practice, and it is more important to me that it is engaging and useful, than whether or not it falls within one category or the other.

I think there is an evolving openness to cross-disciplinary projects. Nevertheless, it continues to be an issue I repeatedly confront from many sides, including funders and academics. Within the art world, it was brought to my attention that similar projects had taken place. Most frequently mentioned is Hole In Space by Erkki Huhtamo. I have found his work to be particularly insightful. What I take away from him is that it is not so important that we come up with new and "groundbreaking" ideas. Ideas or works of art are not better because they are "new"; often, what we perceive as new is a restatement of an old idea. (He labels this a "Topoi.") But capitalism and consumerism is driven by this idea of coming up with the latest hottest thing.

Just the fact that Virtual Street Corners will be seen by a completely different group of people, that it is executed in a different context and at a different time, makes it worthwhile. I'm thinking of this as a cooperation rather than a competition. And that's something I appreciate about the Knight Challenge -- that it is centered on building and expanding ideas, rather than making them exclusive.

The best part of our arrangement is our idea to including Beanstockd Game clues in the green column of their magazine. It will be a tangible real-world connection for the players of the Beanstockd Game (they can go to the local newsstand, flip to the green column of this magazine, and hence be immersed in the game environment even outside their computers and mobile devices. It will also be a fantastic way to drive more users to the Beanstockd game when it is publicly launched.

We had a fantastic meeting with 2 of their representatives, and we are hoping to begin content sharing before the end of the year. Very exciting!

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 visited geifer in her showroom, took some pictures, and had a quick chat. i also recruited a new friend of mine, caroline tobias, to take photos at the shows with me. caroline was a great partner in crime and was really good at getting those quick shots. all of the photos in the slideshow are hers; those paparazzi style ones of the celebs are a direct result of her needling her way into the crowd to get up close and personal with the stars. we also had the pleasure of going backstage to see the preparation of the tibi show. john and adam taylor (a videographer) came along for this and got to take in the show. adam took footage of me interviewing the hairdresser backstage, who told us he was weaving scraps of fabric taken from this season's collection into the models' messy buns (so green!). we also got footage of a short chat with a model, then of other going ons backstage as well as the show itself. additionally, i set up an interview with getty images photog frazer harrison. for this, we enlisted kipany's jetain mahendra, who was AWESOME and super professional and got great footage of me chatting with frazer about red carpet no nos and surviving life in the pit (where the photographers fight for spots to get runway photos). jetain also put together a kickass video of the interview juxtaposed with runway footage from the max azria show. he rocks, and i would totally work with him again.
2) I've also been in contact with tristan gribbons, 1/2 of SUST, a sustainable clothing line that's currently promoting their wares via the sustainability across america tour. i've been emailing with tristan, who i came across online, and she's goign to be filling out (i hope!) some interview questions i emailed her.
3) I also came across another great sustainable line just today, called everlasting hope. i've emailed them to see if we could visit their showroom (they're based in brooklyn) and chat with the designers.
4) I'm also really gunning for us to get to portland fashion week. it's this october, and starts on the 7th, so clearly we won't make it this year. but its completely sustainable fashion and sustainable sponsors - everything is green! it's where leanne marshall first showed (from project runway), and seems like an AWESOME event. i'm really hoping to get out there next year."

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!

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 strategy for reaching our stated objectives, and we will begin the process of integrating and implementing their great ideas into our project.

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 addictive.

Switch is a concentration-style game that deals each player 18 pairs of cards, each representing an opportunity for the city to conserve or produce electricity. As players match pairs, they're asked to decide whether each policy initiative is a good fit for New York City. At the end (or whenever the player grows bored!) players "flip the switch" to see how the measures they've accepted would add up against the city's predicted 2030 energy needs.

We worked with Will James of Tekimaki, whom we met through his very cool subway map project at onNYTurf which, in addition to being both early and awesome, is the only online NYC map I know of that is available in Estonian.

We've learned a lot about gaming and news games over the last two years, and a lot about building them on the cheap. More on that after you've all played Switch!

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 so.

One thing we didn't really budget for in these games was really good documentation. What we've got is pretty bare bones. And we certainly don't have the resources to support the software. That said, if you're genuinely interested in getting a Balance!-style game running yourself, I'll do what I can to lead you through it.

A big shoutout to our summer strategists who will be helping us with The Beanstockd Game full time! We are excited to see what comes out of the summer, and will be resuming discussions with our alternate reality gaming friends in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, The Beanstockd Game beta testing continues, with a few experimental features thrown in for fun. More updates soon...

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 opportunity! We fully expect to actually implement many of the ideas and strategies presented by the bright, creative, and talented students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill this fall.

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 still be on the agenda, but we're pushing back production for at least for 4-6 months to enable us to focus our efforts on our core projects.

We're very pleased with this decision, as it allows us to really ramp up our current projects, and will enable us to do a much better job on the video when we do pick this project, a GREAT addition to our portfolio of offerings to our readership, up again in the future.

Mode updates to come...

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 Spike TV Guys Choice Awards

This was a crazy weekend for Beanstockd. Not only did we have a full crew in LA, but for the first time we had TWO full video crews in LA filming simultaneously! Was quite an accomplishment for us - and the footage turned out great!

More updates to come...

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 issue in New York City that definitely lent itself to the quiz-y nature of the budget maze game, and when candidates file their nominating petitions later this month, there will be a lot of bumping activity, as candidates are forced off the ballot for failing to number the pages on their nominating petitions.

This new game reflects a lot of the lessons we learned from our first maze game. First, we really toned down the "maze" end of things after too many people complained that it was too challenging. Second, we made it a whole lot harder to loose after our high school interns complained that they kept losing (and getting kicked out of the game) because they actually don't know all the answers off the tops of their youthful heads. Since the point of our games is to engage people in civics and civic participation, penalizing players who don't know the system inside and out would seem to defeat the point.

We hope you'll enjoy the game!

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 real and specific proposals like a bag tax or sales tax changes. Their menu of options is much more limited in that regard.

So there you have it. One more budget game -- my question (as ever) is ... is this really a game? As I check that category box for "Games and Virtual Worlds" a budget balancing widget seems a bit faint.

Unlike the Post's game, though, ours is available for re-use and re-purposing. Let me know if you'd like to tinker with the skeleton of it!

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 the first time, an edifying experience to say the least. The Budget Maze, for those of you who have forgotten since you played it last May and told all your friends about it, asks players to navigate a dreary maze of a dungeon that is the city budget process, in search of the key to the youth program they want funded. In keeping with Knight's preference for free and open source software under the hood (all our games are available as free and open source software, but some are built on non-free tools) the game uses exclusively PHP, AJAX and jQuery to provide interactivity.

When we were designing the game, we were committed to keeping it "game-y" -- a response to complaints about earlier games. Watching people navigate the maze for the first time, and chatting with the experts in game design as well as in pedagogy who stopped by our table, I realized that we had gotten perhaps too caught up in our ideas about what a "game" should be, maybe at the expense of making a good learning experience.

One thing I saw while watching people play is that the maze is far too hard to navigate. We wanted the maze component to make the game more challenging and more fun, but watching people play it I could see that, while it might be challenging, it was taking too much of the fun out of our game to have to puzzle through the maze.

Another realization I came to while chatting with the young intern who'd come with me to the expo, and who had a very tough time getting all the way through the game, was that we were sacrificing pedagogy to game-y-ness, as well. We designed the scoring to ensure that at each level it gets harder and harder to get to the end. Too many missteps along the way and you'll run out of time: the city will pass a budget without your input.

That is nice enough in theory, and it sure is the way the world works, but the very people we wanted to reach with the game -- New Yorkers who are genuinely interested in understanding the budget process but don't know it by heart yet -- are the ones who'll have the hardest time getting the answers right. So they're the ones that get kicked back to start over and over as they screw up. The experts have no trouble getting through the game, but they're experts. They don't need us to show them how government works!

It was good timing, the expo was, because we're actively developing our next game, which will follow the same format as our last maze but with some notable improvements. We'd already agreed we want to make it easier to snake through the maze towards the good stuff. We realized at Games for Change that we should re-think the idea of "losing" and let everyone get to the end of the game.