Idea Lab

What 'The Republia Times' Game Can Teach Us About Propaganda

by Simon Ferrari
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

"The Republia Times" generated a significant amount of buzz when it was released a few weeks ago, even though it was developed by Lucas Pope simply as a warmup for a 48-hour game competition. It's a brilliant little game about tabloid, censorship and propaganda in a war-torn nation. It's also a tidy reflection on the cyclicality of time and the news machine. Your initial goal as the editor of a state-run newspaper is simple: Raise readership and loyalty for a transitional government by carefully selecting stories from the news wire. Based on your performance, you receive a concise, daily report...

• May 2, 2012
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How the 'Keep Me Occupied' Game Taps Into the Occupy Movement

by Simon Ferrari
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

In the world of indie game development, Anna Anthropy is known primarily for three things: her encyclopedic knowledge of 2D level design; her ability to manifest personal and political thoughts on gender, sexuality, and kink through her own spatial and procedural designs; and a preternatural knack for being able to convey this knowledge and her design sensibility to others -- sometimes evocatively, sometimes angrily. It should come as no surprise then, to see Anthropy doing something for political game design that hasn't often been done before. Anthropy's "Keep Me Occupied" is a cooperative maze-navigation game where two players must hold...

• March 7, 2012
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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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