Idea Lab

Beanstockd Class Field Trip to NC

by Angela Antony
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's the start of the fall semester at UNC and Beanstockd has just taken a trip down to visit the class, present on Beanstockd, and answer all their questions. 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...

• October 9, 2009
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Introducing Switch, A News Game About New York City's Energy Gap

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Our latest (and last, for now) news game, Switch, is live. It is no Energyville but we think it is pretty awesome. Not only is it live, the source code and installation instructions are already available. 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...

• September 30, 2009
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Source Code for Balance

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Okay, so you haven't been waiting for this with baited breath the way everyone was waiting for the EveryBlock code. Nonetheless, after a few months of wrangling on and off with Git Hub I finally sat down and worked through a bunch of nagging authentication issues and managed to post the code for Balance! our game about balancing city budgets. 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...

• August 10, 2009
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IOC to Include Citizen Contributions with Virtual Olympic Congress

by Alexander Zolotarev
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Olympics is a special brand that boasts a bottomless marketing potential. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) admits that it has to be careful in positioning the Games' name online. Even so, it's clear that, because of its social nature and enormous global outreach, the Olympics have terrific potential to develop on the web. I decided to look at what the IOC is doing to promote the Games today. In the early fall 2007, IOC announced the start of the Virtual Olympic Congress with an attractive tagline: "Taking the Pulse. Make your Move. Join the debate. Voice Your Opinion." Generally,...

• August 4, 2009
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Bump: Getting on the Ballot in NYC

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Gotham Gazette released our fourth game in our Knight-funded game series this week. Bump, which revisits the maze theme from our Budget Maze sends players through a whole new labyrinth: ballot access. If you can't imagine how ballot access is even remotely interesting, I suggest playing the game! 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...

• July 8, 2009
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Another Budget Game

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

I like to think that Gotham Gazette's Balance! inspired the folks over at the Washington Post to create an even better budget game of their own but I am open to the possibility that they came up with it all on their own. 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...

• June 29, 2009
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Stuck in a Maze

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last week, we were honored with an Honorable Mention in the first Knight News Game Award competition, for our (pretty excellent) budget maze. The honor was made sweeter with the knowledge that our little maze -- we estimate the budget at $65,000 -- was up against a massively multi-player multi-issue networked news game project with a budget just over tenfold ours. With competition like that, an Honorable Mention is honor a-plenty. 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...

• June 12, 2009
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Playing the News Ready for Testing

by Kathleen Hansen
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

After a lot of fits and starts, we are ready to deploy two different versions of the "Playing the News" prototype games. One uses a simulated environment that allows the user to visit various locations to interview stakeholders on the topic of the use of ethanol as fuel. The user plays the role of a legislative research assistant helping a U.S. Senator prepare for hearings on the topic. The user can visit a variety of locations and talk to auto dealer sales reps, farmers, advocacy groups for and against corn ethanol, environmentalists and others. After the user visits the locations...

• February 21, 2009
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Reporting for Games

by Gail Robinson
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Much of the discussion about online games focuses on the technical issues, and that's not surprising since the technical aspects make a game a game or a simulation and not a conventional story. But as Gotham Gazette continues its efforts to create interactive features to involve and educate New Yorkers on key policy issues, we have discovered that the reporting piece can be far more complicated than we originally imagined. 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...

• November 17, 2008
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New Idea: A Card Game

by Fabio Berzaghi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

We had a brainstorming session and an idea of a board game came up. Then a card game followed and it seemed interesting enough to be explored in detail because of the low cost prototype that we could make. 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...

• August 6, 2008
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Changing Our Contractor

by Fabio Berzaghi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I have a few news about our project. We were working with the development team at Pine Tech, the Johnson Simulation Center. After almost one year into the project we decided to part ways with them. I think we need to work with someone on campus, in the house, to work closely with. We struggled to work with them since they had other projects to work on and could not put much effort into ours. 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...

• July 26, 2008
• 2 comments

Games with Legs

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

I've gotten a small handful of emails commending me for my fine work on our latest game, the NYC Voting Arcade -- the only problem is that we launched that game in 2004, long before I got here. We did link to it in a story earlier this week about state campaign filings, though, and the voting arcade games are altogether timeless (unless you happen to know that Doug Kellner left the city Board of Elections in 2005). This has gotten me thinking again about games, gaminess and complexity. Most of our voting arcade games are downright silly. Most of...

• July 17, 2008
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How Can a Game Make You Go Green?

by Sandra Ekong
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

We believe that entertainment, immersion and competition, as embodied by games in general are powerful qualities that can be harnessed to drive an individual or group of individuals to change the way they perceive social issues, to change the way they live their own lives, and to change the world itself. To give you a sense of the power of gaming, Alternate Reality Gaming celeb (yeah those exist!) Prof Jane McGonigal writes "I'm trying to make sure that a game developer wins a Nobel Prize by the year 2032." We're clearly not alone in our thinking.

• July 16, 2008
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1st Day at Knight News Challenge Winners Conference

by Fabio Berzaghi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

report from the 1st day at the Knight Conference at MIT

• June 12, 2008
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We Need a PowerPoint to Make Games

by Fabio Berzaghi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

"Playing the News" Update - Distil Interactive 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...

• June 6, 2008
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"Serious Game" Design 101

by Kathleen Hansen
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

As we continue to develop the "Playing the News" game, we wanted to share the inside workings of the process. Our partners at the Johnson Simulation Center submitted this report on their production process. An Overview of the JSC Production Process This is a short description of the Johnson Simulation Center's production process; that is, how we go about designing and then producing a game. There are two stages to this process, pre-production and production. Pre-production is a time during which everything about how the game will play and be built is written down on paper. We define the...

• April 7, 2008
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Is it a Game Without Moving Parts?

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

We're knee deep in our second game and I realized that I never came through with my promised recap of our last minute technical decisions on the Garbage Game. For one thing, as I mentioned, we jumped ship from OpenLaszlo in the interest of expedience. As I've noted here before, the game design field isn't exactly awash in programmers eager to work in anything but Flash. We found a local programming shop that was game for the challenge, though, and sat down with them to iron out our technical specifications. They'd never worked in OpenLaszlo before, but it looked like...

• March 3, 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
• 5 comments

Lessons from the Garbage Game

by Gail Robinson
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

In the almost three months since Gotham Gazette launched the Garbage Game about New York City's refuse, we've learned interesting things - some about on-line games and some specific to this game and this topic. For a roundup of responses and reactions, presented on Gotham Gazette last month, click here. 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...

• February 5, 2008
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Progress on 'Playing the News'

by Kathleen Hansen
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Hi folks. Our top-flight research assistant, Fabio Berzaghi, has written a narrative of the work we've been doing on the "Playing the News" project. Our goal is to design a game creation tool that allows news professionals to author engaging games around ongoing news issues in a community. The intention of the tool is to allow journalists to create a game that takes no more than 20 - 30 minutes to play through. We've been through quite a number of iterations on game design and Fabio provides the background. "The very first idea for our project was to focus on...

• January 2, 2008
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