Idea Lab

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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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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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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Balance the Budget: Gotham Gazette Game 3

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

After a series of false starts on an energy consumption game we decided to skip ahead to a timely game of balancing the budget . The game is actually a reprise of a popular budget balancing game we created in 2003 -- we're regularly asked for the source code for that game, and while we do have it, it is a bear of a maze of a mess that no self-respecting programmer would want to try to wade through in search of numbers and texts to change. For this game, we did use Flash, which made it significantly easier to...

• February 12, 2009
• 1 comment

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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Who's Watching the Elections?

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Every election, Gotham Gazette publishes a last minute voters guide. We almost always include every local race along with a round up of our coverage of the issues in that district and the race itself. From Surrogate Court and judicial convention delegates to NYC congressional races; and sometimes we're the only publication in town that can tell you whether there's a race in your precinct. Every election, we also provide a roundup of basic information for voters: how to find your polling place, voting rights, special instructions for first time voters. And, who to call to report problems at the...

• October 24, 2008
• 1 comment

NYC Police Deny Press Passes to Online Reporters

by Gail Robinson
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

The New York City Police department, which issues (or refuses to issue) press passes and identification cards, has denied credentials to at least three on-line reporters we know of, including Gotham Gazette city hall editor Courtney Gross. 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...

• July 8, 2008
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Into the Budget Dungeon

by Gail Robinson
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Today, Gotham Gazette unveils the second of its news games: The Budget Maze. 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...

• May 19, 2008
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How Do We Deal with Stolen Content?

by Gail Robinson
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

In an ideal world, I suppose, all information would be free and widely accessible. Maybe not credit records, health stats or income information -- but certainly journalism would be. Alas, though, we're not in an ideal world. On-line publications need readers (hits) to survive. In the case of a small independent site like Gotham Gazette, we need hits to attract funders and advertisers and to build our reputation and credibility. And we need to maintain control over our material to preserve our integrity. So it was distressing when our technical director, Amanda Hickman, using Technorati, found many sites using our...

• May 1, 2008
• 2 comments

Announcing: The Garbage Game

by Gail Robinson
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

After many nervous moments and late nights, Gotham Gazette's The Garbage Game is on our site and ready for players. This is the first in a series of six games on key policy issues facing New York City that Gotham Gazette will be producing over the next two years. As we hope you'll see for yourself, this one focuses on managing the almost 7 billion pounds of residential trash that New Yorkers produce every year. 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...

• November 14, 2007
• 4 comments

Free and Open Source Games

by Gail Robinson
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

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...

• November 2, 2007
• 18 comments