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serious games

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Kathleen Hansen

"Serious Game" Design 101

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...

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Kathleen Hansen

Creating a Game-Building Tool for Newsrooms

For those of us working on creating "serious games," the experience we've had with the "Playing the News" project might be instructive. We are working with the Johnson Simulation Center at Pine Technical College in Pine City, MN to develop a tool that will allow journalists (read, non-techies) create engaging games built from news coverage of ongoing coverage in a community. After much to-ing and fro-ing, we think we've hit on a strategy for the type of utility that will work. But it has taken some "technical fortitude" to get to this point. The JSC folks are working on what...

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Leslie Rule

Gaming, Seriously.

I crossed paths with "serious gaming," in a serious way twice in one week. First at the Knight Digital Media Center's Editorial Writers seminar in Los Angeles last week. Later in the week, I attended a gaming session at the Computer Using Educator's conference in Palm Springs. Both of the gaming presentations were intriguing and relevant for my work. Much of locative media work I do is with HP proprietary's Mediascape software. It's been in beta for a couple of years, but finally HP landed in a partnership with the UK's Futurelab in Bristol to put a friendly face (and...

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Featured Comment

It sounds like journalists today also have to be marketers. They have to know who they are trying to reach, and... to pitch their stories to a broader audience.

Michelle
Changes in Media Over the Past 550 Years

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