Deadline: First Thoughts
I just got back from a very cool event called NewsTools2008, which consisted of 3.5 days of geeks and journalists figuring out how technology can make the news better for people. While there, I had a chance to talk to two guys who helped make a cool newsgame app for facebook.
I posted some first thoughts on StartupMedia.org and I’m cross-posting them below:
Deadline is a fun game. It’s actually really fun, and at the same time, it’s about the news. Well, it’s not just about the news, it is the news. It’s just delivered differently.
Deadline is a game played through facebook that tests the player’s knowledge of the news. The first time I encountered it, I was knee deep in school work. Yet, this facebook app managed to steal over an hour of my time. It was a fair trade though as I found myself thoroughly caught up on recent events when I finally managed to quit.
At NewsTools2008 yesterday, I had the opportunity to sit down with Tony Kuttner of NewzWag.com. He’s on the team that created Deadline and shared his thoughts on
Here are the highlights:
-Other news quiz applications have relied on the player knowing trivia (what was the general’s name that…) rather than knowing about the story. Someone who just quotes trivia when talking makes for a dull conversationalist. Delivering more of the story and what’s interesting about that story makes for better conversations and therefore a better game.
-Regular, new content is key. They aim to get 15-20 new stories up every weekday and 10 each day on weekends.
-Aesthetics were important to the team. It had to look good. It’s hard to test exactly how much of an effect this has on whether people play, but it seems important. (Anecdotaly, I think the design makes me more prone to stick around.)
-Including interesting, sometimes offbeat, stories and making it easy to share with your friends is important to the community aspect.
-The application was created as part of a team that included 3 developers. None were game developers, but some members of the team were avid gamers. (Avid gaming seems important as they get a lot of little things right).
Anyone want to trade Mugabe for UN food riots?
I covered Play the News at another blog I’m currently contributing to for the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship. It’s self-described as “fantasy sports meets the evening news” and encourages news readers to jump in as event forecasters.
Some of the reviewers have been underwhelmed by the site or critical of what kind of game it isn’t. However, the game is an interesting step in applying some game mechanics to a news follower community. Even if it’s not the Holy Grail, I’m all for encouraging more of this kind of experimentation.
In it’s favor, the delivery is clean and polished. Though, I think the level polish could be a slow down on consistent coverage. In my other post, I talk about how crowd sourcing could be a boon here if an effective way to do it can be figured out. Quoting myself is obviously obnoxious, but here’s a clip:
Over time, crowd sourcing could be an effective way to diffuse the unavoidable agenda setting nature of Play the News. While Play the News offers a great variety of stories already, their method of delivery limits their choices in the news they deliver. The site doesn’t tell the player what to think, but it does tell the player what to think about. Creating a system that allowed the crowd to assist in creating the content could greatly increase the number of stories offered.
What is a newsgame?
For a class, I was assigned the task of editing a Wikipedia page. Looking for something related to this blog, I found a possibly dated definition of newsgames on the page about Serious Games.
On the page, the author(s) had begun a list of types of games that would fit into the serious game category. This list includes things like advergaming and edutainment, and the list itself consists of a rather controversial taxonomy as I’ve seen discussions on quite a few of the terms themselves.
The definition for newsgames left me wanting as they were defined this way:
These games discuss, in a direct way, political or geopolitical problems. Examples include ”September 12th”
I’m doubtful of my own ability to arrive at an ideal definition any time soon, but I really felt this one was too narrow. Newsgames can deal with much more than political or geopolitical problems, just as news delivered through other media. So, here’s my attempt to broaden the definition a bit to be more consistent with at least a generic definition of news:
Journalistic games that report on recent events or deliver an editorial comment
I like it so far, but it needs to be bounced off the crowd. There will probably be exceptions to this that still count as a newsgame. Also, the discussion of whether a clean definition needs to be realized at this point could also be worthwhile.
I do think this does begin to separate newsgames from advergames and tabloid games. A newsgame could stray into the territory of either of these and I plan on committing an entire post to the gray areas.
Digital Natives: This is going to get really annoying
Over dinner the other night, my friend Robin told me about a goofy work meeting where the boss asked everyone born since 1977 to stand up. In a deep-voiced, boss tone, she mimicked her boss’s announcement, “Ladies and gentlemen, look around. These are our digital natives.”
Now, I understand that digital natives is a useful way to describe those born into digital technology and I’m sure that has some sort of important effect on “getting it” when it comes to technology. However, as this term enters the mainstream, I’m already starting to see it take on some cop out undertones by those who want an easy out for their inability to “get it” when it comes to technology.
I just have two things to say on this. One, I may have grown up with a PC, but I spent a lot of time surfing, troubleshooting and gaming instead of watching King of Queens. Two, the people I know who “get it” most were born before 1977.
Essential Playing
I’m starting a new page titled “Essential Playing.” This is the beginning of creating a crash course on points where games and news meet.
I’ve started with a handful of links, but I’m hoping this will evolve into a useful list for newbies and veterans alike. I’ve toyed with the idea of creating a type of a game rating system as well, but I’m afraid of the apples to oranges nature of the products as well as the innacurate nature of ratings systems. However, as the list grows to include more than “must play” material, we’ll need some type of indicator for what’s worth your time and what’s worth just knowing about.
To kick things off, I’ve included three games, a game about games, and a place for a constant stream of new game ideas.
Disaster at Harperville
This past week Disaster at Harperville, a game that teaches reporting skills, was shown off at the Serious Games Summit (SGS). Part of the Game Developers Conference (GDC), the SGS brings together developers, academics, and people from a variety of other industries to discuss alternative applications for games. Anything from using gameboys to teach diabetic children how to monitor their insulin to MMOs where players work together to save a planet from ecological disaster are par for the course.
Disaster at Harperville is a good example of adapting an existing game for one’s own purposes. The game’s creator, Nora Paul, has taken Neverwinter Nights (NWN), a game created to allow Dungeon Masters to build Dungeons & Dragons campaigns, and used it to build a journalist training campaign. NWN comes with a robust toolset that allows players to create their own content and share it with others online. Even more important, NWN has a fairly sophisticated system for creating dialogue. Lines of text can be structured into complex dialogue trees, which makes for an interesting series of dialogue choices on the player’s end. How one negotiates his way through a conversation becomes a game in itself.
In the game, the player must enter an evacuated downtown area to interview sources about an environmental disaster. According to an article on Gamasutra, Paul bounced her game off of an experienced game journalist and came up with a pretty cool approach to how character interaction would work. Here’s a clip:
After a discussion with Kotaku’s Brian Crecente, Paul chose to focus on three conceptual points in the interview process: attitude, reliability of source (as compares to authority), and secondary confirmation for every single detail. Subjects respond better to direct queries than to aloof or tentative approaches. They become annoyed when the player relies on them for basic information. Official mouthpieces and people with something to gain need be taken with a grain of salt, then revisited if an alternative take develops.
Disaster at Harperville has gotten an interesting amount of press, which I think is encouraging overall. I’m still amazed by press who are mystified or struck by practical applications for games, especially a game that has been around since 2002. I think Paul’s game is in a good spot for news for several reasons:
1. NWN is a very successful game with a large modding community.
2. Reporting skills are a perfect match for the medium and it’s a more down to earth domain than some serious games attempt to broach (ex. world peace).
3. It looks like she’s tested and refined her idea over time. The fact that she sought out game experts on content advice and not just technical tricks says a lot and puts her ahead of a lot of academics who are a little too white knuckled in the content area.
(Side note: The term “serious game” carries with it a certain amount of controversy. For one, developers who create standard video games can resent the suggestion the term carries that their games are only entertainment and don’t teach or make artistic statements. Also, there’s a significant history of games that have been mainstream, but have used games for more like the SGS encourages. Games like SimCity, Civilization, Brain Age are good examples. However, long discussions on game taxonomy have failed to produce a label that the majority wishes to replace “serious games” with as of yet.)
MetaverseU Follow Up #2
Massively.com put up a great (sometimes paraphrased) transcript of the discussion between Raph Koster, Howard Rheingold, and Cory Ondrejka. (Previous info on who these guys here).
In their discussion, they kick off talking about online communities and the way they try to imitate real life based on the tools you offer them. According to Koster:
From the beginning, virtual communities has never been about the “virtual.” All the oddities come from the mediation, not from human nature. We build trellises, and communities are plants growing on them… you get to shape them a little bit, and sometimes in very bad ways if you’re not careful. We tend to think we have more power than we do when architecting these things. I wince at the title “community manager” (”relations” would be better) because it perpetuates the myth that we have power to control what users do.
After diverging into discussion of dealing with a generation of digital natives, they circle back around to this mimicry of real life and start discussing rituals that show up in online environments. Rheingold and Koster offer these thoughts:
Howard: Will people be able to use those technologies to do ritual together? If so, then yes it’s worth the trade-off. Have been reading a book by Rich Ling — he’s bringing Durheim into the age of the cellphone. He’s asking the question: do mediated communications dissolve the glue that holds societies together, or are they a new glue? He has a theory that people are using phones for ritual among small groups of people. Ritual meaning there is distinction between who is in and who is out, there’s a change of consciousness, and everyone can see everyone else who’s in it. If you can achieve that feeling of ritual the technology sort of falls by the wayside.
Raph: In UO we had really fascinating ritual stuff come up. You have online weddings common nowadays but I haven’t seen a lot of stuff recently that was as crazy as what we saw in UO with guild induction ceremonies and so forth. Lots of weird stuff happened.
This has started me thinking about news delivery in virtual worlds as it matches real world rituals or patterns.
- Are there online pubs where patrons watch SportsCenter?
- What’s the virtual version of breakfast with the morning paper?
- Top of the hour radio news tends to be a commuter thing. I’m playing a game right now where news about the made up world the game takes place in plays in the background of a train station. Wouldn’t it follow to scroll news the same way in the commuter sections of virtual worlds.
Of course, surface-level matching of real world to virtual world could be quite artificial. However, there are definite natural patterns to what parts of the news humans seek out and share, where they do it, and when.
This is probably obvious enough to be discussed in better depth before, and I’m sure Second Life and other worlds have some already tested examples. I definitely want to start exploring this more.
MetaverseU Follow-Up #1
To kick things off, Raph Koster posted some interesting highlights from a presentation by Dmitri Williams:
* People who use voice-over-IP make stronger interpersonal connections in virtual worlds, but also tend to be more insular and meet less strangers. People who use text make somewhat weaker connections but talk more to strangers.
* The older you are, the more hours you spend per week in the world. That’s right — it’s not college students who spend the most time. The graph shows a nearly linear relationship between age and hours spent per week.
Williams is an assistant professor at USC’s Annenberg School of Communication who scored some of these research tidbits thanks to data from Second Life and Sony Online Entertainment. His personal site has a treasure trove of studies from online worlds.
Metaverse Weekend
Beginning tomorrow, Stanford’s Humanities Lab will be hosting MetaverseU. The event takes place around four discussions by virtual world stalwarts. Their site highlights one of these discussion:
At Metaverse U we plan to have 4 “key” conversations. The idea is to put people with different perspectives on a given topic together and also let them pick up on themes that have come up during the conference. I am very excited to announce that in one of these will feature a conversation between Howard Rheingold, Cory Ondrejka and Raph Koster. I am really curious about what it really means when we get the ability form these virtual communities and had the amazing luck of having the top 3 names on my list agree to come have the conversation about this.
Rheingold is a pioneer of web communities and started one of the first called The Well. Ondrejka is a Linden Lab alumnus and is noted for pushing for players retaining their own IP in Second Life. Koster I’ve talked about previously, but I’m interested to see if the conversation heads into comparing and contrasting Second Life vs. Metaplace. The MetaverseU has more about these guys and other notables they conference has lined up.
The registration price for students is quite doable at $100. Part of me wants to take off tonight for the Bay Area to listen in. However, the discussions are being streamed live in Second Life. Reinstalling SL and flying over is probably a much cheaper trip.
Here’s the logistics:
* WHERE: Annenberg Auditorium, Stanford University
* WHEN: Saturday the 16th and Sunday the 17th of February 2008
Holy Brawls
I’m usually disinterested in media that picks at religious sensitivities. Maybe it’s because it seems too easy an avenue for being shocking and doesn’t usually require much cleverness on the creator’s part.
However, there is something charming about Molleindustria’s Faith Fighter. Intended to be a comment on using religious symbols to fuel violence, they describe their game this way:
Faith Fighter is the ultimate fighting game for these dark times. Choose your belief and kick the shit out of your enemies. Give vent to your intolerance! Religious hate has never been so much fun.
The game is styled like Street Fighter, but features religious icons as the competitors. Monotheistic symbols are evenly balanced with Far East ones, allowing Muhammad to square off against Ganesh. Even though caricatures of religious deities isn’t exactly reverent territory, Faith Fighter offers a sufficiently badass depiction to each. For some reason, this seems to take an edge off.
When considering games as a replacement to editorial cartoons, Faith Fighter brings up an interesting point. This game allows for a censored and an uncensored mode of play, the former covering Muhammad’s image during play. After the Danish cartoon depicting the Prophet caused an eruption last year, it’s interesting to see the carry over into the game space.
The choice offered by an interactive game is an interesting balance between sensitivity and artistic credibility. While a printed paper would be cumbersome to print in censored and uncensored versions, it’s a relatively easy addition when working in Flash. Also, offering the choice makes a more interesting point than if one was never offered at all.
With that said, I really don’t know if the option of censoring Muhammad’s visage is sufficiently sensitive from a Muslim’s perspective. The awareness that the depiction exists, even if one isn’t personally exposed to it, could still create tension.
Even more interesting, Molleindustria included a secret boss at the end of the game whose depiction could be as much of a headache for a creator as that of Muhammad. I won’t offer a spoiler though, you’ll just have to play it.