I’m probably jumping into this with some assumed concepts about newspapers talking about micropayments moreso lately. Martin Langeveld’s article from the Nieman Lab and Clay Shirkey’s thoughts from 2000 are good background reading. (UPDATE: Journalism 101 – Accuracy – I had mistaken the identity of the author of the Nieman Lab article. It has since been corrected).
Motion-twin’s games quickly wore thin on me after I hit the wall of entertainment they’re willing to provide without me ponying up for better play. For example, my crabosaur in DinoRPG now has to rest 6 hours between every action. There are potions that eliminat this wait time, but they cost coins and the only serious way to get coins is to buy themwith real cash. About $6 gets you enough coins to take 30-some turns unhassled, which would work out to a few hours of entertainment probably. If I were younger, I definitely would have dropped some expendible income to find out what comes next.
I moved on to Civony last week as their ads showed up all over across game and news sites. After playing the game, their ad w
ith the open-bodiced female is even more hilarious. The game couldn’t be more of a medieval strategy geek out. It’s one of those overly rule-oriented concoctions we have Northern Europeans to thank for.
With that said, I had way more fun building up my little village than I did training my dinosaur. Civony has a really good introduction in that it keeps giving you menial tasks early on and rewarding you for them. It follows the Sid Meier philosophy of “just one more turn.” You never quite quit when one thing completes, because you’ve set something in motion since that you want to see complete. By the time that completes, you have started other things in motion and the cycle perpetuates. Civony delivers this in spades. Early on, buildings are built in minutes, but eventually they take hours. By this time, however, the player will have a second city to take care of where building only take minutes again. Lots of things to start and lots of things to see completed.
If one is impatient, he can buy game items that speed things up or offer bonuses. This is where micropayments come into play. Beyond impatience, buying items for boosts eventually becomes important to hard-core competitors. The ultimate goal is pitting armies against other players and factions. This endless struggle creates a market for the invested gamers to throw a few bucks in here or there for that extra leg up.
Browser-based micropayment games aren’t new, but there seems to be a growing market judging by how many more ads are showing up lately (just started checking out The West). Civony itself went from a single server to three over the course of a week. Enough people showed up to cause massive slowdown. Whether those people stay and play isn’t for certain, but it’s not a bad start for reworking old BBS games into web models.
What does this mean for news? Not totally sure yet, but I believe familiarity with when people dole out change for fun will definitely have some crossover to when they’ll dole it out for news. I should have enough thoughts for a more organized list of concepts to borrow soon. For now, I’m thinking the main strengths are that I’m paying to do something rather than “consume” something and there’s an evolving narrative arc to my interaction.
Over the last couple days, I’ve really gotten into Motion-Twin‘s games. They’re all web-based, flash-game-styled affairs meant to be quick diversions. You make a few quick choices and then take off until enough time passes for the game to allocate you some new actions. While a painful style for the kid at home for a lot to do, it’s perfect for the working man.
My two favorites are My Brute and Dino RPG. My Brute is sort’ve like Street Fighter that plays itself. You get your own brute and he or she auto-tussles your friends’ brutes. As he wins and loses fights, your brute levels up and gains random armaments like stilletos, whips and caveman clubs. He can also level up by recruiting pupils to his dojo. This is done multi-level-marketing style as you send a URL to friends to create their own brute. Built-in marketing, but it’s fun this way.
DinoRPG can be a bit tedious, but it keeps me engaged for some reason. You basically buy a pet dinosaur and train it as you click your way across all creation. You get 1 turn every so many hours (though I still haven’t figured out the scheme for making you wait). Their sales model lets you buy coins with which you can buy extra turns and mitigate the patience required to wait 6-9 hours to finish a fedex quest to a town only two moves away. It’s another approach to micropayments and you can pony up through credit card, SMS, or phone.
Motion-Twin’s game that originally got me thinking is MyMiniCity. Basically you create a city that starts out with a population of 1: you. Like MyBrute, the player must recruit her friends to the game by sending out the pages URL. Every unique visitor (IP-wise) adds another person to the city’s population and a picture of the city begins adding roads and houses. I created a town called Cronkberg after the namesake of my grad program. So far, we have 11 people. The game alludes to new stages opening up after hitting certain population requirements. This mystery is part of the appeal. The page also features a simple message board to post thoughts to the other visitors.
If anything, MyMiniCity could serve as an excellent model for a Coming Soon page for a new community news site. I think there are other ideas here as well. I think a good community journalism site would take note of unique visits andrepresent that back to the community in some way. I think a lot of sites just rely on sign-ups to represent unique, invested participants, but I like MyMiniCity’s way of sidestepping the need for a login. MyBrute does this too and I think it is a strength of some of Motion-Twin’s creations. In addition, I could see a site that allows real-life neighborhoods to initiate a digital neighborhood the same way. All you would need is a map, a message area, and some fun stats to create a reward for people coming back.
Journalism.co.uk tipped me off to a game-like news project/concept by David Johnson. Johnson’s an assistant prof at American University and his idea is called “For the People.” He pitched it to the Knight News Challenge and it goes something like this:
Using Microsoft’s XNA framework, he wants to develop a Sim City-style game based on the politics of Washington DC with avatars of real, elected officials placed inside federal buildings. Topical information, for example from news organisations, could then be streamed into the system.
The article doesn’t dip into what makes it a game (i.e. is there a goal, can it be won or lost, etc.). So, it may be more of a sim or toy (in a non-trivial sense of the word).
Back when Lively and Vivaty Scenes were first launching, I had a similar idea of building a house where users could drop in and attach tips for being more energy efficient to household objects. For example, the dishwasher could bring up a note about turning off the heat drying or windows could be linked to videos about caulking seams. However, the jury is out on the adoption rate of online, 3-D social spaces like this. Lively was shuttered at the end of ’08 and I haven’t heard a lot of chatter about Vivaty (though, I should check that one out again. You should, too).
Anyhow, journalism.co.uk’s article foregoes game detail and plunges back into points that shouldn’t be news. For example:
With ‘For The People’ he hopes to engage a younger audience in current affairs through gaming and reach out beyond the stereotypical male, computer-lover.
The ESA released statistics a couple years ago that said the average gamer is 33 years old and more women over 18 play games than boys under 17.
CC-licensed on flickr by morganglines
I feel Johnson’s pain here. He can’t just pitch a cool idea. Instead he has to backtrack to defending the validity of a new medium and pander to the fact that it could bring in those non-newspaper-buying young people that newsrooms have been dying (quite literally) to reach. Last year, I worked on a game concept with a news organization and every time we talked about players, they were assumed to be college age or younger. So weird.
Johnson articulates his criticism for a lack of media vision much better here:
“Executives didn’t see that games were immersive storytelling platforms and failed to recognise that, writing them off as fanboy entertainment was akin to leaving film to the keystone cops instead of using it for documentary journalism,” he said.
In the end, producing a solid, recognizable game for the purpose of news lies squarely in the realm of new territory. You better be ready to defend criticism from all angles.
Returning to newsPlay after some downtime. I had honestly wained in my interest in covering specifically journalistic games. The topic was narrow and the limited number of projects made for an awkward pace.
However, the two domains involved comprise a lot of my thinking and time. Those domains being Journalism and Games. I’m gonna loosen my focus a bit to the things I find interesting in both.
I’m going to rework the Essential Playing section and welcome comments on what would be good to include. I want to direct people to games that expand ideas on what games can convey. As well, I would like to offer books and articles that guide my thinking when it comes to true story telling.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
