ImpactGames Blog Archive: Play the News
Dear Play the News Community,
On behalf of ImpactGames we would like to thank you all for your participation in our Beta community. We have reached a point in the progression of this product where we will be ceasing to produce new content for the site. We will not be opening, locking, or closing any of the current content. For now we will be leaving the site frozen in time for demonstration purposes and to support our fundraising, content partner acquisition, and future development needs.
In the last few months we have created 126 games on a wide range of subject matter. The process has educated us personally, and hopefully those of you in our community, on many issues. Some of the games we created were on issues we read about every day, while some were on meaningful subjects that are generally buried in the margins of the mainstream press. The discussions around the games have been very thoughtful and revealing to us as developers and individuals. We believe that the way we have packaged current events represents a fresh way for people to consume headline news, and provides greater context and engagement on complex issues and even lighter entertainment. We are confident that the future “new and improved” incarnation of the platform will serve as a real alternative or addition to traditional media.
We are planning to take this time, free from the intense development cycle required to continuously produce new content, to analyze all of your thoughtful feedback in order to create an even better experience. We are opening a new thread in our forum where we welcome you to submit any and all thoughts and ideas about the experience, share user testimonials, and present any leads you think we should explore.
We hope to revive the community in the near future and will preserve all of your user data for integration into our next edition. We thank you again for taking the time to pioneer a new user experience with us. Your feedback and ongoing participation has been integral in exploring this new form of communication, game, and community.
Eric and Asi,
Co-Founders - ImpactGames
ImpactGames is proud to present “Sanctuary for Deserters?” a game suggested and written by Lori Shyba, one of our players. This is our first foray into user-generated content and we’re excited to hear your opinion, so let us know what you think. We also opened a new topic in our forum to explore similar efforts by other players.
On two separate occasions our news games were drawn into the event we had represented, when the real-life characters began paying attention to them. How weird.
First case: a game we published with Read Write Web about Data Portability. The founder of DP, Chris Saad, who is represented by a role in the game, played it and promised not to spoil the game since he “knows the answers”.
Second case: our recent game about BoingBoing and Violet Blue was posted and hosted by Violet Blue on her blog, open to comments by her audience.
Will we see future feedback loops? Say Obama looking at our community predictions/opinions for his prospective VP?
Since the launch of our public beta, “Play the News” has received some interesting reviews on the Blogsphere. There were positive reviews; TransBuddha says “ImpactGames has figured out a way to combine my old D&D love with my obsession with the news”, while Josh on The Knight Center blog calls us: “an interesting offering for those interested in new ways to deliver and interact with the news”.
We also enjoyed the satire on The AV Club, according to them PtN “will make you kill puppies”. Broken Toys’ Scott Jennings, however, was highly critical by claiming we “essentially ha[ve] abdicated any responsibility for making a decision”, pointing out that we have created a framework for the community to voice its opinion without advocating our own opinions or assumptions.
Getting feedback is great, and the beauty of the Web is that we can keep expanding and improving the platform based on reviews and comments from players. Josh of the Knight Center phrases it more eloquently by saying: “It’s interesting that [Jennings] refers to this site as a “title,” making it more akin to a static game product that is done at some point than a website that evolves and changes over time”.
Josh argues we should introduce crowd sourcing to PtN as “an effective way to diffuse the unavoidable agenda setting nature of Play the News… Creating a system that allowed the crowd to assist in creating the content could greatly increase the number of stories offered.”
Funny he should mention that… Because hidden behind the front-end of PtN is an easy to use content creation tool. It enables us to publish polished experiences around a breaking story in only a day or two. Our focus now is reaching out to different media partners so they will create their own games using our editor. Aggregating all these “channels” on our site would allow for very interesting comparisons of the the issues illuminated by different content partners, while obviously adding richer and wider content.
We do plan to open PtN up to user-created games. At that point anyone could create whatever advocacy perspective they want through the information and the potential courses of action. We will need to seriously address moderation and copyright issues, but it is definitely a worthwhile expansion. From our perspective, it is a natural step in the evolution of PtN but not an immediate one. First, we would like to establish this new media format. Once the “News Game” format is established, we can support civic journalism and user-generated content. As Eric my partner commented on one of these blogs “for us this platform has just been born.”
This week we published our first news game with a media partner - ReadWriteWeb, one of the world’s leading tech Blogs. This is a first in a weekly series of tech games we are going to write together. With these partnerships, we aim to expand “Play the News” and the content we bring to the community. Our easy to use content editor enables us to continue to add different partners that can bring a range of content expertise and perspectives to the games. Please contact us if you are interested in such partnership.
As mentioned in the previous post, we just introduced this feature. Below each game on the Play the News portal you will find a section called “Share This Game”. You may post any game to your website or blog using the iframe embed tag. For embedding the game, please note: because they have fixed dimensions of 600 x 450, you may need to adjust your website or blog’s width to accommodate a more pleasing layout. Here is a sample for the PA Democratic Primary:
The closed beta is formally over and http://www.playthenewsgame.com is now open to the public. During the closed beta period we had 340 members who provided us with invaluable feedback and showed outstanding participation. We plan to continue to improve, update, and introduce new features to the site in the future so keep your suggestions coming. We know there are many more things we could add to make the site even better but it’s time to push the fledging out of its nest.
If you (like us) are enjoying active participation in the news, and think others will too, please help us spread the word. Many of you have asked if you could share your log-in with others or could invite others into the community, and now is the time. We added a “Share This Game” feature, so just like a YouTube video, anyone can embed our Flash games into their personal blogs or websites, as well as link to them from popular social networking and news aggregation sites (e.g. Digg, Facebook, Google).
The site is free of charge to end-users. We are excited to let you know that two top-tier media partners are planning to launch PlayTheNews on their site in the following weeks bringing even more content to the community. As promised, we have added all registered users to our iPhone raffle. We will conduct the drawing in the following days, and one of you lucky participants will be contacted with the good news.
We want to thank the community again for the amazing feedback and participation. We hope you will continue to Play the News, keeping our community vibrant and engaged. Feel free to keep sending feedback to us directly. Due to the success of the forum, we’ve decided to leave it open for future comments.
Sincerely,
The ImpactGames team
In February we are launching a closed beta of our new online product: Play the News, imagine if you will Fantasy Sports meets the Evening News. As a player you can choose your role and participate in a variety of real events: domestic, global, serious news as well as softer issues and entertainment. You can gain a deeper understanding of the day’s headlines while voicing your opinion. You will be measured vs. reality as well as against the performance of other community members.
To make it a bit more interesting for those of you that choose to help us out we will be giving away an iPhone to one lucky participant. Just by signing up you have a chance to win. Perform well on the platform to raise your chances.
If you would like to take part and help us in shaping this unique product, please use the contact form. If possible and you feel verbose, we’d love to hear in 1-2 sentences who you are, and why you are interested to join. We apologize in advance if we can’t accommodate everyone, as it is a limited beta. In any case, your personal data is guaranteed and will not be used for any other purpose, not now and not in the future.
Edit 1.15 - this position is no longer open, thanks for all the applications!
This time around we are looking for a creative writer to lead, manage and write content for our online interactive experiences. The candidate should have a mastery of textual writing as well as the ability to attach visual and audible references to their work. We would require interested candidates to submit examples of their previous work in a range of fields, such as: fiction, non-fiction, technical writing, video games and/or journalism. We are looking for dedicated individuals with deep understanding and immersion in current events on diverse topics: Global, US, entertainment, technology, business and more. Please note that the application process will include a writing test on a selected topic/s. To Apply please send your cover letter and resume to jobs (at) impactgames.com
Edit 1.15 - this position is no longer open, thanks for all the applications!
As we are expanding our business strategy to encompass interactive Web experiences around news and current events, we are seeking an exceptionally talented System Administrator who would share our passion and vision. We offer a competitive salary and compensation based on experience. The job is located in Pittsburgh. Our new admin will take overall responsibility for setup and maintenance of client-facing and internal systems, including administrating and balancing a high traffic website that integrates dynamic database content and flash remote services. He/she will work with software developers in performance monitoring and benchmarking of server side-applications, and be responsible for maintaining the internal company network. Responsibilities may also include HTML, JavaScript and Java coding. Interested? Please send a cover letter and resume through the contact form on our sites (PeaceMaker or ImpactGames).