The web people are better dressed than the music people this year, futurist Bruce Sterling said in his SxSW closing remarks. Not just better dressed but wealthier, hungrier, more optimistic, I thought. Austin, Texas is where thousands of representatives & enthusiasts of technology, film and music gather every year to talk about their craft and [...]
I have been researching newsgames for the last 8 months with a view to making my own newsgame project, a multiplayer wordgame I’m working on with an online media partner, the best it can possibly be. The first thing I discovered is that there is a fundamental mismatch in the way news and games are [...]
One of my professor, Jay Rosen‘s, greatest preoccupations is the gap between breaking news and our understanding of its larger context. Our Studio 20 journalism group at NYU has been addressing that problem by creating original works of explanatory journalism (explainers) and prototyping new explanatory techniques for our media partner, the non-profit investigative news site [...]
This weekend, I attended a “News + Gaming”-themed hackathon run by Hacks & Hackers New York. Thanks to my team of Juan C. Muller, Joe Cullen, Blair Hickman, Chelsea Stark, David Holmes, Wicky Mendoza and Julian Burgess, we managed to getting a working prototype up and running in no less than 10 hours.
“The game layer is coming,” he said, and everyone in the room believed him. At SxSW 2011, the young CEO of SCVNGR, Seth Priebatsch, expressed what was arguably the most important prediction of the illustrious tech conference: that the experience of real-life would more and more be organised around game-like structures and technologies. Full article on [...]
Bobby Schweizer is a researcher for Georgia Tech’s Newsgames Project, which is currently developing a newsgame authoring tool for local newsrooms, codenamed The Cartoonist, in conjunction with the University of California, Santa Cruz and the Knight Foundation. Schweizer is also the co-author of Newsgames: Journalism at Play with Dr. Ian Bogost and Simon Ferrari. I chatted to Bobby about [...]
Information is cheap. It has to be, if a fourteen year old with no security clearance can learn state secrets with a regular dial-up connection. Thanks to WikiLeaks, we all can. But as more and more information is liberated on the internet – by everyone – the piles of it we are left to sort [...]
It is often claimed that Cape Town’s Table Mountain contains a greater number of plant species than the entire British Isles. So what is it, exactly, that causes certain environments to flourish with biodiversity and rapid evolutionary specialisation, while others lag behind? Steven Johnson’s latest book, Where Good Ideas Come From, offers several theories. What’s more, it [...]
