One of the most important events in my life as a productive adult was reading an earlier version of this article on Lifehacker about how to create effective to-do lists. I had always kept to-do lists, either scribbling out a list of things I had to finish on a notepad, or keeping them in a text file on my desktop. The ugly truth of those lists is that I seldom had the pleasure of crossing out any of the tasks I listed, or when I did, it had taken far too long for me to do so.

A good to-do list, the author said, consisted of actionable micro-tasks described in clear, unambiguous language. A great to-do task can be completed in under 30 minutes and should be linked to a specific verb. So today, a to-do list of mine might look like this:

• CALL dentist to confirm appointment
• GO TO dentist for 3.30 appointment
• DRAFT product spec for invisibility app
• EMAIL spec to Daniel
• CONFIRM that Sharon is working on quiz designs

Simple verbs are great, because they’re like switches. You either carry them out or you don’t. On the other hand, something like “FINISH super secret project” is unlikely to be crossed off my list any time soon because “finishing” represents an undefined number of complex tasks, many of which may be out of my hands.

The Lifehacked To-Do List has been a part of my life for many years now, and until recently I haven’t had much need to change it.

Then I became a product manager. Now, my life is a series of unfinished (or worse: buggy) interactive features that need constant attention. Since my natural hardware (and even my beloved to do-paradigm) isn’t so good at making sense of different groups of tasks, never mind the sheer number of tasks that come with this line of work, it was time for me to enlist the help of some project management software.

I ended up with Asana, a lightweight web app from the brain of Dustin Moskovitz, former Facebook CTO and recent IPO billionaire (even after Facebook’s share price began tanking). Asana lets you break out your to-do list into separate projects or folders, which not only makes sense for the workplace but also for personal use (“Book Club” gets its own folder, as does “Taxes”). Inside the project folder, you can add new tasks by typing directly into it, like a bespoke text editor. Once you’ve added something to the list, you can prioritize, labeling it as “Today”, “Upcoming” or “Later”.

Of course it would be cumbersome to have to switch between your different projects just to see what needs to be done first. Luckily, there’s a handy aggregate view which shows you all of your outstanding tasks, separated into “Today”, “Upcoming” and “Later” categories, which you can re-order by dragging and dropping as necessary. Once you’re done with something, you just check the box next to a task and it will grey out, vacating that annoying “to-do” nook in the back of your mind.

I’m not here to cheer for a specific piece of software as much as I am to say that organizing your workflow can make the office a much saner, more zen place to be. Crises and mistakes still happen and that’s okay, but they’re so much less likely if that “thing” that you were supposed to do was written down at some point and a lovely bit of software prods you in the ribs daily to say: “hey, how about we get this done today?”

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 make a dent in the global tequila supply. I attended in 2012 for my second time and these are the trends that I think are worth reporting on.

A new generation of social, local & mobile apps – SoLoMo, for short – are trying to solve the problem of social discovery. Not only will they alert you when friends are nearby (see ambient computing below), but they’ll also tell you about strangers in your vicinity, and match you to those with similar interests. As creepy as it sounds, I had a few good interactions using one of these apps, although I never met face to face with the people I’d talked to. That might be a bad sign. Check out Glancee, Highlight, Banjo or Sonar to get a taste of the SoLoMo phenomenon. The granddaddy of them all is of course an app called Grindr, which helps guys find other guys looking for a particular sort of good time. 

One of the persistent complaints against technology is that it transfixes us to screens. Ambient computing, another hot SxSW topic, is a solution to this. The idea is that data should come to us only when it’s needed. Cyborg anthropologist Amber Case delivered a keynote speech in which she explained how “invisible” buttons could use location, rather than sight and touch, to activate software. Imagine getting woken up by your phone when your local bus is 30 minutes away from the closest bus stop… nice, isn’t it? Case has launched a mobile location protocol called Geoloqi which will help developers do that and more.

Even more interesting is the advance of 3D printing into more and more homes. “Makers”, as the expanding clan of DIY-manufacturers is called, use 3D printers to cheaply manufacture objects that were previously only possible on the assembly line. Already, The Pirate Bay (of illegal filesharing fame) has launched a “physibles” section where users can download printable designs for physical objects. Others say the home industrial revolution is further off than we think. Nonetheless, this scene exists and it smells like the future.

Elsewhere, the work place is being decentralized. Zappos, as famous for its HR policies as it is for shoes, is paying for its workers to spend time in external co-working spaces. The idea is that mixing with a different crowd is good for creativity. Incidentally, ever worried about how to distribute those company bonuses? Don’t worry, neither have I. But Linden Labs, the company responsible for (the somewhat passé) virtual world Second Life has a great way to do it. They assign an equal amount of cash to every worker in the company, who must then give all of it away anonymously to their peers within 24 hours. They’ve studied the historical distribution of these bonuses and found them to be surprisingly fair. Collective intelligence is the ally of the employer of the future, it seems.

The general consensus is that education is in trouble. Formal education was created for an industrial society which has been supplanted by a very different digital economy. As the value proposition of universities is being questioned (and almost certainly eroded in terms of sheer supply & demand of degrees), alternatives are springing up all over. Khan Academy’s educational videos have become essential online viewing while Codecademy is teaching laymen to code in terms they can understand. Even some of the universities are dipping their toes into this future with open online courses such as that of MIT. UnCollege is Dale Stephens’ attempt to raise awareness of such alternatives and create a community for “unschoolers”, people who learn independently.

This being a technology conference, discussions often veered into the realm of the sci-fi, strange talk of cyborgs & the Singularity. When you think about it, though, the melding of man & machine has already begun. Humans are outsourcing their memories and computational power to the superior processing power of the cloud. I use iTunes, therefore I am a cyborg, basically. Prolific inventor Raymond Kurzweil predicts that we are seventeen years away from the first computer to pass the Turing test, meaning one that is indistinguishable from a human in communication. At that point, computers could considered to be sentient beings.

But will they use Facebook?

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 produced. Newsrooms are set up to turn out stories within minutes if necessary. Game studios require weeks, months or even years (a lá Duke Nukem Forever) to be brought to market. So if news is fast, and games are slow, how do you produce a newsgame that can “win” in the online news environment?

Luckily, the question points to two answers: you can either (1) speed up production; or (2) extend consumption.

1. Micro-newsgames

Earlier this year, I interviewed Dutch game designer Kenney Vleugels, who released a game called London Looters while the chaotic riots of August, 2011 were still rocking Britain. The game tasks players with defending their shop from marauding looters (read: “hitting them over the head”). As an expression of sympathy with the victims of the riots – and outrage at the rioters – it is effective enough. As a game, however, few could argue that the experience is very shallow and offers little replay value. London Looters’ popularity peaked not long after its release, and I don’t expect it to recover.

But what about newsgames that aren’t just about one story in particular? That brings us to…

2. System-centric newsgame design

If you think of journalism as an eco-system, containing many types of news and structures that are built around them, we can discern certain recurring features within the system. Many stories have visuals, for example. The majority of news refers to personalities. Online news has clearly measured traffic and social metrics. The list goes on: location, units of conflict, updates.

Now, when these features are carefully applied to robust game mechanics, the result is a newsgame that can be updated as often as the news itself.

Example? Look no further than fantasy sports. Fantasy sports can be deconstructed as a number of game mechanics (trading players, accruing points based on their performance) placed upon the foundation of sports statistics, a freely available, constantly updated resource within the news. The result is a thriving industry (if the Fantasy Sports Trade Association is to be believed) and millions of regular players.

News quizzes also come to mind. Facts are one of the most ubiquitous features of the news eco-system – though oddly absent on Fox News – and as a result, news quizzes are one of the only newsgames regularly featured by online news publishers (Examples: The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal & NPR). The age of procedurally generated quizzes has already dawned – Studio E9 has developed a platform that can generate quizzes automatically from a site’s existing content.

Back to my own project. Head to Head sources another freely available news resource, headlines, from various RSS feeds to put a new spin on the “free association” game mechanic seen in games like Apples to Apples. To start, the game assigns each player a number of headlines, each linked to a recent article from the world wide web. They must then submit their headline that best fits the category for that round, e.g., “Controversial”. One player will sit out that turn to be the judge, and they decide which headline wins.

I’ve thought a lot about what I want people to experience in this game. It comes down to discovery and conversation. What if you learnt that North Korea had decided to declare war on Japan inside of a game? And what would the discussion that followed be like? I want this to be a space that connects people to the news and to each other in a way that regular RSS readers do not.

No game will ever be the same, as long as the intractable entropy of the universe continues to produce fresh news (and headlines). And, because success is socially determined, there is no dominant strategy to suck the fun out of the game, at least in theory.

As much as I look forward to refining Head to Head and finally showing it to the public, this post is about the future of newsgame design. My point is: it has one. We just need to be realistic about the structural inefficiencies of the medium in a 24/7 media environment. System-centric design is one way around it and I hope it is an approach that can be developed further by journalists, game designers and the nutcases who just happen to be both.

Niel Bekker is a journalist and game designer, and a (very) recent graduate of Jay Rosen’s Studio 20 program in journalism. You should follow him on Twitter here.

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Bogost, Ferrari & Schweizer – Newsgames: Journalism at Play
An excellent book on the history and state-of-the art in newsgames. System-centric design can be considered as a direct response to their call for newsgames to be designed as “platforms”.

The Dynamics of News Information on the Web
A 2006 Harvard study that confirms what we already know: online news gets old fast. How fast? Well, they pin it at about 36 hours.

“Cartoonist Prototype Tackles the Most Visible News”
Bogost and co. have put their money where their mouth is, and actually begun building a newsgame authoring tool that allows journalists to generate games from stories without any coding or game design knowledge. It’s an interesting hybrid solution to the problem I describe above, combining the approach of system-centric design but with a micr0-newsgame end product. Simon Ferrari discusses the early results of their work.

Meet Socktopus.

Socktopus is where all your odd socks go when you can’t find their matching twin. Every time you find an odd sock, compare it to Socktopus’ tendrils:

• if nothing matches, stuff it into the organism.
• if you can make a matching pair, remove the other sock from Socktopus and celebrate!

Making your own Socktopus is simple:

Socktopus is so simple that I’m pretty sure it has been “invented” many times before. But if I can’t take credit for the idea, I can help share this neat little anti-entropy device with the rest of the world. May there be many more Socktopi!

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 ProPublica.

“The Fracking Song” is an explainer I worked on with David Holmes, a colleague in the Studio 20 class. Based on ProPublica’s investigative series on hydraulic fracturing, “Buried Secrets”, the song attempts to explain some of the facts and also the controversies surrounding the fracking process, so that users are better equipped to understand the news they receive about the subject. As David explained in his post on Explainer.Net:

“My Water’s On Fire Tonight (The Fracking Song)” is not meant to take the place of the rich, detailed investigation done by Abrahm Lustgarten and the rest of ProPublica’s frack squad. It’s impossible to sum up a massive, immersive experience like “Buried Secrets” in a two-and-a-half minute song. Instead, the intent is to bring people in, to create an easily digestible package that compels news consumers to dig into the real meat of the story.

In 2010, David and I tried our hand at original reporting through music for the first time, by writing an original rock opera about the bedbug menace in New York. The result, “Tiny Little Vampires”, was an enormous amount of fun to make (and arguably, to listen to), but it didn’t succeed as compelling internet video. So when a second chance to bring journalism to life through music came around, we had some good ideas about how to improve on our last effort.

After we recorded “The Fracking Song” based on David’s carefully researched lyrics, we knew that:

• Our video should not exceed 3 minutes in length.
• The visuals had to be vivid, but not over-complicated.
• Because we were using so many technical terms (and rapping like bosses), we had to put our key terms on screen, in writing. The music for Cee Lo Green’s “Fuck You” was a key inspiration.

Thanks to the excellent work of animators Adam Sakellarides and Lisa Rucker, we were able to achieve these objectives and at the time of writing, “My Water’s On Fire (The Fracking Song)” has received 89,000 hits on YouTube within 13 days of posting. In addition, the video was posted by Time Magazine, The Huffington Post, The New York Times and others, contributing to the broader public debate on fracking in the United States and beyond.

I hope you enjoy the song. (See if you can pick out my voice… hint: “benzene!”)

The Headline 2 Headline team.

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.

Here’s how the game works:

• Players login to the game whenever they want. Turns are asynchronous, like the iOS game Words With Friends.
• One player is the judge, while the rest receive 6 randomly assigned headlines from a list of well-known RSS feeds (ESPN, Perez Hilton, The New Yorker, etc). The judge rotates every round.
• Each round, there is a category, ranging from “sexy” to “political” to “breaking”. Players then submit the headline that most fits that category.
• The judge must decide which headline wins. Before they do so, the players are free to discuss which headline should receive the honour of winning the round. The player who submitted the winning headline wins the round.
• Players keep playing until the leader reaches the agreed number of points, e.g. 15 points.

Those of you who have played Apples to Apples will be familiar with the mechanics of this very social game. However, by adding a current events angle through the miracle of RSS, we hoped to achieve one of the most important objectives of newsgames: to get people talking about the news.

Hopefully, work will continue on Headline 2 Headline and I can share a playable version of the game in the near future.

Scvngr CEO Seth Priebatsch

“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 Memeburn.com

Bobby Schweizer

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 the challenge of making newsgames an accessible medium for regular journalists.

Full post on Explainer.Net

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 through are overwhelming.

If it no longer falls to journalists to discover, or even publish that information, what good are they at all?

Why, to explain, of course!

Full article on Memeburn.com