Publishing in the digital age is pretty simple. You upload a folder. And that is all. You and me and everybody we know are publishers. We all know that this leads to a situation of constant content overload and many many shrugs while people use the internet. Why the heck am i supposed to invest precious time on something when i could be stalking friends or watch free porn?!
Still every content-publisher longs for attention, recognition, love or at least some sort of feedback. No feedback at all means that you actually do not exist in terms of internet currency. There are many fantastic and even more applaudable obscure projects somewhere out there but can they actually exist on their own without at least some human beings using them? I do not know and leave this discussion to digital philosophers contemplating deserted parts of diverse app-stores.
Yesterday evening we uploaded Prism – the Game and deep in our heart we longed for recogniation. What a priceless feeling when tweet after tweet comes pinging in. Pretty sure that you can get addicted to instant digital feedback. Whatever. Truth told: We invested time checking out a pretty small niche. Newsgames is not a topic that normally gets people freaking out in joy and ecstasis. In addition others have written about a certain Big Brother fatigue.
So maybe we already missed the perfect point to launch the game. Apart from that we are happy to discuss the game mechanic. It was fairly simple. Something that was criticized. Fair enough. We totally agree. Time was short and HTML5 is not the easiest when it comes to programming games. Maybe we should try out Game Maker or Game Salad next time. We like Pippin Barrs attempt playing around with the former.
In the end we are quite content with 131 page visits on the first day. That may not sound very much, but we are quite happy with the likes of people that dropped by. Among them a bunch of digital journalists, a bunch of game thinkers, makers and critics and others. Special thx go out to Gonzalo Frasca, John C. Osborn Florent Maurin and Nick Diakopoulos.
This was a very first attempt to dive into the topic of actual newsgame-production. We are very happy to discuss the topic. Just drop us a line over at the Good Evil.
More
- Day Three Programming a (PRISM-)Newsgame
- Day Two Designing a (PRISM-)Newsgame
- Day One Brainstorming a (PRISM-)Newsgame