Okay, this is not a Newsgame. Why not? It is not about news. Nevertheless i am going to write about it, because it is my very first game that achieved some kind of feedback. Apart from that there are some things that somewhat refer to the fuzzy new genre of Newsgames and that need some discussion e.g. the length and duration of games and the game development process.
H.I.V. Extinction took 48 hours to produce. It is a result of the Global Game Jam 2011. You can play it here. Actually the game is quite simple: Back to the days. Disco! It is hot, sweaty & loud. It is 1981. The year that AIDS was first reported. Try to get as many falling hearts as possible. Get three of them to get a condom. Fire condoms at your fellow dancers. Make them bubble around!
Some people seemed to have liked it. Krystian Majewski wrote some nice stuff “It’s fair to say that Marcus Bösch blew everybody’s mind with this concept and it remains one of the audience’s favorites. It also seems like it caught some attention over at Gay Gamer. Dennis Farr made some excellent observations about the game there. I think this is a good example of how an game idea doesn’t need to be technically complicated to be effective.” Thanks for that. I really liked Dennis Farr´s observations!
Experiencing the whole development process taught me several things. Do what you do best and rely on the skills of other people to complete something. For me working together with a designer and a programmer obviously works best. Thanks to Tim (design) and Markus (programming) without their help there would be no game.
It is quite hard to see how long it takes to finish even very small products. This is a lesson that is crucial for Newsgames as well. Otherwise your newsevent is long gone and over before you even finish your game. I had to think about the question if you want to spend 2 or 10 hours on a product that people spend a maximum of some minutes with. Even so i am not very convinced about the idea of certain frameworks for Newsgames that could work like a cartoon-setting. On the other hand i have not seen one of these. Maybe it is a good idea after all. Another thing: i prefer it plain and simple. For getting a point across complexity should be within the game idea not in the visual appeal or the user experience.
Anything else?
Yes!
- It’s book week at Brainy Gamer! Michael Abbott looks at three new books by Jane McGonigal (Reality is Broken), Ian Bogost (Newsgames, with collaborators Simon Ferrari and Bobby Schweitzer), and Tom Chatfield (Fun, Inc.). All three propose that games have the power to do important, transformative work, but they differ wildly in their goals and rhetorical strategies.
- There is an article about Newsgames over at TechNewsDaily.
- @ndiakopoulos has written an article about ‘Playing With Data‘