Game Center

General Description Mini-games around news stories. Play along as you read. See your scores, compete with your friends and find other games in the Chicago Tribune Game Center.

Games are woven into stories throughout chicagotribune.com. Most of these games would consist of simple trivia or role-playing questions. Some games would be more involved and stand on their own linked to from the Game Center or as related media links on stories. The Game Center would collect and display scores for all games and players and provide a list of all the available games on ChicagoTribune.com.

The Game Center is a platform for user engagement and an ecosystem of tools for rapid game development.

Technical Aspects: “Micro-games” are produced with a tool in the CMS to create quizzes with questions and answers.

“Mini-games” are produced by apps developers in collaboration with reporters and editors using our internal publishing tool, Tarbell. Tarbell uses Google spreadsheets for easy editing of game content and data by non-developers and publishes static HTML to Amazon S3.

The Game Center integrates with the Gigya API which provides a point system, badges, and titles. Using the Gigya API, we could also award points for sharing and reading. The Game Center would be built off of our existing user-generated content platform, making it quicker to build.

Design: “Micro games” are designed to be integrated throughout a story. Placement of a micro-game component will flow with the context of the narrative and provide an another way to tell the story and draw in readers. The user experience should be short and simple, focusing more on quick interactions.

“Mini games” take a more complex approach to telling a story and should be able to stand alone on a separate page. The games are designed to retain a users attention for a longer period and tackle larger news topics.

In each case, points earned and stars awarded (one to three) depending on performance are totaled and displayed for each game. All the user achievements are stored in a profile and totals are displayed on the Game Center homepage. The accumulation system is designed to create competition among users and encourage further interaction with games throughout the site.

Editorial Aspects: By adding game aspects to stories, we would provide another way for readers to engage with our website and help them to better understand stories by allowing them to think about the story in a different way. For members in our audience who enjoy these games aspects, the game center would create a totally new way for readers to discover content.

The Game Center gives life to traditional news stories by encouraging users to engage in the content by completing the challenges.

The Game Center also encourages users to share and read more on the Chicago Tribune website.

Planning: The Chicago Tribune has the necessary resources to accomplish this project now: Gigya, static site publishing, CMS tools for creating polls and quizzes, an existing platform for user-generated content.

Based on our experience here, most games will take anywhere from an hour (for micro-games) to two days (for mini-games) to develop.

We need to develop the Game Center mockups functionality throughout the site into a functional platform. This will take 3-4 weeks of design, development, and testing.

Roadblocks to this project include:
- Extra work for producers
- Providing a regular stream of game content to include in the Game Center
- Integration with Tribune CMS templates
- Audience participation: Our readers come to us for news, not games

Team Members: Alex Bordens, Assoc Editor of New Apps, David Eads, News Apps Developer, Ryan Mark, Director of News Apps