The Knight Foundation has established endowed chairs in journalism at top universities nationwide. The chairs are leaders who practice journalism, teach innovative classes, and create experimental projects and new programs that help advance journalism excellence in the digital age.
The University of Miami's Fall 2017 Visiting Knight Chair is Lindsay Grace.
Professor Grace will be researching human computation games in the service of news, rapid game making and application of engagement design concepts. Visit the research section for details on these concepts.
Content may be king, but experience is the kingdom. How do you turn the science and art of game design into strategies to creating audiences and keep them wanting more?
This workshop covers some core lessons learned and applies specific strategies learned from 2-years of research. Our findings indicate that the formal practice of game design offers three key foci that may likely prove useful to industries and practices concerned with improving their audience engagement strategies. These three foci are experience, agency and play. This workshop includes content adapted from our presentations at SXSW, the Game Developer’s Conference, and news organizations. These approaches are likely to improve the struggles facing not only the news industry, but other domains like activism, social impact, civic participation, and consumer retention.
Game Design rarely moves at the pace of news, but that doesn’t mean it can’t. Adapting a verb-centered design approach, this workshop demonstrates how a concise concept statement and a few hours with game making software can help you create interactive, toys and games quickly. Building on previously published work, the workshop demonstrations the difference between games (play with a goal), toys (play without an explicit goal) and interactives, showing how they can be created quickly.
(This workshop is BYOD, participants should install Construct 2 , Processing.org, Gamesalad, and Twine on their computers if they'd like to follow along.
You just completed a nice little prototype and now it’s time to take it to the masses. What are the steps to producing, publishing and promoting an independent game or public interactive. What are your options and how do you launch. Based on lessons learned from experience, this workshop covers the basic strategies and practicalities to bringing a project from prototype to public beta and beyond.
This discussion will expect that you have an in process project.
Our December symposium was an invite only event convening a variety of academics, students and professionals in Washington, DC. at the American University Game Lab. 50 Attendees registered for the event, including professionals from Smithsonian National Archives, Smithsonian American Art Museum, WAMU, The Woodrow Wilson Center, the University of Miami, American University, and more.
Presentations:
Community Presentations:
Publications:
A community effort guide to engagement design was released on December 10, 2017. The document covers our findings, through Jolt, on how game design can be applied to create better engagement.
Games (designed and developed in 2-5 days each)Interested in knowing more about the confluence of news and games? Here are some videos, publications and news about this work. Completed projects will also be posted here.
Jolt: Innovation in Journalism through Game Design
Presentations:
Presentation:
Nieman Lab, Games might be a good tool for fighting fake news. Here’s what three developers have learned, Christine, Schmidt, August 3, 2017.
Houston Chronicle, Fake news? Game seeks to train readers to separate fact and fiction in the media, Andrew Kragie, July 10, 2017
Patch.com [Austin], Beat The Monday Blahs With Scintillating Conversations At SXSW, Tony Cantu, March 13, 2017
NRC Media, So Save the Tech Press, Three Solutions for the Media (Dutch Language), March 21, 2017
NRC Media SXSW #4: Fake News and News Games, Jan Benjamin, March 21, 2017
Federal News Radio, Fact-checking in the era of fake news, Debra Roth and Nikki Cannon, March 10, 2017
Texas Public Radio (w/ Aaron Delwiche, Trinity University), (KPAC/KSTX-San Antonio, KTXI,KTPR,KCHL): The Source, Can Gaming Save the World?, March 16, 2015