Dataminer

We will probably develop the dataminer application, unless we get enough arguments to go for the article rating system from the other groups.

What users will use this application?

• users that just want to play a game and gain levels
• users that want to read random articles of todays news in a certain genre.

We want to give the users the feeling that they are booking progress in the reading of newspapers. This is why we keep track of their progress.Some options are:

• some kind of monetary value gained while mining
• a level of a player, indicating its strength
• how deep the player can mine, expressed in meters
• the combined length of all shafts a player has mined

For each article a user mines, this indication will rise. This way it is also possible to make users compete against each other with some kind of highscore.

At specific levels, a user will gain bonuses, like being allowed to get articles from other newspapers, refine the genre the articles come from,...

When the user mines an article, he gets the choice to keep it in his backpack for later reading or reading it now and throw it away. The size of the backpack is fixed. If the backpack is full, the user has to delete some articles if he wants to keep the newly archived article.

The concept of this application is to make younger people more interested in the news, in a playful way. This means our testing public will be restricted to mostly children and adolescents. Unfortunately we won't be able to do the mom-test, but will replace it with the baby-brother-test.

The highscores will allow us to gather more people, because current players will invite their friends to beat them and they will keep playing, because people always want to beat others.