We don't want to offer the application as just a click game where the news is used as in-game currency. This is why we thought of a new feature for the application.
When a user mines an article, he will get the choice of 3 possible buyers. One of them will be related to the article and the other two will just be random people. Only the person related to the article will offer a lot of money for the article, while others will offer almost nothing. There would then be a highscore of the players with the most amount of money. Those who sell the articles to the correct persons will get money faster. This way there is a reason for actually reading the articles. To implement this, we can use opencalais or something similar to get names out of the articles.
Now that we have a final concept, we will explain everything in more detail with the help of a storyboard.
Storyboard
Again the application starts with some kind of start screen.
The user start with no depth and no money in the dig tab.
All bullets in the picture are clickable.
When going over a certain bullet, a roll over menu is shown.
This menu indicates which type of article will be mined and from which newspaper.
Also an indication of progress is given.
Every time the user clicks on the "Random Story" bullet, a random new story article will be shown. More about this in just a few moments.
When a certain node is fully dug out, the user will be able to go to that point.
Also new categories will be available. New categories are refinements of the earlier category or random articles from a total new newspaper.
Earlier bullets will still be available to dig by going to that point and clicking on it.
When the user goes deeper he will discover new layers with more interesting contents.
When interested, he will be able to read the entire article by clicking on the read more button.
To proceed, the user has to sell the article to a random character.
1 character will reward the user generously. The other two will give consolation credits.
In this way, we do not force the user to read the article, but it is more advantageous if he would.
Some kind of special reward for players that fulfill a certain requirement.
Users can invite friends and watch their progress, badges and trophies.
Why do we want to make this application?
Our goal is to get younger people in touch with news. Most kids and teens aren't interested in the news. By adding a playful element to the news, they might read more of the news and get interested in it. They will learn while playing the game.
How will we achieve our goals?
- We will add a competitive element to make sure users keep playing the game. The competitive element will consist of badges that users can show to others and two kinds of highscores: mining depth and coins gathered.
- We will make sure that users read the news by rewarding them for reading it. When they sell the article to the correct person, they get more money.
We found a related idea about social news gaming. http://www.newsgaming.de/2010/10/a-social-news-game/
Their concept is very similar to ours. They also want a rating system with badges and stress the competitive element while retaining the social news aspect.
They do have some variations. They let the users be reporters, while we let them be miners. They are also talking about selling things to their users and companies, while ours will be free.
They say they will be the first app in this genre. Our goal is now to try to beat them by finishing our application before them.
Getting rid of the auction system is a good decision, it's always better to focus on just 1 idea instead of more.
ReplyDeleteThe proposed UI looks great, it's simple and effective. Especially the separation between the top of the screen with player information and the bottom with the visuals on the mining seems good.
The badges reminds us of the use of achievements we see in videogames a lot lately. Using this will definitely keep the users coming back, giving them a goal to achieve, like collecting all of the badges. And rewarding them for it obviously helps too :)
We were wondering though: when a user gets to a very low depth, is there some kind of overview of the whole drilling he has done so far? It seems like how more the user drills the more things get disorganised.
We like the idea of trying to get younger people into reading news papers but does this mean they will read the same articles as lets say cnn.com? It might be hard for them to read/become interested in a complicated political article (as example topic).
The rationale for why you want to build the application is nice.
ReplyDeleteI'm afraid I'm still a bit confused about how the selling process works and about how one drills exactly for news. May be OK if I would understand when I see the application, but I do worry a bit that, if this is not clear at first sight, you will have troubles attracting and keeping users...
A similar application, but without the news, can be found as Digg It, a popular iOS game.
ReplyDeleteI also have some concerns about the digging, the general concept looks ok and is described well, however it is unclear to me how you get to see the article. Does it instantly pop up or do you need to click the node again. The concept of selling seems ok but when using peoples name it is starting to look more like a quiz. Again, Digg It is a possible example to that as you just sell it to a general store and get money and use the money to buy upgrades.
Will there be a limit too how often a user can mine a day/hour? Otherwise I imagine that users who play for a couple of hours a day, would easily mine out everything they can (assuming you cannot keep refining each category into infinity)... What happens then? Do mine shafts 'cave in' as new news becomes available?
ReplyDeleteAs said before, the deeper you go, and the more and more forks you take, it may get easy to lose track of the full overview of your tunneling. Being able to zoom out might be a good option.
Erik, I find the selling concept rather clear and well explained. From what I understand, the highscores (or at least one of the two) is based on the money the user collected. To get money, users need to mine, and subsequently sell articles. There are three persons/NPCs/names/options to sell to. Two will have something like a randomly generated name, or a name from someone in a completely unrelated article. The 3rd is named after a subject from the article the user has just found. This third will pay/give the user a lot of money (thus a bigger rank boost) for the article, than the other two.
If the user reads the article he found, he'll find out which of the 3 is mentioned in the article (or whom the article is about), and thus who will give them the most money.
This is, in my opinion, a very good incentive to get users to read the articles and do more than just mining.
~ Team SuCHI