Back to the drawing board?

After the reviews we got from the paper version, we now have a better look at our concept. It seems the concept isn't very clear for the users. Not all the reviewers seem to understand the point of the game.
This leaves us with a tough choice. Do we have to keep to our current concept of mining with a tree-structure or do we have to change to yet another idea?

What are the pros and the cons of our current idea?

• We saw the tree-structure as a way to unlock better news and more refined categories later in the game. This can however also be seen as annoying the user with stuff they don't want to read in the beginning. Only later on in the game they will be able to get the refined news they are looking for. The user will never get there, as we scare them away in the beginning of the game. For us it was clear that the user can work towards the news he likes, but apparently not all users see it this way.
• We had money in the game, but the money had no use except the highscores. This was very confusing for the users, because they expect to be able to buy something with the money.
• It seems that the rollovers were not clear enough in our paper version. Users got lost in the UI and didn't know what to do, because the information was in the rollovers. Some users also didn't know how to get out of certain menus, as there was no cross to close it. Both these things can be related to the fact that it is only a paper version, where a rollover is hard to simulate and that a paper isn't always the same as a window. We don't know this for sure, the only way to find out is by testing it in a real version. 

If we want to continue with our current idea, we should find solutions for these problems.
Now, why would we stick to our current concept?

• Some of the test-users liked the concept, even though it can use some refinement.
• We already worked out this concept. Although this should not make our decision, unwillingly it will play a role.
• The idea of badges and highscores will make the players come back to our application.

What next?

One of our test subjects (E.D.) suggested to give the articles a value based on the opinions of friends on that article. In this vision, you will rate articles which will increase their value. This could be globally or for your friends. We should decide what the meaning of the depth is. This could be refinement of categories, value of the articles found or even nothing. We had the feeling we did this, but apparently it wasn't clear enough.

We thought we could give more articles of a specific category based on what the user and his friends liked. So every category starts with the same likelihood to be digged at the surface, but the deeper you mine, the more you get articles that match the interests of your friend group. You are also able to go back up to get some more varied news. If you want to read something totally unrelated to what your friends like, you won't find it if you mine too deep. However, articles that match the interests of your friends will be worth more. To keep this system working, a user would be obligated to press like or dislike. That way no news stays unrated.

Similar to this idea, and merged with an idea of E.D., we can make a user walk around underground, indicating where articles are. These articles would be represented by mud, rocks, diamonds,... The value of the mineral indicates how much the article was rated by the friends of the user. If it receives a negative rating, its mud, a neutral or no rating makes it a stone and a positive rating makes it gold or diamonds. If a user mines a rock, and finds it iteresting he gives it a good rating and the article raises in value. If afterwards the value rises, the user gets extra points. If however others dislike it and the value decreases, the user that gave it a good rating gets penalized. In this solution the mining depth would have no use or value. The value will depend on the icon representing the article.

The problem with these new ideas is that we don't know if they will solve the problems we have with our current design. It could be that our users think they are even worse than our original idea.

We are leaning towards the last idea we described here. We will work this out in more detail and try if users prefer the paper version of that idea. Depending on the comments we get from the users, we will decide with what idea we should continue. We won't make a final decision at this moment.

Any thoughts on the new concept we chose to work out, the other concepts we described or new concepts are welcome.

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.

Article rating

We are still not sure which of the two ideas we will work on. To have a better idea of which one will become our final project, we decided to do a little more work on both of them before deciding. In this post the news-rating system will be explained, the one about dataminer is already here.

The basic idea is that we want people to be able to comment on the news and share it with their friends. We would add a box on news sites, where you can directly see what your friends thought of the article you are viewing. You can also add your own comments and ratings there, or even click a button to see some related articles on different news-sites. 

Here is a mockup-picture of what it could look like:

A second part of our program would give users the possibility to see all of their friends comments on the news of that day and give comments on the comments, read the articles their friends liked or read similar articles. The comments could be sorted by news-category, rating given to the article,...

Both features would contain the same data, so the user can choose to only use one of the features, or both. 

The good side of choosing this idea is that there is a big public able to use it. Even our moms could use this kind of software, while they won't start playing games. That gives us a varied test public when we make changes and it is easier to evaluate if our changes were good.

The down side is that it isn't very original and that it is only useful if many of your friends also use this. The mining game won't have that problem, as it is also playable when you are alone.

We will discuss which idea seems best for everyone in the coming days.

2 Options to Rule Them All

Option 2 - DataMiner

Choosing what application we will make

In todays course we first had to choose if we wanted to do the project about news or music. We have chosen to do something about the news, because there are already so much applications that do something with music. Also some team members already worked with music and wanted to do something new.

We had a brainstorm session about what we could do with the news. Here are a few items we came up with. Some are more realistic than others.

• Gambling on the sensation value of the news of the next day... will a bomb explode, or is it yet again news about the lack of government in Belgium?
• A game where people can unlock better newspapers: they start with the "story" and end with "de tijd"
• Make a site where people can comment on news articles and rate them. You can then see the articles your friends liked most.
• We could add a possibility to comment on user comments, as most newspapers don't allow this
• Give newsarticles related to the article you are viewing or some words you enter in a search box.
• Gambling on how long a current topic will survive in the news
• Make a game where a miner can mine data and increase his skills while mining the news. Lighter lecture like "Story" will be like mining sand, while "de tijd" will be some very though rock. It is possible to get better skills and equipment to be able to read thougher news.
• Add hidden content to news items

We have 2 favourites within these possibilities: the mining game and the article-rating site. We haven't decided yet which one we will make.