Just over a year ago, Rochester’s Democrat and Chronicle launched an ambitious Alternate Reality Game (ARG) called Picture the Impossible. The seven-week game was a collaboration with the Lab for Social Computing at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and it built web, print, and real-life challenges over a fictional storyline designed to connect players with with Rochester’s history. Participants were divided into three teams that competed against each other to earn money for three local charities. The players completed a scavenger hunt in a local cemetery, created recipes for a cooking contest focused on local ingredients, and earned points each week for both web-based games like jigsaw puzzles and print newspaper challenges like assembling a mystery photo. The game concluded with a Halloween costume party for the top players.
Over 2,500 people signed up for the game in all, and it attracted a highly engaged core of about 600 people, including members of the young professional demographic that the Democrat and Chronicle had been most hoping to attract. But running an ARG was also very resource-intensive. I talked with Traci Bauer, the Democrat and Chronicle’s managing editor for content and digital platforms, about what the paper learned from Picture the Impossible, and how they are building social gaming into the paper’s day-to-day operations.
Picture the Impossible emerged through a collaboration between Bauer and RIT professor Elizabeth Lane Lawley. It was funded through sweat equity from both organizations and a donation from a local charity and Microsoft Bing. (Kodak, which is based in Rochester, provided cameras and printers as weekly prizes.)
The game attracted players of all ages, including families, students brought in through RIT, and plenty of Baby Boomers. (“They’re easy,” Bauer said. “Boomers do everything.”) Two-thirds of the players were women. The most important strengths of the game were the collaborative team structure and the focus on earning money for charity. Team spirit was high on the message boards for the three different “factions,” and players strategized ways to maximize their weekly point totals. The scavenger hunts and real-life games (some powered by the text-messaging/smartphone app SCVNGR) were popular, as was the cooking competition, which brought in 104 entrants. When I spoke with Bauer and Lawley last year, they had also been very excited about the way the game used the print paper as a physical element of play.
Bauer said the newspaper had learned enough from the collaboration that the experiment would have been worthwhile even if the game flopped. It didn’t.
“The beauty of it wasn’t in the volume of players, but in the amount of time that they spent in the game,” Bauer said. “In the end we had 62 minutes on-site per unique, and that’s compared to 30-35 minutes on our core sites.”
Bauer came out of the project believing that the news industry needs to harness gaming strategies. “There’s something in there, for sure,” she said.
Her goal is for the Democrat and Chronicle to always have some kind of social gaming presence. When Picture the Impossible closed last Halloween, “I wanted to quickly get another initiative out there,” Bauer said. “I hate when you build something and it’s a success and you put it up on a shelf and don’t pay attention to it for years.”
The problem was that Picture the Impossible had taken a huge amount of time and resources. The newspaper’s collaboration with RIT had ended, and the pressures of making social gaming a normal part of newspaper operations meant figuring out a more pared-down, sustainable model.
For the Democrat and Chronicle, that has meant abandoning the Alternate Reality Game model, with its fictional storyline that united the different elements of the game and propelled it forward. As a news organization, Bauer said, creating fictional scenarios didn’t really fit with their mission. It also meant fewer real-life challenges, even though they were very popular with players. RIT had been “instrumental” in making those in-person activities work. “It’s not what we’re really good at, organizing baking contests and things like that,” Bauer said. “It wasn’t what we’re about.”
This time around, the Democrat and Chronicle’s new social gaming project, score!, is focused around one of the newspaper’s core activities: political coverage. Launched in June, score! focuses on the November elections, and consists mainly of politically-themed web games and quizzes. One new game, Headline Hopper, has players propel little politicians through a landscape of quotes, Mario Brothers-style.
As in Picture the Impossible, players accumulate points and earn money for charity, and the profiles of score! players note whether they participated in Picture the Impossible, to build continuity between the two games.
This time, Bauer said, they thought the team loyalty that had powered Picture the Impossible would be formed around political parties, the Democrats competing with the Republicans. But that team structure flopped when only four Republicans signed up. As a result, Bauer said, they’ve mostly abandoned the team focus. The in-person component of score! has also been scaled back; players can get “stalker” points for snapping photographs of politicians at local events, but Bauer said the challenge hasn’t really taken off. Part of the problem is that candidates are unpredictable, so it’s hard to get information about possible stalker events until the very last minute.
The election focus has been one of the strengths of score!, in part because it gives the game a natural theme that’s easy to build content around, and in part because the games build on the status that comes along with being well-informed about politics — and with having other people know that you are.
“In the forums they talk about how much they’ve learned about the election, and how they feel like smarter voters because of it,” Bauer said.
Players now need to log in to the game through Facebook, which has generated about a dozen complaints from people who can’t play — not enough to be a real concern. And the benefit of the Facebook platform is that it allows players to compare their scores with friends.
Like Picture the Impossible, Bauer said that the 2,300 score! players fall into three tiers: a smaller group of 250 hardcore players, a middle tier of casual players, and then the remainder — who scored a few points and then didn’t come back.
“That’s really our target, is the causal player,” Bauer said.
One of the biggest challenges of running games when you’re not a full-time gaming company is negotiating the relationship with the hardcore players versus the larger group of more casual ones. The most devoted players are also the ones who post the most complaints on forums and Facebook. “We have to keep reminding each other as a team this is an initiative that is going to be constant on our site, and we can’t wear ourselves out catering to five people,” Bauer said.
At the same time, those small number of hardcore players are responsible for a lot of the games’ energy. “That’s where the conundrum is,” Bauer said. “We owe all of our success to those kinds of people.”
When score! ends, Bauer will evaluate the game’s analytics to see which parts of it generated enough engagement to make the time invested in it worthwhile, and continue to think about how to automate parts of the game to make it more sustainable. The next game will debut sometime early in the winter, Bauer said, and it may involve competition between players in Rochester and other cities.
So far, the Democrat and Chronicle is the only Gannett paper to implement a major gaming initiative, Bauer said. She said this was disappointing, but not surprising, since the success of Picture the Impossible didn’t translate into a bump in revenue. (Unlike Picture the Impossible, score! has advertising on its site.) As much as she believes in making social gaming part of a newspaper’s toolbox, Bauer said, “it certainly doesn’t produce a lot of revenue, and until it does, it’s not going to get a lot of attention.”
The other day I blogged with a funny Santa photo of my daughter, which I made into our holiday card that year. Even though my little one still has some fears of Santa, the vast majority of kids find him fun and fascinating. As you may have read in Lisa Sikora’s blog post last week, Windows and Southwest Airlines are partnering to bring you Holiday Photos on the Fly. This is a great opportunity to have your photo taken with Santa for free. Once your photo is taken, you’ll get a printed copy and later you can logon to www.freeholidayphotos.com to retrieve and share your photo. Southwest and Windows are offering this great opportunity in 26 airports, as well as kiosks located at Bryant Park in NYC and Skyline Park in Denver. If you can, make sure you take advantage of this great opportunity – who can beat free!
Now that covers fun with Santa, but I personally also strive for that great family photo to share out and I commonly face the familiar crisis I’m sure many parents also go through: It’s December 1st and I need a nice family photo for our holiday cards! Thankfully, this task has been made much easier with a few great inventions.
First, Windows Live Photo Gallery now provides a special touch of magic, enabling you to very quickly fix nearly any photo and create perfection. This includes the tool Photo Fuse, which allows you take several photos of the same group shot and merge them together to create the photo YOU want – you may have seen this in recent “To the Cloud” TV advertising and it seriously is that easy! Essentially, you can now have that perfect group or family photo without every person having to smile at the same time. I told you…just like magic. For any parent, taking that perfect picture can be very daunting. Photo Fuse has saved me time and money, as I now don’t have to pay for a professional photographer to capture everyone in the right pose. Once you have taken your group photos, simply open Photo Gallery, highlight the set of photos you want to fuse together and click Photos Fuse (under the create tab) and presto! For in depth tips and steps on how to do this, see my previous blog post on photo editing in Windows Live, which will show you how to use Retouch, Auto Adjust and Photo Fuse.
Second, there are a plethora of tools available to help you create fun holiday cards, whether you want to send yours electronically or pay for a professional service print and mail cards out for you. Additionally, advancements in photo printers have made it easier than ever to print your own photo cards at home. I like the Epson Artison 725 All In One printer, which is not only very affordable at just under $200, but also gives you hi-definition prints and is the world’s fastest 4” x 6” photo printer. Since I’m usually in a rush to get my cards and invitations out the door, I like to use online software to create my own masterpiece and then print them up myself at home, which guarantees I’ll get my cards out to friends and family before the New Year.
For more information on the Epson Artison 725 printer, my colleague Brandon will be doing a review of it on the Windows Experience Blog in the coming weeks.
bench craft company rip off
Hulu plans its own entertainment <b>news</b> show, but will anyone watch?
As Peter Kafka at MediaMemo reports, Hulu is currently casting for a presenter for the show which will be published daily, taking a 'Daily Show'-style satirical approach to the latest entertainment news. Hulu (backed by US TV giants NBC ...
Soap <b>News</b>: 'Days of Our Lives' Lands Big Fish and More
The holidays are hopping in soap opera world, with new characters moving in and familiar faces returning. Last week, we reported that CBS gave 'The.
This Week in Credit Card <b>News</b> - MoneyBuilder - making sense of <b>...</b>
Provided by LowCards.com More Than Eight Million People Drop Out of Credit Card Use More than eight million consumers stopped using credit cards over the past year, according to a new study by TransUnion. The use of general purpose ...
bench craft company rip off
Hulu plans its own entertainment <b>news</b> show, but will anyone watch?
As Peter Kafka at MediaMemo reports, Hulu is currently casting for a presenter for the show which will be published daily, taking a 'Daily Show'-style satirical approach to the latest entertainment news. Hulu (backed by US TV giants NBC ...
Soap <b>News</b>: 'Days of Our Lives' Lands Big Fish and More
The holidays are hopping in soap opera world, with new characters moving in and familiar faces returning. Last week, we reported that CBS gave 'The.
This Week in Credit Card <b>News</b> - MoneyBuilder - making sense of <b>...</b>
Provided by LowCards.com More Than Eight Million People Drop Out of Credit Card Use More than eight million consumers stopped using credit cards over the past year, according to a new study by TransUnion. The use of general purpose ...
bench craft company rip off
Hulu plans its own entertainment <b>news</b> show, but will anyone watch?
As Peter Kafka at MediaMemo reports, Hulu is currently casting for a presenter for the show which will be published daily, taking a 'Daily Show'-style satirical approach to the latest entertainment news. Hulu (backed by US TV giants NBC ...
Soap <b>News</b>: 'Days of Our Lives' Lands Big Fish and More
The holidays are hopping in soap opera world, with new characters moving in and familiar faces returning. Last week, we reported that CBS gave 'The.
This Week in Credit Card <b>News</b> - MoneyBuilder - making sense of <b>...</b>
Provided by LowCards.com More Than Eight Million People Drop Out of Credit Card Use More than eight million consumers stopped using credit cards over the past year, according to a new study by TransUnion. The use of general purpose ...
bench craft company rip off
Hulu sus planes de <b> propio entretenimiento de noticias </ b> muestran, pero a nadie ver? Como Peter Kafka en informes MediaMemo, Hulu es actualmente el casting para un presentador de la serie que se publica todos los días, teniendo una 'Daily Show' al estilo de enfoque satírico de las últimas noticias de entretenimiento. Hulu (respaldado por EE.UU. gigantes de televisión NBC ...
Jabón <b> Noticias </ b>: Vacaciones Días de nuestras vidas "' ' Tierras Big Fish y másLa están saltando en el mundo de las telenovelas, . con nuevos personajes que entran y caras familiares que regresan La semana pasada, se informó que la CBS le dio "El
Esta semana en la tarjeta de crédito <b> Noticias </ b> - MoneyBuilder - sentido de lo que <b> .... </ b> Proporcionado por LowCards.com más de ocho millones de personas abandonan la Tarjeta de Crédito uso Más de ocho millones de consumidores dejaron de usar las tarjetas de crédito durante el año pasado, según un nuevo estudio de TransUnion. El uso de propósito general .. .
bench craft company rip off
Hulu plans its own entertainment <b>news</b> show, but will anyone watch?
As Peter Kafka at MediaMemo reports, Hulu is currently casting for a presenter for the show which will be published daily, taking a 'Daily Show'-style satirical approach to the latest entertainment news. Hulu (backed by US TV giants NBC ...
Soap <b>News</b>: 'Days of Our Lives' Lands Big Fish and More
The holidays are hopping in soap opera world, with new characters moving in and familiar faces returning. Last week, we reported that CBS gave 'The.
This Week in Credit Card <b>News</b> - MoneyBuilder - making sense of <b>...</b>
Provided by LowCards.com More Than Eight Million People Drop Out of Credit Card Use More than eight million consumers stopped using credit cards over the past year, according to a new study by TransUnion. The use of general purpose ...
bench craft company rip off
Just over a year ago, Rochester’s Democrat and Chronicle launched an ambitious Alternate Reality Game (ARG) called Picture the Impossible. The seven-week game was a collaboration with the Lab for Social Computing at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and it built web, print, and real-life challenges over a fictional storyline designed to connect players with with Rochester’s history. Participants were divided into three teams that competed against each other to earn money for three local charities. The players completed a scavenger hunt in a local cemetery, created recipes for a cooking contest focused on local ingredients, and earned points each week for both web-based games like jigsaw puzzles and print newspaper challenges like assembling a mystery photo. The game concluded with a Halloween costume party for the top players.
Over 2,500 people signed up for the game in all, and it attracted a highly engaged core of about 600 people, including members of the young professional demographic that the Democrat and Chronicle had been most hoping to attract. But running an ARG was also very resource-intensive. I talked with Traci Bauer, the Democrat and Chronicle’s managing editor for content and digital platforms, about what the paper learned from Picture the Impossible, and how they are building social gaming into the paper’s day-to-day operations.
Picture the Impossible emerged through a collaboration between Bauer and RIT professor Elizabeth Lane Lawley. It was funded through sweat equity from both organizations and a donation from a local charity and Microsoft Bing. (Kodak, which is based in Rochester, provided cameras and printers as weekly prizes.)
The game attracted players of all ages, including families, students brought in through RIT, and plenty of Baby Boomers. (“They’re easy,” Bauer said. “Boomers do everything.”) Two-thirds of the players were women. The most important strengths of the game were the collaborative team structure and the focus on earning money for charity. Team spirit was high on the message boards for the three different “factions,” and players strategized ways to maximize their weekly point totals. The scavenger hunts and real-life games (some powered by the text-messaging/smartphone app SCVNGR) were popular, as was the cooking competition, which brought in 104 entrants. When I spoke with Bauer and Lawley last year, they had also been very excited about the way the game used the print paper as a physical element of play.
Bauer said the newspaper had learned enough from the collaboration that the experiment would have been worthwhile even if the game flopped. It didn’t.
“The beauty of it wasn’t in the volume of players, but in the amount of time that they spent in the game,” Bauer said. “In the end we had 62 minutes on-site per unique, and that’s compared to 30-35 minutes on our core sites.”
Bauer came out of the project believing that the news industry needs to harness gaming strategies. “There’s something in there, for sure,” she said.
Her goal is for the Democrat and Chronicle to always have some kind of social gaming presence. When Picture the Impossible closed last Halloween, “I wanted to quickly get another initiative out there,” Bauer said. “I hate when you build something and it’s a success and you put it up on a shelf and don’t pay attention to it for years.”
The problem was that Picture the Impossible had taken a huge amount of time and resources. The newspaper’s collaboration with RIT had ended, and the pressures of making social gaming a normal part of newspaper operations meant figuring out a more pared-down, sustainable model.
For the Democrat and Chronicle, that has meant abandoning the Alternate Reality Game model, with its fictional storyline that united the different elements of the game and propelled it forward. As a news organization, Bauer said, creating fictional scenarios didn’t really fit with their mission. It also meant fewer real-life challenges, even though they were very popular with players. RIT had been “instrumental” in making those in-person activities work. “It’s not what we’re really good at, organizing baking contests and things like that,” Bauer said. “It wasn’t what we’re about.”
This time around, the Democrat and Chronicle’s new social gaming project, score!, is focused around one of the newspaper’s core activities: political coverage. Launched in June, score! focuses on the November elections, and consists mainly of politically-themed web games and quizzes. One new game, Headline Hopper, has players propel little politicians through a landscape of quotes, Mario Brothers-style.
As in Picture the Impossible, players accumulate points and earn money for charity, and the profiles of score! players note whether they participated in Picture the Impossible, to build continuity between the two games.
This time, Bauer said, they thought the team loyalty that had powered Picture the Impossible would be formed around political parties, the Democrats competing with the Republicans. But that team structure flopped when only four Republicans signed up. As a result, Bauer said, they’ve mostly abandoned the team focus. The in-person component of score! has also been scaled back; players can get “stalker” points for snapping photographs of politicians at local events, but Bauer said the challenge hasn’t really taken off. Part of the problem is that candidates are unpredictable, so it’s hard to get information about possible stalker events until the very last minute.
The election focus has been one of the strengths of score!, in part because it gives the game a natural theme that’s easy to build content around, and in part because the games build on the status that comes along with being well-informed about politics — and with having other people know that you are.
“In the forums they talk about how much they’ve learned about the election, and how they feel like smarter voters because of it,” Bauer said.
Players now need to log in to the game through Facebook, which has generated about a dozen complaints from people who can’t play — not enough to be a real concern. And the benefit of the Facebook platform is that it allows players to compare their scores with friends.
Like Picture the Impossible, Bauer said that the 2,300 score! players fall into three tiers: a smaller group of 250 hardcore players, a middle tier of casual players, and then the remainder — who scored a few points and then didn’t come back.
“That’s really our target, is the causal player,” Bauer said.
One of the biggest challenges of running games when you’re not a full-time gaming company is negotiating the relationship with the hardcore players versus the larger group of more casual ones. The most devoted players are also the ones who post the most complaints on forums and Facebook. “We have to keep reminding each other as a team this is an initiative that is going to be constant on our site, and we can’t wear ourselves out catering to five people,” Bauer said.
At the same time, those small number of hardcore players are responsible for a lot of the games’ energy. “That’s where the conundrum is,” Bauer said. “We owe all of our success to those kinds of people.”
When score! ends, Bauer will evaluate the game’s analytics to see which parts of it generated enough engagement to make the time invested in it worthwhile, and continue to think about how to automate parts of the game to make it more sustainable. The next game will debut sometime early in the winter, Bauer said, and it may involve competition between players in Rochester and other cities.
So far, the Democrat and Chronicle is the only Gannett paper to implement a major gaming initiative, Bauer said. She said this was disappointing, but not surprising, since the success of Picture the Impossible didn’t translate into a bump in revenue. (Unlike Picture the Impossible, score! has advertising on its site.) As much as she believes in making social gaming part of a newspaper’s toolbox, Bauer said, “it certainly doesn’t produce a lot of revenue, and until it does, it’s not going to get a lot of attention.”
The other day I blogged with a funny Santa photo of my daughter, which I made into our holiday card that year. Even though my little one still has some fears of Santa, the vast majority of kids find him fun and fascinating. As you may have read in Lisa Sikora’s blog post last week, Windows and Southwest Airlines are partnering to bring you Holiday Photos on the Fly. This is a great opportunity to have your photo taken with Santa for free. Once your photo is taken, you’ll get a printed copy and later you can logon to www.freeholidayphotos.com to retrieve and share your photo. Southwest and Windows are offering this great opportunity in 26 airports, as well as kiosks located at Bryant Park in NYC and Skyline Park in Denver. If you can, make sure you take advantage of this great opportunity – who can beat free!
Now that covers fun with Santa, but I personally also strive for that great family photo to share out and I commonly face the familiar crisis I’m sure many parents also go through: It’s December 1st and I need a nice family photo for our holiday cards! Thankfully, this task has been made much easier with a few great inventions.
First, Windows Live Photo Gallery now provides a special touch of magic, enabling you to very quickly fix nearly any photo and create perfection. This includes the tool Photo Fuse, which allows you take several photos of the same group shot and merge them together to create the photo YOU want – you may have seen this in recent “To the Cloud” TV advertising and it seriously is that easy! Essentially, you can now have that perfect group or family photo without every person having to smile at the same time. I told you…just like magic. For any parent, taking that perfect picture can be very daunting. Photo Fuse has saved me time and money, as I now don’t have to pay for a professional photographer to capture everyone in the right pose. Once you have taken your group photos, simply open Photo Gallery, highlight the set of photos you want to fuse together and click Photos Fuse (under the create tab) and presto! For in depth tips and steps on how to do this, see my previous blog post on photo editing in Windows Live, which will show you how to use Retouch, Auto Adjust and Photo Fuse.
Second, there are a plethora of tools available to help you create fun holiday cards, whether you want to send yours electronically or pay for a professional service print and mail cards out for you. Additionally, advancements in photo printers have made it easier than ever to print your own photo cards at home. I like the Epson Artison 725 All In One printer, which is not only very affordable at just under $200, but also gives you hi-definition prints and is the world’s fastest 4” x 6” photo printer. Since I’m usually in a rush to get my cards and invitations out the door, I like to use online software to create my own masterpiece and then print them up myself at home, which guarantees I’ll get my cards out to friends and family before the New Year.
For more information on the Epson Artison 725 printer, my colleague Brandon will be doing a review of it on the Windows Experience Blog in the coming weeks.
bench craft company rip off
Hulu plans its own entertainment <b>news</b> show, but will anyone watch?
As Peter Kafka at MediaMemo reports, Hulu is currently casting for a presenter for the show which will be published daily, taking a 'Daily Show'-style satirical approach to the latest entertainment news. Hulu (backed by US TV giants NBC ...
Soap <b>News</b>: 'Days of Our Lives' Lands Big Fish and More
The holidays are hopping in soap opera world, with new characters moving in and familiar faces returning. Last week, we reported that CBS gave 'The.
This Week in Credit Card <b>News</b> - MoneyBuilder - making sense of <b>...</b>
Provided by LowCards.com More Than Eight Million People Drop Out of Credit Card Use More than eight million consumers stopped using credit cards over the past year, according to a new study by TransUnion. The use of general purpose ...
bench craft company rip off
Hulu plans its own entertainment <b>news</b> show, but will anyone watch?
As Peter Kafka at MediaMemo reports, Hulu is currently casting for a presenter for the show which will be published daily, taking a 'Daily Show'-style satirical approach to the latest entertainment news. Hulu (backed by US TV giants NBC ...
Soap <b>News</b>: 'Days of Our Lives' Lands Big Fish and More
The holidays are hopping in soap opera world, with new characters moving in and familiar faces returning. Last week, we reported that CBS gave 'The.
This Week in Credit Card <b>News</b> - MoneyBuilder - making sense of <b>...</b>
Provided by LowCards.com More Than Eight Million People Drop Out of Credit Card Use More than eight million consumers stopped using credit cards over the past year, according to a new study by TransUnion. The use of general purpose ...
bench craft company rip off
Hulu plans its own entertainment <b>news</b> show, but will anyone watch?
As Peter Kafka at MediaMemo reports, Hulu is currently casting for a presenter for the show which will be published daily, taking a 'Daily Show'-style satirical approach to the latest entertainment news. Hulu (backed by US TV giants NBC ...
Soap <b>News</b>: 'Days of Our Lives' Lands Big Fish and More
The holidays are hopping in soap opera world, with new characters moving in and familiar faces returning. Last week, we reported that CBS gave 'The.
This Week in Credit Card <b>News</b> - MoneyBuilder - making sense of <b>...</b>
Provided by LowCards.com More Than Eight Million People Drop Out of Credit Card Use More than eight million consumers stopped using credit cards over the past year, according to a new study by TransUnion. The use of general purpose ...
bench craft company rip off
Hulu plans its own entertainment <b>news</b> show, but will anyone watch?
As Peter Kafka at MediaMemo reports, Hulu is currently casting for a presenter for the show which will be published daily, taking a 'Daily Show'-style satirical approach to the latest entertainment news. Hulu (backed by US TV giants NBC ...
Soap <b>News</b>: 'Days of Our Lives' Lands Big Fish and More
The holidays are hopping in soap opera world, with new characters moving in and familiar faces returning. Last week, we reported that CBS gave 'The.
This Week in Credit Card <b>News</b> - MoneyBuilder - making sense of <b>...</b>
Provided by LowCards.com More Than Eight Million People Drop Out of Credit Card Use More than eight million consumers stopped using credit cards over the past year, according to a new study by TransUnion. The use of general purpose ...
bench craft company rip off
Hulu plans its own entertainment <b>news</b> show, but will anyone watch?
As Peter Kafka at MediaMemo reports, Hulu is currently casting for a presenter for the show which will be published daily, taking a 'Daily Show'-style satirical approach to the latest entertainment news. Hulu (backed by US TV giants NBC ...
Soap <b>News</b>: 'Days of Our Lives' Lands Big Fish and More
The holidays are hopping in soap opera world, with new characters moving in and familiar faces returning. Last week, we reported that CBS gave 'The.
This Week in Credit Card <b>News</b> - MoneyBuilder - making sense of <b>...</b>
Provided by LowCards.com More Than Eight Million People Drop Out of Credit Card Use More than eight million consumers stopped using credit cards over the past year, according to a new study by TransUnion. The use of general purpose ...
bench craft company rip off
Hulu plans its own entertainment <b>news</b> show, but will anyone watch?
As Peter Kafka at MediaMemo reports, Hulu is currently casting for a presenter for the show which will be published daily, taking a 'Daily Show'-style satirical approach to the latest entertainment news. Hulu (backed by US TV giants NBC ...
Soap <b>News</b>: 'Days of Our Lives' Lands Big Fish and More
The holidays are hopping in soap opera world, with new characters moving in and familiar faces returning. Last week, we reported that CBS gave 'The.
This Week in Credit Card <b>News</b> - MoneyBuilder - making sense of <b>...</b>
Provided by LowCards.com More Than Eight Million People Drop Out of Credit Card Use More than eight million consumers stopped using credit cards over the past year, according to a new study by TransUnion. The use of general purpose ...
bench craft company rip off
Just over a year ago, Rochester’s Democrat and Chronicle launched an ambitious Alternate Reality Game (ARG) called Picture the Impossible. The seven-week game was a collaboration with the Lab for Social Computing at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and it built web, print, and real-life challenges over a fictional storyline designed to connect players with with Rochester’s history. Participants were divided into three teams that competed against each other to earn money for three local charities. The players completed a scavenger hunt in a local cemetery, created recipes for a cooking contest focused on local ingredients, and earned points each week for both web-based games like jigsaw puzzles and print newspaper challenges like assembling a mystery photo. The game concluded with a Halloween costume party for the top players.
Over 2,500 people signed up for the game in all, and it attracted a highly engaged core of about 600 people, including members of the young professional demographic that the Democrat and Chronicle had been most hoping to attract. But running an ARG was also very resource-intensive. I talked with Traci Bauer, the Democrat and Chronicle’s managing editor for content and digital platforms, about what the paper learned from Picture the Impossible, and how they are building social gaming into the paper’s day-to-day operations.
Picture the Impossible emerged through a collaboration between Bauer and RIT professor Elizabeth Lane Lawley. It was funded through sweat equity from both organizations and a donation from a local charity and Microsoft Bing. (Kodak, which is based in Rochester, provided cameras and printers as weekly prizes.)
The game attracted players of all ages, including families, students brought in through RIT, and plenty of Baby Boomers. (“They’re easy,” Bauer said. “Boomers do everything.”) Two-thirds of the players were women. The most important strengths of the game were the collaborative team structure and the focus on earning money for charity. Team spirit was high on the message boards for the three different “factions,” and players strategized ways to maximize their weekly point totals. The scavenger hunts and real-life games (some powered by the text-messaging/smartphone app SCVNGR) were popular, as was the cooking competition, which brought in 104 entrants. When I spoke with Bauer and Lawley last year, they had also been very excited about the way the game used the print paper as a physical element of play.
Bauer said the newspaper had learned enough from the collaboration that the experiment would have been worthwhile even if the game flopped. It didn’t.
“The beauty of it wasn’t in the volume of players, but in the amount of time that they spent in the game,” Bauer said. “In the end we had 62 minutes on-site per unique, and that’s compared to 30-35 minutes on our core sites.”
Bauer came out of the project believing that the news industry needs to harness gaming strategies. “There’s something in there, for sure,” she said.
Her goal is for the Democrat and Chronicle to always have some kind of social gaming presence. When Picture the Impossible closed last Halloween, “I wanted to quickly get another initiative out there,” Bauer said. “I hate when you build something and it’s a success and you put it up on a shelf and don’t pay attention to it for years.”
The problem was that Picture the Impossible had taken a huge amount of time and resources. The newspaper’s collaboration with RIT had ended, and the pressures of making social gaming a normal part of newspaper operations meant figuring out a more pared-down, sustainable model.
For the Democrat and Chronicle, that has meant abandoning the Alternate Reality Game model, with its fictional storyline that united the different elements of the game and propelled it forward. As a news organization, Bauer said, creating fictional scenarios didn’t really fit with their mission. It also meant fewer real-life challenges, even though they were very popular with players. RIT had been “instrumental” in making those in-person activities work. “It’s not what we’re really good at, organizing baking contests and things like that,” Bauer said. “It wasn’t what we’re about.”
This time around, the Democrat and Chronicle’s new social gaming project, score!, is focused around one of the newspaper’s core activities: political coverage. Launched in June, score! focuses on the November elections, and consists mainly of politically-themed web games and quizzes. One new game, Headline Hopper, has players propel little politicians through a landscape of quotes, Mario Brothers-style.
As in Picture the Impossible, players accumulate points and earn money for charity, and the profiles of score! players note whether they participated in Picture the Impossible, to build continuity between the two games.
This time, Bauer said, they thought the team loyalty that had powered Picture the Impossible would be formed around political parties, the Democrats competing with the Republicans. But that team structure flopped when only four Republicans signed up. As a result, Bauer said, they’ve mostly abandoned the team focus. The in-person component of score! has also been scaled back; players can get “stalker” points for snapping photographs of politicians at local events, but Bauer said the challenge hasn’t really taken off. Part of the problem is that candidates are unpredictable, so it’s hard to get information about possible stalker events until the very last minute.
The election focus has been one of the strengths of score!, in part because it gives the game a natural theme that’s easy to build content around, and in part because the games build on the status that comes along with being well-informed about politics — and with having other people know that you are.
“In the forums they talk about how much they’ve learned about the election, and how they feel like smarter voters because of it,” Bauer said.
Players now need to log in to the game through Facebook, which has generated about a dozen complaints from people who can’t play — not enough to be a real concern. And the benefit of the Facebook platform is that it allows players to compare their scores with friends.
Like Picture the Impossible, Bauer said that the 2,300 score! players fall into three tiers: a smaller group of 250 hardcore players, a middle tier of casual players, and then the remainder — who scored a few points and then didn’t come back.
“That’s really our target, is the causal player,” Bauer said.
One of the biggest challenges of running games when you’re not a full-time gaming company is negotiating the relationship with the hardcore players versus the larger group of more casual ones. The most devoted players are also the ones who post the most complaints on forums and Facebook. “We have to keep reminding each other as a team this is an initiative that is going to be constant on our site, and we can’t wear ourselves out catering to five people,” Bauer said.
At the same time, those small number of hardcore players are responsible for a lot of the games’ energy. “That’s where the conundrum is,” Bauer said. “We owe all of our success to those kinds of people.”
When score! ends, Bauer will evaluate the game’s analytics to see which parts of it generated enough engagement to make the time invested in it worthwhile, and continue to think about how to automate parts of the game to make it more sustainable. The next game will debut sometime early in the winter, Bauer said, and it may involve competition between players in Rochester and other cities.
So far, the Democrat and Chronicle is the only Gannett paper to implement a major gaming initiative, Bauer said. She said this was disappointing, but not surprising, since the success of Picture the Impossible didn’t translate into a bump in revenue. (Unlike Picture the Impossible, score! has advertising on its site.) As much as she believes in making social gaming part of a newspaper’s toolbox, Bauer said, “it certainly doesn’t produce a lot of revenue, and until it does, it’s not going to get a lot of attention.”
The other day I blogged with a funny Santa photo of my daughter, which I made into our holiday card that year. Even though my little one still has some fears of Santa, the vast majority of kids find him fun and fascinating. As you may have read in Lisa Sikora’s blog post last week, Windows and Southwest Airlines are partnering to bring you Holiday Photos on the Fly. This is a great opportunity to have your photo taken with Santa for free. Once your photo is taken, you’ll get a printed copy and later you can logon to www.freeholidayphotos.com to retrieve and share your photo. Southwest and Windows are offering this great opportunity in 26 airports, as well as kiosks located at Bryant Park in NYC and Skyline Park in Denver. If you can, make sure you take advantage of this great opportunity – who can beat free!
Now that covers fun with Santa, but I personally also strive for that great family photo to share out and I commonly face the familiar crisis I’m sure many parents also go through: It’s December 1st and I need a nice family photo for our holiday cards! Thankfully, this task has been made much easier with a few great inventions.
First, Windows Live Photo Gallery now provides a special touch of magic, enabling you to very quickly fix nearly any photo and create perfection. This includes the tool Photo Fuse, which allows you take several photos of the same group shot and merge them together to create the photo YOU want – you may have seen this in recent “To the Cloud” TV advertising and it seriously is that easy! Essentially, you can now have that perfect group or family photo without every person having to smile at the same time. I told you…just like magic. For any parent, taking that perfect picture can be very daunting. Photo Fuse has saved me time and money, as I now don’t have to pay for a professional photographer to capture everyone in the right pose. Once you have taken your group photos, simply open Photo Gallery, highlight the set of photos you want to fuse together and click Photos Fuse (under the create tab) and presto! For in depth tips and steps on how to do this, see my previous blog post on photo editing in Windows Live, which will show you how to use Retouch, Auto Adjust and Photo Fuse.
Second, there are a plethora of tools available to help you create fun holiday cards, whether you want to send yours electronically or pay for a professional service print and mail cards out for you. Additionally, advancements in photo printers have made it easier than ever to print your own photo cards at home. I like the Epson Artison 725 All In One printer, which is not only very affordable at just under $200, but also gives you hi-definition prints and is the world’s fastest 4” x 6” photo printer. Since I’m usually in a rush to get my cards and invitations out the door, I like to use online software to create my own masterpiece and then print them up myself at home, which guarantees I’ll get my cards out to friends and family before the New Year.
For more information on the Epson Artison 725 printer, my colleague Brandon will be doing a review of it on the Windows Experience Blog in the coming weeks.
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bench craft company rip off
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bench craft company rip off
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Provided by LowCards.com More Than Eight Million People Drop Out of Credit Card Use More than eight million consumers stopped using credit cards over the past year, according to a new study by TransUnion. The use of general purpose ...
bench craft company rip off
Hulu plans its own entertainment <b>news</b> show, but will anyone watch?
As Peter Kafka at MediaMemo reports, Hulu is currently casting for a presenter for the show which will be published daily, taking a 'Daily Show'-style satirical approach to the latest entertainment news. Hulu (backed by US TV giants NBC ...
Soap <b>News</b>: 'Days of Our Lives' Lands Big Fish and More
The holidays are hopping in soap opera world, with new characters moving in and familiar faces returning. Last week, we reported that CBS gave 'The.
This Week in Credit Card <b>News</b> - MoneyBuilder - making sense of <b>...</b>
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