Last Brief

So for the last brief I went for another sort of game/experiment as the one I choose is Papers Please:

PAPERS PLEASE

You are an intern in the interactive design department of a major UK newspaper. Faced with falling circulation and diminishing ad revenue, the paper’s focus is increasingly on their online operations. Some articles include light interactivity, allowing the reader to control the way graphs are displayed or explore media surrounding an event. The head of your department believes this should go further, and asks you to explore the possibility of embedded “games” that could back up editorial articles.

Choose a newspaper and find a story within that newspaper that could benefit from an embedded game, and produce a pitch for that game. The pitch should include storyboarding, all relevant design information and an elegant introduction to why this will serve the paper (both from an editorial and financial point of view) — you can assume the target for this pitch is an editorial board who may not be familiar with videogames. You should also pay attention to budget and timescale.

In addition, please provide a single page overview of other political games found on newspaper websites and beyond. Summarise wetheir design, their message and why the medium communicates that message so effectively.

EXTENDED WORK: Build a prototype that proves your point.

To do so, I choose ‘COVID-19’ as the theme of the game. All the news are related to it as is affecting the economy, governments and people’s lives.

The Game:

We need to create something simple with a strong and understandable message. The design aspects of the game are also simple as we are limited by the browser. It needs to be playable on both phones and computers.

The game would work like this:

While the people is reading an article small virus like forms would start spawning on the screen, a quick reaction would be click/tap on it to see what that is, and it would disappear. But eventually another one would appear somewhere else on the screen. That would be the main mechanic and the game itself.

Once we catch enough people we can think about adding new stuff to the game as a countdown, a score, things that make people play a little more, some challenge, but we need to spread the message first and after that we can give people something more enjoyable.

The Message:

No, the game doesn’t end like that. Probably some people would get bored after a few minutes, probably seconds, because they are there to read, and not to play. The easiest way to show you what would happened after ignoring this is an in-game image.

The virus-sprite would start spawning faster until you can’t see anything and a message would popup. “COVID-19 spreads fast, this is just a game, but the real world isn’t. You can help to stop COVID-19 from spreading. STAY AT HOME.” The message is simple as the game, but people don’t seem to understand the risks of the virus and how that affects their day-to-day.

How do we get people’s attention?

The answer is Social Media, people is in constant communication through Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc. The coronavirus is not going to last forever, so the movement to do this is now. On the financial point of view, the newspaper needs clicks, that’s how they earn money.

How do we get those clicks? By making our game/message viral. People would start posting images of how the newspaper is trying to make a point about the virus with a mini-game and they would visit the web to try it, because is something original that other newspapers don’t do. Even other newspapers would cover the news of ‘The newspaper that created a mini-game to make people more concern about the coronavirus’ and that means more clicks.