This project seeks to explore the use of Microsoft's accessible XNA framework to develop serious immersive experiences for PCs and the XBox360 that are factual, accurate and timely. The project will model the federal buildings of Washington D.C. and place in them avatars of elected and appointed officials. While a 'Second Life' potential for interactive community could exist within the model, rather than focus on the novelty of the interface, the goal will be to attach vast databases of public information to the virtual space allowing users to visualize complicated issues that generally obfuscate the workings of federal government for citizens in local districts nationwide. Interpersonal and financial relationships that underpin politics will be revealed in heretofore unseen ways. Avatars will be connected to the congressional record, speeches, public statements and news searches. Overlay maps will show current and pending budget allocations by buildings and departments. Daybooks will give users across the nation more access to the workings of the their government. While certain experiences will be built modeling point-of-view gaming experiences, others will incorporate feature-rich real-time-strategy elements. Real data will stream into the experience live over the Internet, creating links to current news sources and archives of information. All working press organizations will be invited to take part.
Popular wisdom targets the 18 - 34 year-old male demographic as the primary audience for gaming, however marketing research shows that console ownership and PC gaming are far more widespread across age groups and sexes. Any person in any district in the nation will be able to use the virtual interface to walk into their Senator or Representative's office building and see what is happening that day, or track the dollars in play for projects that concern them. Users will be connected to each other through their districts and have a full range of online community tools to interact with each other on multiple levels. Rather than compete with existing social networks, APIs will be developed to hook into popular communities and openly share databases from the warehouse of information.
American University offers the perfect storm to incubate a next-generation news and government project that could impact every neighborhood in America. The School of Communication is deeply tied to national and local journalism outlets and features an excellent motion graphics department. A.U. also features strong programs in political science and international relations to offer more layers to the project. We have a strong history of forming strong strategic partnerships to create innovative communication products. If rooted in academia, this project can be a boon to all journalists, news companies and citizens nationwide. We will also be able to court technology partners to underwrite other portions of the project. Most importantly, it will be a product created by young minds to reach young minds on a platform built for the next generation. The A.U. student profile is highly engaged in politics and civics and will be the perfect ambassadors to bring credible journalism to an audience that is falling away from traditional channels in print and broadcast. We are using the online medium to replicate print and broadcast content at the same time as we shift personal communication patterns to it for various messaging activities. Yet, serious documentarians and journalists have yet to embrace and harness the power of immersive experiences that currently make up a more than $13 billion dollar entertainment industry. The technology that drives gaming may well be the most engaging communications platform ever developed. Recognizing the market, we are ready to bring serious messages to it and advance the news dialogue between government, citizens, and the fourth estate.
The project has wide and diverse potential. With the core strategy based in open source development, media, government and citizens can all use the engine to add information and create new ways to interact and communicate in the platform. We hope people will build upon it and add more functions and modules. Once created, the platform and full documentation will be made available to create models for states and cities across the nation as well as internationally. This project will make a strong contribution to the emerging field of serious games. American University could become home to an institute dedicated to interactive documentaries and serious games, which in conjunction with the existing centers for social media and environmental film making will comprise a cluster of cutting edge incubators for thought leaders in communication. The Center for Social Media is already actively studying the game space under their present mandate. Additionally, we have an opportunity to engage journalists with the potential of using game technology to tell stories and provide information. In the educational setting, we will be able to train students in this production and open up even wider potential.
Participation by citizens, journalists, and politicians will of course be the most primary measure of the project’s impact. Beyond gross traffic numbers, the true measure of success will be an increase in interest in the workings of the representative government and its impact on local communities. A higher level of engagement and a clearer understanding of the government is crucial as society grows and matures. While success could be measured in terms of hard numbers of registered users, or contributed data, or clients downloaded, the project will make a difference when citizens become more informed and become more engaged in the process. If more young people vote and see facts through talking points, the project will have made a difference.
An increasing drift towards hyper-localization is the common trend as media outlets react to market pressures in this dynamic period of cultural and technological change. Cost-cutting and staff reductions are reducing the diversity of voices and coverage of government from local perspectives. Meanwhile, partisan politics, punditry and increasing sophisticated public relations tactics are obfuscating real issues that affect communities and citizens. People are losing their connection to their own government and failing to grasp the potential implications of the process on their communities and lives. This project seeks to use powerful visual organizational tools to communicate incredibly complicated data and reconnect people to in-depth journalism that concerns their community and its federal relationship. At the same time, it offers vast potential to access the broad realm of existing content at news sites online via the open API and other hooks built into the platform’s core. This is intended as an interactive aspect of the project, where those sites can use the data warehouse openly to create their own products as well as participate actively inside the virtual platform and online community.
The status quo is not adequately reaching audiences, particularly younger demographics, with responsible news and information about the government. Media literacy projects are clearly indicating that diversity and profusion of information is not leading to deeper and better awareness of current issues. The shrinking print news hole and quick format of continuous broadcast news do not provide adequate space or time to address complex issues. Facts become blurred by repeated punditry and obscured in narrative storytelling. The industry is confronting declining readership and fragmented viewership with their own online efforts, but with a divide in rate structures and revenue disparity between online and print, there is still a major focus on attracting younger viewers and subscribers to core products. Except for newswires and weather information shipped into the Nintendo Wii console as a service, there are no efforts being made to take the content to the gaming platform where millions of users who are not engaging with core journalism products are spending increasing hours. To discount the potential for serious uses of the platform would be similar to early filmmakers ignoring the potential to make documentaries and leave the medium in the hands of pure entertainment like the Keystone Cops.
A portion of the budget is allocated to market the product in multiple ways. Viral and online marketing techniques will be employed, but only as one component in a strategy that also uses more traditional means. Engaging media partners at the outset provides a certain audience exposure. The software and documentation (including a documentary film) will be distributed freely at a large online community site dedicated to the project as well as on DVD. Kits will be sent to all newspapers and broadcasters around the country to engage them and get them into the project. The software will also be distributed on college and university campuses as part of a collaborative outreach program. We will speak at conferences and hold events to engage and involve producers and stakeholders as well as spread the word about the project. Other means of increasing awareness in the project are fundamental components of the service architecture, including widgets, feeds and APIs, that will draw more audience in a distributed, organic way as developers make use of them.
We are in the process of developing a strategy to sustain the project after the initial funding round. Knight is the first granting source approached, but other foundations and endowments are likely contributors. The National Endowment for the Humanities, for example, has a digital initiative category that could fit this project. Financing will also be sought through potential sponsors and partnerships. As a public service, sponsorships will be structured and offered adopting similar guidelines as public broadcasting. We are exploring ways to provide revenue opportunities to participating media organizations to create incentives for their involvement. Users may also provide donations to continue the project once it is launched and running.
A number of full-time faculty members will be involved in the project as well as the director, working across schools at American University to take advantage of the vast resources. In SOC, Amy Eisman and Wendell Cochran will be key in leading the journalism and database aspects of the course and faculty from the documentary film division will be core in guiding motion graphics and video components. Fellowships and post doctoral opportunities will be openly offered to attract the best minds in the field who may working at other universities. Some funds are reserved to hire dedicated staff as well as contractors for technical expertise. SOC is already partnered or working with the following major media organizations: Gannet USA Today Washington Post Newsweek NBC Scripps Howard News Service Center for Public Integrity National Public Radio Public Broadcasting System Congressional Quarterly C-SPAN The following companies comprise a short list of potential corporate partners. Relationships are in early stages: Microsoft Adobe Autodesk Sony Google Earth and Google News Firaxis Games (Baltimore) Electronic Arts (Arlington, Virginia) Bethesda Softworks (Bethesda, Maryland) Additionally, the following associations and institutes in the Washington area are also identified: Electronic Entertainment Association Institute for Serious Games National Association of Broadcasters National Newspaper Association
The closest comparison to this project is Google Earth; however, since the scope of Google Earth is so wide and open to any information, it is a poor comparison for the targeted journalistic application. This project is not intended to mirror alternate virtual reality experiences such as “Second Life” and create a social networking and communication platform, although some similar functionality will be inherent in the system. The development of serious games is a growing field. There is an institute for serious games in Washington, DC (www.seriousgames.org) and the Online News Association recently discussed the use of games in news and journalism at their annual meeting. The Web site, addictinggames.com has a channel dedicated to news games (http://www.addictinggames.com/newsgames.html). Games for news are in an early stage, focused more in novelty and commentary or ‘transparent interactivity.’ Yet, serious applications of interactive gaming technology are appearing, such as Discovery’s recent Everest project and the Oakland historical street reconstruction, funded by the Knight Challenge last year. Rather than focus on novelty or a single micro-community, this project seeks to use game techniques to display complicated issues, offer easier access to information and allow many communities to develop and deepen their understanding of their relationships with each other and the federal government.
The users of the platform will have a deeper understanding of how the government relates to their communities and their daily lives. Taking a giant step forward in interactive storytelling and communication, this project will set an example for how the technology can be used by journalists to share information in new and compelling ways. The opportunity to place this work in an academic setting away from pressures of business exclusivity offers great potential to educate journalists in the theory and practice of this kind of work. The project seeks to build an alternative graphical user interface to access online news content in a completely new way, so an expected result is bringing greater exposure to Washington news and re-establishing local interest by focusing the attention on how that news relates to communities and individuals. Hopefully this will lead to renewed interest in local news operations keeping correspondents in Washington bureaus. Journalism and our democracy will benefit from healthy diversity in voices and alternatives in coverage.
