Nick Diakopoulos

Last year I volunteer taught some salsa classes with my girlfriend, Kat, at the Georgia Tech Salsa Club. What we found was that one of the hardest parts of picking up salsa for many beginners is hearing the beats in the music. Of course there are other hard things about learning salsa, but at least [...]

How are people interacting in news games? What kinds of decisions are they making? And what game elements and relationships are players most interested in? These are the types of questions that an observant journalist might answer, or at least pose, if they began to think of games as informal sources of information.
In their 2004 [...]

Games and Journalism both evoke their own cultural images; the Ramen and Dorito stained gamer on one hand and the hard nosed, gum shoe journalist on the other. It’s not immediately obvious that oil and water can mix, nor am I going to argue that they should. But there are some interesting opportunities here, both [...]

In Ian’s prior post on transparency and games he mentions three types of transparency: transparency of influence, transparency of construction, and transparency of reference. Cutting across these facets of transparency I’d like to add the transparency of mechanics which is particularly applicable to any consumer-facing journalistic software, of which games are one instance. To get [...]

I played The Gotham Gazette Garbage Game and sent 1,897,872 tons of refuse across 698,093 miles.

This week I had the chance to attend a tutorial at the ACM Conference on Multimedia on Music Recommender Systems presented by Oscar Celma. It was a very informative talk, touching on some of the foundational issues in music recommenders: relevancy, serendipity, transparency, and context. There was also some discussion of the tradeoffs between content [...]

The NYT has recently been doing a lot of interactive pieces for the 2008 presidential election. One of these is an interactive chart presentation of different political polls done by different organizations. This isn’t quite game-y, though it could be if there were some additional features like being able to compare one poll to another, [...]

In The Elements of Journalism Kovach and Rosenstiel call it the “Awareness Instinct,” that basic human drive to know something about what’s going on beyond our direct experience. Sure, the gold standard for journalists is to give people the information they need to make the decisions that are important to themselves, their families, and their [...]