Week 107: More Smokescreen and 87 Cool Things
Smokescreen
There's been a slight hiatus here while I've been on holiday, but in the meantime it's been all go for the Smokescreen team. While I was away, Adrian wrote two behind-the-scenes posts about some of our design process which are really worth reading:
- Why Smokescreen is the Best Game Ever* (*for what it's trying to achieve) talks about how we tweaked the ARG formula from what we learned through Perplex City, as well as some of the design decisions we made.
- Smokescreen: Why Interaction Matters talks about the why - why the subject matter we're tackling has been approached through a game
Against all of that, we started to get the first rounds of press for Smokescreen. Here's some:
- BoingBoing, Smokescreen privacy game uses fun missions to show kids how data on social services can be used against them: "Smokescreen is a privacy game for kids, it runs them through a series of clever online missions that serve to explain how information disclosed on social sites like Facebook can come back and bite you in the ass"
- Wired, Game neatly sidesteps social networking horrors: "I played through the first few [missions] last night, and there’s a distinct possibility I’ll be eagerly awaiting the rest of them as they go live, because although I’m about ten years older than their target audience, it’s so incredibly well made that I want to play it anyway... ...And I recommend you do. The live feed of ‘Tweetr’ posts during the nightclub scene is awesome."
- ... and Jay is Games' review of Smokescreen, where our current score is 4.5/5: "...Through all the different messages and recordings, you really start to get into your character. Any game that makes me feel like a character on Degrassi is worth a shot...."
87 Cool Things
I found out about this at Picnic, but Google Creative Labs presented 87 Cool Things at Advertising Week recently, and We Tell Stories is right there on slide 57!