Engaging with open data through video games

Description

Open data, such as that provided by many governments around the world, is cool. It’s fantastic to see countries around the world opening as much as they can, allowing citizens and interested parties to build upon and enhance the myriad interesting information collected by countries. Many people are doing great work with this sort of data, but you have to be extremely passionate, engaged, and motivated in order to get involved.

Tim Nugent, Paris Buttfield-Addison, and Jonathon Manning found another way. For the last three years, they’ve been participating in government-data-focused hackathons and turning them into game jams. Tim, Paris, and Jonathon have built games—often at GovHack in Australia—that do everything from turning your local politician’s parliamentary voting history into a party game to parsing and interpreting a giant database incorporating all the functional roles in a government and turning it into a SpaceTeam-style party game. They’ll tell you how you can do the same thing in your community, how to make it engaging and meaningful, why you might want to do this, and how to get started.

Topics include:

• Conceiving of game ideas based on normally dry open datasets (They once made a Pokémon-style battle game based on the energy efficiency data provided by the government energy regulator—it helped you figure out if your fridge was efficient by letting you battle it against other people’s fridges.)
• Preserving the spirit and meaning of the data in games you make with it
• Tools for parsing and interpreting the data and making it usable for your games (Tim, Paris, and Jonathon are now very good at Perl, Awk, Sed, and R.)
• Getting out and engaging people with your data-based games and making sure people don’t draw the wrong conclusions from what your game shows them (while still having fun—it is a game after all!)