Remembering 7th Street: The Virtual Oakland Blues & Jazz game was developed by UC Berkeley journalism professor Paul Grabowicz and architecture professor Yehuda Kalay. Grabowicz, who had been a reporter for the Oakland Tribune, was interested in finding a new way to tell the story of the Oakland jazz scene, which flourished after World War II but was forced into decline only two decades later. In the Fall of 2006 and Spring of 2007, the architecture and journalism departments formed project groups to recreate Oakland, CA not only as a 3D model, but as a game.

You play as a musician looking to make it big in Oakland. The game, built using Torque, recreates the block of 7th Street using models created by the architecture students in 3D Studio Max. The neighborhood is populated with non-player characters who tell bits of the history of the area and send the player on basic quests. The game's script was written by the journalism students and arranged in the familiar fashion of a branching dialogue tree. After talking to "the right people" and buying a special guitar, the player is ready to break onto the scene.

Crickler is a crossword-derived digital puzzle game named for its creators, Michael and Barbara Crick. Crickler puzzles retain the verbal clues and one-word responses of crosswords, but they explode the layout of the puzzle into a list rather than an interlocking grid. When players type an answer, letters from one response automatically fill certain cells in other responses down the page, mimicking the way a crossword's answers provide clues for orthogonal responses. On their website, the Cricks explain why this arrangement makes for a better puzzle:

Traditional crossword puzzles are incredibly successful but they have several serious drawbacks: (1) They are difficult to construct, (2) Most words are short and often silly--chosen only because they fit, (3) Matching clues to numbers is a distraction, and (4) A given puzzle is usually either too easy or too hard. Cricklers solve all of these problems while retaining the essence and feel of a traditional crossword puzzle.

Prepared by Cinque Hicks and Tanyoung Kim.

You be the Reporter: Ethanol as Fuel! was developed by the Institute for New Media Studies (INMS) at the University of Minnesota by Nora Paul and Kathleen Hansen. It was one of two games developed under the Institute's "Playing the News" umbrella and supported by the Knight Foundation's 21st Century News Challenge grant. Along with other format variations based on the same topics, this game was designed and tested in 2007 and 2008. In this article, we first explain the goal, the characteristics of the game and the procedural gameplay. Next, we look into this newsgame in a larger context in which we discuss how we might improve this game beyond its primary goal of delivering complex news content. In addition, we suggest how this game could encourage readers to take real world social action. Finally, we argue the potential of this game as a platform for further newsgames in which other community issues can be embedded.

Undoubtedly one of the strongest capabilities of the internet is its ability to make a wide range of real-time information easily accessible to anyone with a connection.  News aggregators such as Google News and Huffington Post serve as some of the strongest manifestations of this capability. 

One might think this easy access to information would lead to a more informed citizenry, but as a 2007 report by the Pew Research Center demonstrates, this is not necessarily the case.  In the report, Pew asked respondents questions that tested their public affairs knowledge in 1989 and then again in 2007, and despite the many changes in mass communication that have occurred over the almost two-decade span of time, public affairs knowledge changed little.  In some instances, it decreased: 74% of respondents could name the vice-president in 1989, but in 2007 that number dropped to 69%.