They've Got Game

What’s the next big thing in online gaming? How about video clips?

by Chris Koseluk

As anyone who spends a lot of time on the Web can tell you, there's one thing that's in no short supply. No, I'm not talking about that. Get your mind out of the gutter. What I'm referring to is online games. Type in those two words at Google, and your search will return 248 million results.

But compared to the action on Xbox or Wii, the majority of Internet games are... how shall I put it... quaint. Many are reminiscent of the early days of video games. Heck, some of the most popular games sites are the early days. Check out 1980-games and Classic Games Arcade. You'll find everything from Pacman and Donkey Kong to Frogger and Space Invaders.

But a movement has started towards a new type of Internet gaming. And it's taking advantage of an element totally unique to the medium -- video clips.

"In a hunting culture, young people learn by playing with bows and arrows. In an information society, young people learn by playing with information," says Henry Jenkins III, a professor at MIT and one of the founders of The Education Arcade, an initiative formed to study educational game playing. "We are going to see more and more forms of play which straddle different media systems and which combine different kinds of data -- simulations, visualizations, multimedia footage, text -- in creative and imaginative ways. I think it is simply the tip of the iceberg in terms of a broader shift in how young Americans learn and play."

The Education Arcade is a major force behind one of the most ambitious Internet clip game projects -- iCue.

 

Created in collaboration with NBC news, iCue is an innovative learning environment featuring thousands of video clips from the NBC News Archives. Designed as a study guide for students, the site uses the clips to augment four course topics -- "US History," "Decision 08," "English Language and Composition" and "U.S. Government and Politics."

"NBC news was seeking a way to more effectively deploy its multimedia archive as a resource for teaching and learning," continues Jenkins. "They have been "eyewitnesses to history," as the expression goes, yet very little of that material has been available to students and teachers for use in the classroom."

As outlined in the site's video tour, hosted by none other than NFL running back legend Tiki Barber, iCue features three video clip-driven games. The first, Timeline, challenges players to arrange clips in chronological order. As more clips are added, the score goes higher. Concentration, based on the classic memory game, awards points when players match two clips from a group that share a common link. Again, points are awarded for each correct pairing. Connection, the third game, starts with two unrelated video clips. The object is to connect the clips through other video clips that share something in common with both. The more connections made, the higher the point total.

Professor Jenkins hopes that in a world where information is flowing at students from a variety of media, iCue will help teach them to move fluidly across platforms, understand the connections between ideas represented in different media forms, and encourage them to weigh and assess the reliability and credibility of data transmitted through alternative channels. "iCue seems particularly well designed to foster this kind of literacy across media -- encouraging young people to make connections between isolated bits of information to better understand the context within which important decisions impacting our world have been made," he says.

When it's time to take a study break from iCue, there's an online video game for the Trivial Pursuit lover in all of us. PopJax is a clip-oriented game featuring thousands of pop culture questions divided into 250-plus categories.

 

Players get to choose the games from five sections -- film, television, sports, music and extras. So, whether your expertise is The Brady Bunch, Baseball or Boy Bands, there's a quiz here to challenge you.

Each game contains nine questions arranged in Tic-Tac-Toe fashion. Each question is posed in video form, with the clips fed in from such sites as YouTube, Hulu and Veoh. Watch the clip, answer the question correctly, and you earn points. Get three questions in a row correct and you earn bonus points.

Best of all, every right answer gets the player a step closer to winning valuable prizes... i.e. cash! Anyone scoring over 5000 points in a given day qualifies for the $100 daily drawing. Gamers amassing over 25,000 points in any given month are in the running for the $1000 monthly prize.

PopJax.com is the brainchild of Doug Barry. And he couldn't have a better pedigree for being an Internet gaming pioneer. Barry's father is TV legend Jack Barry, who produced and hosted such classic games as 21 and The Joker's Wild. Barry is betting that PopJax is perfect for the current cultural Zeitgeist.

"One of the things that game shows have done well in the past is they've tapped into the popular passions of the time," Barry, who is also PopJax's CEO, told The San Francisco Chronicle last March. "The Price Is Right was big in the 1950s because consumerism became such a big deal. Some of the early music shows, such as Stop the Music, were big during the big band era. We think today's big national obsession is Web video, so we're trying to create a unique game around that."

Sockandawe.com doesn't offer much in the way of video -- in fact there are only two images on the site -- neither really a clip. But in less than a month, it has become an Internet phenomenon and another example of the potential for online games with a video flavor.

 

Based on the notorious incident last December when Iraq journalist Muntadha al-Zaidi threw his shoes at President Bush during a Bagdad press conference, sockandawe encourages all of us to tap into our inner al-Zaidi by flinging moccasins the President's way. And unlike al-Zaidi, players here can actually score hits. Land a shoe in George's face and his grin quickly turns into a grimace. Each hit is accompanied by a comical sound effect and added to a player's total score.

Created by 24-year-old Londoner Alex Tew, sockandawe also features a list of "Top 10 Bush-shoeing players" (MoonBlade 11 Bokong currently holds the record with 47 hits in the allotted time) and "Top 10 Bush-Shoeing countries" (United States tops France, Australia, United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia). A separate page offers a forum where visitors can express opinions on pressing world matters, world leaders and the game itself.

Though amazingly simple, the game also appears to be highly habit forming. At presstime, almost 79 million shoes have hit their intended target. Now THAT's an Excedrin headache!

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