About us

The Project

Game-O-Matic is a Knight News Challenge funded collaboration between the graduate program in Digital Media at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Expressive Intelligence Studio at UC Santa Cruz.

It was conceived as a tool for generating journalistic games (or newsgames) through a simple “concept mapping” of relevant actors and their relationships. For the past two years, we have been exploring a key problem facing the adoption of newsgames by traditional media sources: the expense, time, and expertise required to craft regular videogame content. Game-O-Matic relieves the burden of programming and design while encouraging journalists to think of news events as systems rather than as stories.

Game-O-Matic has since proved itself to be a versatile way of thinking about meaning and games. It can be used as a general design tool to explore the relationship between things, the metaphorical potential of game mechanics, and procedural rhetoric.

Our Team