Constitutional Law

Open Source Flash Games

By Fabio Berzaghi

Here is another update from our research assistant on the "Playing the News" project. The team has been exploring "mini-games" that would provide a challenge as players move through the information from the news stories. Fabio has discovered some open source flash sites that might help.

"As I mentioned in my earlier post, this week I started looking into open source flash games that could be adapted for our purpose. After some research on the web, I found this website http://www.flashadvisor.com/movie/index.php?viewCat=24 . It's called Flash Advisor and it's a collection of resources for Flash programmers and what not. I went through and played almost every single game, since the descriptions of the game aren't really that explicative.

I found out that most games did not suit our needs. But there were a few concepts that could be used. One is a memory game, which we already talked about with the Johnson Simulation Center, but this one is ready to go, it's pretty simple so I am not even sure if the developers would like to edit this one or just create one from scratch. Here's the link http://www.flashadvisor.com/movie/display/141.html . I also bumped into a website with a couple of quiz/find-the-words games that could be used, since we mentioned using a crossword type of game. Here the links http://edufun.bravehost.com/housegame1.html http://edufun.bravehost.com/wordsearch.html .

I thought that the adventure with the quiz was somewhat interesting, because you could see yourself proceeding in the game towards an objective. The last one I'd like to mention is a logic game, http://www.flashadvisor.com/movie/display/250.html, I really liked the concept but I didn't understand why the squares don't disappear. I think I would use it and put the information behind the squares, so the players slowly unveil the information. That is another concept we are trying to exploit. Or maybe the squares could contain part of sentences and the players need to construct a complete sentence.

Stay Tuned.

Full post as published by MediaShift Idea Lab on April 25, 2008 (boomark / email).