Real-world data as a seed

Abstract

Living in the Information Age, we are surrounded by news, facts, propaganda, and advertisements. We are bombarded with information from TV screens in bars or from wall projections on the subway, and we can look up any type of obscure information on our phones within seconds (thus ruining trivia night). There are community efforts to fact-check and compile information in sites such as Wikipedia, PolitiFact or the Europeana collections. There are also far less noble efforts at using consumers' interaction data to target them with messages of all kinds. While games exist in all types of devices, we do not often think of games as sources of information --- least of all factual. However, games can take advantage of all this information available in repositories, websites and social media to create new ways of engaging players as well as disseminating information during gameplay. Gabriella Barros, Mike Green, Julian Togelius and I designed a game which takes advantage of information on open data repositories and transforms it into an adventure game. The game is called ``DATA Agent'' and the player is an agent of the Detective Agency of Time Anomalies (DATA) tasked with solving a bizarre mystery. An assassin has traveled back in time and killed a famous person, masquerading as another famous person somehow related to the victim. Since the assassin does not know everything about the person they impersonate, the DATA Agent must find in a lineup of suspects which one does not have all their facts right. The correct facts about the suspects can be found by talking to other people in different cities. Finding the suspects themselves is no easy task either: the agent must talk to other people, read books and break into dark and locked places.