VIRTUAL EVENT

British Library Labs Crowdsourcing Game Jam

(1am Friday 4 September 2015 – 11:59pm Sun 13 September 2015)

The British Library has digitised 1,000,000 historical images, but we don’t know as much about what’s in them as we’d like. Normally this is the type of task we’d solve with crowdsourcing, but we’re looking to have a bit more fun. So we’re hosting a Crowdsourcing Game Jam. Can you help us make crowdsourcing information about this collection fun?

The best game could appear as part of the British Library Labs ‘Mechanical Curator Arcade Game’, a 1980s-style arcade console that we’re planning to install in the Library this autumn. We’ve set aside a small budget to work with someone to polish their game if they come up with a strong idea.

All completed games will also be eligible to enter the British Library Labs Awards, with a chance to win an additional £500 in prizes.

We’ve created a framework for accessing the 1 million images [LINK HERE] {BEN WHAT NEEDS TO GO HERE?}

What are the rules?

1. If you want your game to be elligible for use on our ‘Mechanical Curator Arcade Game’, you’ll have to limit your interface to a 4-direction joystick and 2 buttons ONLY. No extra bits and pieces.
2. Our arcade runs on a Raspberry Pi 2 so keep our processing power in mind. We really like Phaser.io as a platform, but any similar HTML5 browser-based approach would be great as well.
3. The goal of the game must be to get the player to provide accurate descriptive data about images in our 1 million-historical image Flickr Collection.
4. Family friendly games only. This is the British Library, after all.

Who are we?

• Adam Crymble, lecturer of digital history, University of Hertfordshire
• Ben O’Steen, technical lead, British Library Labs
• Mahendra Mahey, project manager, British Library Labs

PHYSICAL EVENT

Crowdsourcing Games – Unconference

(14 September 2015 – 10-4pm)

We want to talk about games, and crowdsourcing. And we want you to join us. British Library Labs and the Digital History Research Centre (DHRC) at the University of Hertfordshire are hosting a 1-day unconference on gamification and cultural crowdsourcing. This is a space to think about, discuss, and experiment with making crowdsourcing more fun. We’ll also have our own custom-built arcade machine for you to play around with, as part of the ‘Mechanical Curator Arcade’, Adam Crymble’s winning project from the British Library Labs competition 2015, as well as the community-created games from our Virtual Game Jam.

We encourage game makers (amateur and professional), developers, academics, cultural heritage professionals, and interested members of the public to join us for this unique event.

Space is limited so sign up today.

[Include boilerplate what is an unconference type pages from: https://genderedacademia.wordpress.com/]
* Limit spaces to 40 people, but expect 30 to show up. 2 concurrent unconference sessions.