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The mtvU Journals -
Just an Idea It was December—finals time at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. Robots, wires, and gadgets abound. No one had time for anything but finals, but the mtvU and Cisco Systems Digital Incubator grant was due that week! mtvU and Cisco Systems opened a grant application to find, fund, and incubate college students with projects directed towards broadband programming to debut on mtvU, mtvU Über, and mtvU wireless. Jaki Levy sent out an email to the program’s listserv requesting help. He initially got tons of responses, so he set a meeting time for everyone who was interested in joining the group to discuss ideas. But finals took over everyone’s life, so only three showed up: Jaki, Pollie Barden, and me. The contest seemed like a perfect fit for our program, and looked open to anything we thought of. Jaki had three ideas in his sketchbook: two were video based projects and the third was an idea for a camera phone scavenger hunt. Pollie and I immediately loved the idea of using the pictures on camera phones. We took close to an hour to refine our idea of a camera phone-based scavenger hunt so it captured what we found existing games were missing, and spent about three hours to come up with the name of the game: Tag. Now came the hard part: filling out the forms, writing up the idea, and sending it off. Pollie put everything together just in the nick of time. We realized in the flurry of finals and applications that some information was missing, but there was no way to update it; our fate rested in the hands of the contest gods. Lucky Us With finals done and winter break in progress, we all returned home to rest. Only a few days into break, I received a phone call from Pollie. Apparently the uploaded file got corrupted, probably a Mac to Windows problem, and they needed us to resubmit all the information right away. We were back at work refining our concept and consolidating content, over emails and phone calls. We took advantage of this technological mishap to fill in the gaps and added some finishing touches—the contest gods had smiled upon us. The technological mishap was a fortunate mistake for us. January 1st, New Years Day, and we were all getting over our hangovers, when mtvU asked for a conference call presentation of our concept. Unfortunately we were all in different states, so we had to prepare for it all electronically. We even had our own pre-game conference call to get on the same page. After a great debate about what we wanted to get across about the game, Jaki and Pollie made the slide presentation. Right before the conference call, we all got on IM, went over our main points, and practiced our presentation over the phone. We entered the conference call ready for anything, knowing exactly what we wanted to say and the points we wanted to get across. When mtvU asked several pointed questions that indicated they understood the potential of the game, we knew we had something.
The Final Answer In March, we heard we were in the finals! mtvU wanted us to develop another presentation to be taped for executives to review and make their final decision on the winners. We were very confused. If they were going through the trouble of taping us, why were the execs not going to be present? Were we actually going to be part of some bogus reality show? Lucky for us again, we were right in the middle of our spring midterm projects. They couldn’t have chosen a better time! We invited our colleagues and faculty to review our presentation. Based on the feedback, we created an entire presentation based around the game and the website, which was all still just an idea, including designing a deck of cards to create a flip version of the game. I was chosen as the one to give the presentation, so I gave several mock presentations to people from our program. The first presentation was quite rough, so I kept revising and rehearsing to get it perfect. I had to be camera ready, and I had never given a real big presentation in my life! On the day of the taping, we went around the corner to the mtvU studios, called our contact, and waited. They sent a camera crew down to follow us up the elevator and into the studio. There I gave our presentation, and we had a short interview with an mtvU VJ. It turned out mtvU had duped us; we were not actually finalists, we were winners! They completely surprised us with the announcement of the grant, and had the entire thing taped! It’s On! So we have done loads of work on the game. We expanded our team to four with the addition of Cory Forsyth, who heads up the backend development and is a major contributor to game development. We are even enlisting other ITPer’s Josh Knowles, Eric Fino, and Lamar Hines for specialized tasks and help. And our most significant change? We changed the name of the game. It’s now called snagu! Everyone is doing a great job, and we are currently running another play test with great success. At its most basic, the game is an artistic scavenger hunt, or what some call “a reverse flickr.” Rather than tagging the photo, you photograph the tag. After signing up on your cell phone, we send you the first “tag.” The first tag is always “me.” Your task is to take a picture representing yourself, then send it to tag@snagu.com. Shortly after sending in your picture, you will receive your next tag. The tags are sent randomly. The other half of the fun comes with voting. When you sign into our website, www.snagu.com, you will see two pictures side by side from the same tag. The pictures taken are from different people for the same tag. All you have to do is choose the one you like more; you will never see a picture twice or get to vote on your own picture. There are no right answers, just more popular ones. Everyone gets to be photographer and judge, so long as you play. So we ask you a simple question: If a picture is worth a thousand words, can you capture one word in a picture?
[How will it go? Find out next month in The mtvU Journals - Part Two] |
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Features
The New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program team is opening a final play test of snagu before its formal launch to colleges in September. To sign up for the game, send a text message to |
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