Looking for a game to build - would love for it to be a game for good!

[Becket Linn]

Hey everyone,

my name is Becket and I have leaned a lot since my last post. Since that time I have turned 22, founded a company in Boston, won some prize money at the Tufts 100k, and gotten into a top business accelerator program called Mass Challenge... all for the sake of getting into the position to build games (because games are what I love!)

The core vision of our company, TeemPlay, is that the key to solving really tough problems is introducing them to novel perspectives. Foldit led to a novel protein shape being discovered precisely because it was non-scientists who were looking at the problem and for the first time a set of new, fresh perspectives tackled the problem. And of course Jane's TED talk inspired us to want to create a way for gamers to get involved in problem solving.

But after about 2 years of development we have realized that this grand vision has to start simply and progress one step at a time. And the next step for us is to prove that gamers have good ideas and that the process of game development itself can be crowdsourced. I would imagine that most of the crowdsourced ideas for games would be purely focused on entertainment value but I am asking this community because I also want some ideas in the pool to be focused on making the world a better place too. 

So if you have an idea let us know by filling out this survey. We will then sort through and pick the top ideas and have the community vote on their favorite... and if you win we will build it and share the profit with you!

Here is the survey: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/16HWEoGsV3euShYmPrsi35eGGWku9wnKnC3...

Feel free to ask me anything in an email : [e-mail] 

[Luke Haward]

Hi Becket, we've been in touch before :)

I'm a little closer to getting my idea off the ground for a Game Hub for changing the world- we spoke briefly about it some months ago. I'm soon to be looking for funding, game designers and charities to work with in getting it going, and am seriously considering the crowdsourcing route. I've been speaking with Kirsten Bonanza, another avid Gamefuller, about it, and making steps towards kicking off a beta version of the the Hub with three mini-games supporting three charities / disaster relief campaigns. I'll certainly be sending you an email, here's a link to the original (too long didn't read!) post about my idea:

http://gameful.org/forum/topics/earth-working-title-a-metagame-for-...

All the best,

Luke Haward

[Becket Linn]

Hey Luke,

I certainly do remember your post from a while back. It was one of the first ones I read on Gameful. I hope all is well and I will keep an eye out for your email.

-Becket

[Benny Faibish]

Sounds Cool!

I like the concept of collaborative design, It could work well also with collaborative development...

Best of luck :)

[Becket Linn]

Hey Benny,

absolutely. Collaborative development is going to be the next step. We worked on creating a collaborative development platform for about 6 months and in that time we realized that in order to make that vision a reality we would need exponentially more time and resources which we will only be able to get if we can demonstrate successful traction to investors. You see the chicken and the egg dilemma here right?

The paradox is that to create a successful platform you need users (but no one will want to use the platform unless its already been somewhat successful).

With this approach we hope to really get at the heart of what matters first -the brilliant ideas of the collective. Then once we have gone through this process of collecting ideas and building the best ones we will be in a position to actually take the investments required to build such a platform and expand it with tools that allow users to collaborate on development.

Sorry if this is a little excessive of an answer... but I think about this a lot haha. The short answer is: I can't wait until we are in the position to build the collaborative development platform but we have to do this first :)

[Luke Haward]

Hi Becket, 

I have a feeling our projects could work very well together, every time I read something you've written ;) I hope that's mutual! 

I've just sent you an email, to the teemplay email address. I hope that's still the right one. Look forward to hearing back from you :)

All the best,

Luke Haward