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SFZERO.ORG
Voting Summary (Elevator Pitch):
SFZero is a free game and online social network that challenges players to complete social, cultural and artistic projects. Our goal is to develop a system that allows anyone to use our model to create powerful, socially relevant games.
URL:
http://sf0.org
City:
San Francisco
State/Region:
CA
Country:
USA
Project Vision Statement & Potential Social Impact:
SFZero is a highly innovative example of using the internet to effect change, transforming virtual interaction into real world interaction in socially, politically, or artistically relevant ways. The game is about engaging in progressively more interesting, difficult, and amusing activities that bring players into a new relationship with their real world environment. Players take an active role in creating the game as it progresses by designing new tasks and initiating events. Social networks organized around this uniquely participatory kind of play create lasting change in the lives of individual participants as well as in their larger social, cultural, and political universes.
SFZero, as it is now, covers a wide variety of topics and issues. Our goal is to allow anyone, anywhere, to create new games using the SFZero model to focus on specific topics and communities. Game-makers will be able to modify the online appearance, create and moderate the tasks, and set the scoring policies for their games. The non-narrative, open structure of the SFZero model means that these games can be organized around any subject, and for any audience. Drawing on our experience from SFZero, we will act as consultants to help individuals and organizations develop games that are effective in their purpose and fun for their participants.
We are not interested in using SFZero as a marketing tool. Rather, we believe the SFZero model, which encourages creativity, teamwork, and critical thinking, is best suited to educators and community organizations. We imagine, for example, helping a local organization set up a game to promote awareness of environmental issues, or a game based on the reconstruction efforts in New Orleans. These games would be structured to require direct action on the part of the players, as well as a careful reflection of the issues at hand.
SFZero has encouraged players to become active investigators and creators, rather than passive observers. We believe that games based on the SFZero model can engender an engagement with the issues that goes beyond the game itself and enters the daily lives of its participants in a truly transformative way.
Sustainability (financial) model:
Currently SFZero itself is financed through player donations. Our games and events are free to players. New games on the SFZero Game Network will also be free to players. Our model to sustain the SFZero community is as follows:
Set-up and subscription fees:
A sliding scale set-up fee will be charged to create a game (but not to play it). Game creators will be assessed a monthly subscription fee on a per player basis. This will enable small game creators, like school teachers, individuals, and non-profits, to utilize the SFZero model, while supporting SFZero itself as games grow.
Consulting fees:
A large portion of our income will come from consulting fees. Our intention is to help individuals, organizations, and companies create highly effective games. We have already been contacted by people from all over the world asking us to help them create games on our model. The SFZero Game Network will allow us to do this.
Potential obstacles:
- To be successful, games must be engaging. People with political or social agendas might tend to create pedantic games with dull content. The insight gained from continuing to run SFZero will enable us to help our users avoid this problem.
- Reaching a larger audience of potential game-makers is a key issue. People who normally would not consider creating (or even playing) a game like SFZero are the ones who would benefit most from our game network. To reach them, we will have to develop and execute a powerful marketing plan, notwithstanding our limited funds.
Resource Needs:
We require capital for development of:
- programming
- design
- refining our business model
- developing and executing a marketing plan
Programming and design with be accomplished in house by the principles. We may need occasional help from outside sources in refining the business model and coming up with a marketing solution.
Key Milestones:
Phase 1: Develop the platform
The first 45 days will be devoted to developing the game platform and recruiting beta testers. In this period our team will program and test the essential components of the project, coding the system that allows users to create and customize their own games / online social networks. Since the code for this project will be built upon code already written for SF0 (a fully functioning game and online social network) we estimate that 45 days will be enough to develop a functioning beta of the project.
Phase 2: Develop the network
In the second phase of the project we will work with individuals and organizations to further test the platform, and help them develop relevant games. We've already seen interest expressed in developing a number of games (including a game based on the reconstruction efforts in New Orleans). We will continue to adjust code and add features to the platform based on the feedback of our initial users.
Project Summary:
SFZero.org is a free ongoing game and online social network. SFZero challenges players to collaborate with each other to complete social, cultural and artistic projects - it asks players to create challenges for the community, and gives players support to do things they wouldn't normally do.
Participants pick from a variety of activities to compete in the real world, and then submit documentation of what they've accomplished on the SFZero website.
SFZero makes a unique statement about how technology and virtual, online interactions can positively impact real-world interaction and experience.
The goal of this project is to further develop SFZero into a system that allows individuals or organizations to create powerful socially relevant games, and give them the support and expertise they need to be successful.
Comments
more info on SFZero
I just wanted to add some links in case anyone is interested in reading up a bit more on SFZero.
games changing the real world
Sandra Dickinson
I am delighted to find SF0 here among the Net2 projects! I was first introduced to SF0 thru Jane McGonigal's doctoral dissertation. Jane is one of my heroes. The way she thinks about the power of multi-player games to impact the real world is a guiding principle for me. And of course, Jane says SF0 is doing it.
I have just spent quite a bit of time exploring your website, getting a deeper feel for the types of game tasks players have created. Like the quixotic Ivan -- I too am eager to hear an illustrative example of how you envision the SF0 platform transitions as a tool for nonprofits to use in service of social missions.
What do you see as the essential difference between what SF0 is now -- and what it needs to be for nonprofits to use it effectively? A little fuller explanation of that difference might make it easier to see what is worth paying to play. (there are plenty of games out there that millions of people feel are worth paying to play - but it is hard to go from free to fee without folks seeing the difference).
My own project, SElearninggames, has some basic principles in common with your proposal, and we share some of the same challenges. SElearninggames uses wiki and blog tools to create a space for social entrepreneurs to make an elearning game together. The game goal is to increase the real-world profitability of nonprofit earned income ventures - so that nonprofits can make more of their own money to support their social missions.
Because of what we have in common, your comments on my project would be very valuable to me. I hope you'll take a look. Thank you.
I <3 sf0
I only wish I lived in the Bay Area.
I would like a little more theory on how you think this could be applied/used by nonprofits or social change organizations...an example or two might help. In particular it might dispel any of those pedantic/dull ideas we as nonprofits might initially have when thinking about sf0. Your average ED might not get the situationist cues you're dropping.
That said, I'm a little confused about your sustainability/"marketing" section. You're proposing to charge subscription fees for participation? Won't this fundamentally alter the nature of the "game"? This seems like something that's inherent to the existing community, and I would be wary of strong community backlash, to the point of setting up alternative websites, if a mandatory fee were introduced. (You mention that it would be sliding-scale but don't say if that scale would go down to 0, or how it would be assessed.)
On the consulting end, is your vision to become the coolhunters of guerrilla marketing? So every new Nike shoe can have its own Ignignokt or Shepard Fairey campaign? Or is it something...well...less capitalist-exploitative? I can't really tell.
I really like this proposal, I think you just need to appeal a little more directly to the audience here.
--ivan (quixotic1.com/Genocide Intervention Network)
Out of the Bay and into our Hearts
I also am amazed with what SF0 can do, even far away from the Bay. From someone who has never even visited California, I want to say that this is a fantastic project, and I have seen that the young men who created this project continue to have so much energy and insight for it. What they want to do with it, what its possibilities are. It is a website so much about coaxing and tricking people to do fantastic things in the non-Web world.