Backchatter is now open source.
More info on BackChatter and our open source plans at the Local No.12 website. Or, to get started right away, visit our SourceForge repository, grab our documentation and the print templates we've prepared.
BackChatter is a game about predicting Twitter trends. Designed to be played at conferences and other events, beating BackChatter means sharpening your socio-linguistic smarts.
Here's how the game works:
When the event starts, you pick three words that you think will be popular in tweets about the conference. You send in your votes with a direct message to the game consisting of the three words you want to pick.
As the conference progresses, you get points whenever anyone uses your words in a tweet about the event (tweets marked with #eventname). The value of a word is based on how many people voted on it: the MORE people that picked a word, the LESS valuable it is. So the most valuable words are the words that no one else selected. A website keeps track of player scores and has other useful info, like a dynamic word cloud formed from tweets about the event.
BackChatter was prototyped at the 2009 Games for Change Festival and IndieCade 2009 and premiered at the 2009 Games, Learning, and Society Conference, where Electronic Arts generously provided prizes for the winners of each round and the overall game winners. The final official run of Backchatter was at the Game Developers Conference 2010 where it was co-hosted by Local No. 12 and the IGDA with support of Arkadium.
