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The Budget Maze     (0 comments)

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Age Range Ages 14 and up

Brief Description

Players in Gotham Gazette's web-based Budget Maze navigate a dreary dungeon. At various rooms, the player must find the zombie who holds the answers to a question about the city or state budget process in order to move forward.

Release Date May 19, 2008

Developer Gotham Gazette with Forum One

Project Lead Amanda Hickman

Press Coverage

http://www.dmiblog.com/archives/2008/05/gotham_gazettes_new_york_city.html http://www.brownstoner.com/brownstoner/archives/2008/05/closing_bell_ny.php

Press Release URL


Full Description

Gotham Gazette’s Budget Maze, written in AJAX, PHP and MySQL, challenges players to make their way through the maze of the city budget as the calendar ticks down to the budget deadline. The game has three levels, the first a fairly simple level where the player must procure funding from a discretionary pool. The third level requires the player to travel to and from the state capital organizing support for their budget proposal.

At each level the player navigates a maze to arrive at challenges – questions about the budget process that they must answer to proceed. Too many wrong answers and they budget passes without them.

The Budget Maze follows the actual city and state budget process and is designed to gently educate New Yorkers about the budget process by illustrating the steps that go into securing discretionary funding, a line item in the city budget or a change to the tax code.



Purpose

Our goal is to illustrate a complex policy issue with the ultimate aim of arming our readers with better tools to bring with them into policy debates.

Metrics
 How are you measuring results?
 We use Urchin to measure traffic to the online game, and staff-power to aggregate and assess outside links.

What outcomes have been measured?
 Traffic, Game Completion

Non-Profit involved: yes


Funding Sources: Knight News Challenge and donors to Citizens Union Foundation

Budget
Overall: 65,000
Secured: 65,000

Social Issues/Channels Economics, News, Politics, Public Policy Game Tags

News, news games, New York City, public policy, Albany, budget, public finance



Where you can play this game The game can be played at http://www.gothamgazette.com/article/issueoftheweek/20080519/200/2525

Contacts
General Amanda Hickman, amanda@gothamgazette.com
Press Sara Stuart, sstuart@citizensunionfoundation.org

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