Headline guessing site wins News+Gaming Hackathon in NYC

Julian Burgess‘s game, Whose Headline, won the News+Gaming Hackathon held at CUNY Journalism school over April 22 and 23 in New York City. The game presents headlines drawn from various publications, using RSS feeds, and asks the players to identify which publication it comes from. The original publications included The New York Times, ESPN, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, The New York Daily News, Mashable, and Forbes. Cody Brown also won a prize for suggesting that The Onion‘s satirical headlines be added to the list.

Also recognized:

• HeadlinestoHeadlines, a game that allows people to match headlines with adjectives, was also recognized:  Juan C. Muller, Joe Cullen, Blair Hickman, Wicky Mendoza, Chelsea Stark, Niel Bekker and David Holmes (pictured above)
• Context, an application which allows readers to comment and annotate articles inline, done by Colin Nederkoorn, Peter Harkins, and Donald Schwartz.
• Chutalkingbout, by Lauren Gardiner and Syed Salahuddin, which allows players to make predictive bets on trending topics on Twitter (pictured below)

The judging was done by Roy Schmidt and Brian Immel from BigDoor, a Seattle-based company which provides a gamification API, that simplified things like keeping track of score and leaderboard.

The BigDoor prizes included $25 iTune gift cards, a upbeat version of the Magic Eight Ball that only gave affirmation, an iPad game device, and a William Shakespeare action figure (which went to Julian).

Another (though not game-related project) was an interface that simplified The Daily News’s efforts to add historic photos into FourSquare. The project was done by Doak Jantzen and Anjali Mullany, both who work on The Daily News’ social media team.

Food included dumplings and buns from Rickshaw Dumplings, Vietnamese sandwiches and vermicelli from Bep Restaurant (a pop-up establishment in Williamsburg), and freshly baked focaccia and cheese puffs from Izmir Delights.

The Friday night talks with Ian Bogost, Heather Chapin and Roy of BigDoor are online.