For the fourth year in a row we went to GovHack, the world's biggest open-data hackathon, and made a game. We (Paris and Jon) teamed up with Rex, Seb, Matthew, Tim, Arabella, and Josh, and build Beat the Press, a game about news (sort of?) Check out the video, and the website for the project! It was a great way to spend 48 hours.

We're looking forward to coming back to GovHack next year! Thanks to all the organisers and volunteers in Hobart, as well as the other participants. Everyone made it such a great experience as usual!

In London, in October, we'll be giving a talk about our experiences turning open data into video games at OSCON; it's one of our favourite conferences, and we'd love to see you there!

At Linux.conf.au 2016, in Geelong, we presented a talk on our experiences building video games at open data hackathons, such as GovHack. The video and slides are now available! The video is available on YouTube, and embedded below, and the slides are available on SpeakerDeck.

Paris Buttfield-Addison https://linux.conf.au/schedule/30351/view_talk Open data is cool, especially when it comes from government. What's even cooler than open data? Games. Games are cool. So why not combine them? This talk explores the potential for spreading the word about open data, as well as providing for deeper engagement with data, through game development.

We had a great time preparing and delivering this talk! You can check out our GovHack entries from 2014 and 2015 online.

Over the weekend, the Secret Lab team participated in GovHack 2013. Together with our friends and colleagues we formed a team and hacked a project together, using government data, over the 48 hour event.

The GovHack team included Secret Lab’s Jon and Paris, as well as frequent collaborators and friends Tim “McJones” Nugent, Nic “Winton” Wittison, Josh Deprez, Matthew D’Orazio, and Rex Smeal, as well our friends Frank Sainsbury, Sebastian Cook, and Eloise “Ducky” Macdonald-Meyer. Together, the team built a digital card game called Marvellous Ultimate Appliance, based around Energy Australia’s appliance efficiency and power consumption data.

The game was designed to help raise awareness of the energy usage and efficiencies of common household appliances. We had an absolute blast making it, and can’t wait for next year’s GovHack!

You can learn more about our 2-day game, Marvellous Ultimate Appliance, at http://admiraldolphin.github.io. The game was built in Unity, and runs on the web, Mac, Windows, and Linux. We plan to expand on it, with the team, in the near future. Thank you to the Hobart venue, The Typewriter Factory, and the organisers in Hobart, particularly Richard Tubb and Casey Farrell. The food was brilliant, the venue was brilliant, and the constant coffee was exceptional!

Special congratulations to our team member, Frank Sainsbury, who won the Spirit of GovHack award for Tasmania. Likewise, thank you to Pia Waugh for organising the event nationally.

You can watch our team's video below.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLppE0mx5DE&w=500] You can view all of our photos from GovHack 2013 in Tasmania on Flickr. Don't forget to check out our project, as well as all the other brilliant projects on the GovHack Hackerspace.