Friday, May 9, 2014

Thoughts on Other Projects: G.E.R.A

G.E.R.A., or the Global Emissions Reduction Alliance, is a gamified carbon tracking website that allows users to input real data from their actual carbon emissions, and also encourages them through mini-games to reduce these emissions in real life. What's really great about this site is that it is trying to make a difference in the real world. Some of the apps are for convenience or entertainment, whereas this app is actually trying to address a real world problem, and that's admirable.

The stat visualization on the website looks really good. Since users can enter their data, the team has created tools to help visualize their carbon emission history, and I think this will help users to see how much they've improved, or if they have. Most of the users on the site will want to improve their carbon emissions, it's unlikely that people will be playing the game without any motivation. This tool just helps them keep track of everything, and gives them little directed incentives, which is really all people need to get going in the right direction.

The site is a little too dark sometimes, which makes the text a little hard to read. The team slightly fixed this by making a translucent background, but the site (at certain points) doesn't look super visually appealing, mostly because of color rather than art style. As well, I wish I knew what the games looked like. From what I can tell, the "games" are just something like "reduce your carbon by 2% this week" with data entry from the user, which isn't super exciting. Though, I don't really know how you could make it more exciting, so I can't really blame them.

Overall, I think this app is very good. I think it is the most beneficial app to mankind out of all of the projects in the class, since it is actually trying to do good for the world.

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