Costa Rica: Video Game Based on Real Time Tweets Seeks Funding  · Global Voices
Juliana Rincón Parra

Six young video game designers in Costa Rica are looking for crowd-sourced funding for TweetLand, their real-time twitter powered games.
the TweetLand team
The games are called Route 140 and LoveCity and both use real time twitter updates to influence actions that take place during the game. In Route 140 cars race to get to the finish line, but if someone writes an update on twitter about zombies, meteors or car crashes (among others) beware! It will be reflected in the game.  In Love City, an Anti-Care Bear feeds on different “hate” updates to increase power and get new weapons but loving and caring tweets will power its enemies.
Costa Rican blogger Cristian Cambronero of Fusil de Chispas interviewed the creators asking them about their decision to crowd-source funding for the games:
Para reunir el dinero decidieron recurrir al sitio de crowdfunding KickStarter.com. Pero ¿por qué no recurrir a inversionistas? “TweetLand es un proyecto que se alimenta de experiencias de la comunidad web de una forma colaborativa. Es decir, no es sino gracias al apoyo de todos, que la plataforma de juegos funciona. Nos pareció que lo más coherente, era que un proyecto de naturaleza colaborativa como este, fuera fundado de la misma forma, con la colaboración de todos”, dice Néstor Villalobos.
It's not the first time a Costa Rican initiative has used Kickstarter.com to raise funds. A recent successful use was for the movie The Return by Hernán Jiménez, which managed to raise far more than their original goal of 40, 000 US dollars (USD) needed to edit and make the movie ready for theaters and distribution.
On their Kickstarter.com site for TweetLand  they explain their vision and what use they'll give the 7,000 USD they are trying to raise. The 6 young designers have previously won awards and recognition for previous projects in their daytime jobs, and are now turning to the web to make their independent project TweetLand a reality. They tell more about the game in their promotional video: