Tweet Land! What is more enticing than a game called Tweet Land?? Plain old Twitter is so passé by now anyway. In this video game, social networks meet social gaming as people race through game worlds impacted by real-time tweets. The six game-makers behind the scenes of Tweet Land want to “play with reality,” which is such a fun phrase I asked them to tell us more.

How do players control whose tweets get incorporated into a game?

Right now anyone’s tweets can affect your gameplay. The tweets used are chosen by the keywords they have. So if someone in New York witnessed a “car accident” and tweets about it, this tweet will affect Tweet Land players. It doesn’t matter if they don’t know that guy in NY and it also doesn’t matters if that guy doesn’t know about the game. That way, we can recreate reality and play with it in this virtual world, so the events can be triggered by anyone, anytime, anywhere. It’s results are as unpredictable as the real world.

Is there a max number of players and/or Twitter users in one game? Can players play with their own tweets too?

Right now Tweet Land is a single-player game and you play with all the planet’s tweets — actually this is what lets you feel like you are playing with reality! Also, another cool feature of Tweet Land is that you don’t need a Twitter account to play — you can enjoy it either way. If we reach our goal, we’ll definitely include a multiplayer mode in future releases, which is going to be awesome. We are also planning to include an option for the user to play only with his or her friends’ tweets in the future. The more support we get, the bigger and more fun Tweet Land will be.

How’d you hear about Kickstarter and decide to use it?

Well, the first time we heard about Kickstarter was when the Diaspora project hit the web. Since then, we fell in love with the Kickstarter community and its ideals. We have pledged to many projects that we feel are awesome and always wished to use this platform for a personal project that fit. Finally, we started thinking about Tweet Land, a game that builds itself collaboratively by the world’s tweets: a project that we really love, and thought the world would also. However, to finish it we needed funds that we didn’t have at the moment, so, what better way to fund this collaborative game than a crowdfunding community such as Kickstarter. It was pretty obvious for us that this should be the way Tweet Land is born.

What other projects do you like on Kickstarter?

Well, actually we are kinda geeky guys, believe it or not! ;) So we get really excited about technology and videogame projects. Since Diaspora we have been looking forward to these kinds of projects. The first project we backed up was a Back to the Future comic (that sadly didn’t reach its funding goal). Other projects we showed interest in were the Power Laces sneakers (also Back to the Future related by the way), the Space Shuttle video project, and a book of high-tech scientific machines around the world. Finally, we have also supported the gaming community by supporting Orion: Prelude, an awesome first-person shooter game about dinos and mechs, and our favorite, the first Costa Rican project on Kickstarter, The Return, a movie that successfully reached its goal!

You can support the project here.