Games in Media
Playing the News
Does turning news articles into interactive games engage the readers and help to spread awareness on a topic? Read on to find out more about the newest format: news games.
By Lakshmi Prabha
Imagine donning the role of an undercover police personnel trying to uncover a serious drug racket while you are reading a piece of news on drug trafficking. While this may sound unorthodox, it was what was offered by the magazine Superinteressante, a part of the Brazilian Editora Abril group.
Playing games while consuming news is the trend that many journalism houses are eager to be a part of. It started as early as 2006, when online news websites started offering news quizzes for the readers to play and has gradually evolved into a genre of news based on different styles of gameplay.
Play is an important element in every culture. Elements of play are present in every facet of culture, be it art, media, politics or even war. John Huizinga's seminal work Homo Ludens is a masterwork in the sociology of gameplay. It acknowledges the different dimensions of play and how they relate to notions of justice, chivalry and collectivism.
Games and gamification are an important part of people’s media experiences. Today news games have become full fledged immersive video games from open world design to virtual reality experiences. The term 'gamification' was coined by Nick Pelling who defined it as a tool to improve user interface with game elements to make electronic transactions.
The global video game market is a rapidly growing industry and is poised to grow at an annual rate of 8.77% from 2024 to 2027. Journalism houses are adopting advancement in the field of gaming, especially aspects that have to do with heuristics, design and technology to find solutions to one of its oldest problems, that is to create such reader engagements with news content that has a potential for forming habits. News organisations are investing in creating digital games to leverage the offerings of the gaming industry and it comes as a part of other meta processes like individualisation, commercialisation and mediatization.
Reimagining audiences
News games, as they are called, are intended to make reader engagement with news more fun and give avenues for the reader to empathise with the reality that is represented to them. Ian Bogost popularised the term news games and was one of the first to experiment with the format. His game Cow Clicker served as a satire of gamification and was intended to critique how social games affect people. In a time when news fatigue and news avoidance are gnawing at the revenues of news organisations, the thinking goes that gamifying the news can help lock media producers and their customers with a fun format.
One of the most read pieces of The New York Times is an interactive game called You Be the Ump. The reader becomes an umpire behind the home plate, calling ball and strike as they receive their updates. This was an accompaniment to the news about Major League Basketball, discussing how using automated strike zones is replacing the traditional role of umpires. The idea behind this interactive news game was to let the readers see for themselves how hard it is to don the cloak of an umpire. It quickly became popular on the social platform Twitter (now X) when readers started tweeting their scores.
DC's Great Rat Migration launched by the Washington Post was similarly intended to engage audiences with an immersive experience of news. When it comes to gamification in journalism, the commonly held opinion is that games and play in the news is intended to entertain readers. However, newsmakers around the world are experimenting with games as a way of reinventing storytelling and reimagining their audiences.
The award winning newsgame Pirate Fishing by Juliana Ruhfus, pioneers in interactive investigation by taking to the seas of Sierra Leone to investigate the multimillion dollar illegal fishing trade. Another project Hacked: Syria’s Electronic Armies by the same journalist navigates hackers and cyber war in Syria based on real life experiences and includes links to real hacktivist profiles in social media. In both these pieces the journalist was trying to tell the story by making investigative journalism pieces fun and relevant to an audience beyond ‘serious readers’. Both Pirate Fishing and Hacked were created for Al Jazeera and received many accolades for getting these pieces of investigative journalism to a broader audience.
More than website traffic
As fun as it seems, news games aren't as easy to put together. The reality that needs to be represented in news should balance with the aspect of play for the reader's empathic engagement. This engagement should translate into measurable results like in reckoning how news games have increased the traffic in a news website, or if readers spend more time on a page, or if readers create social signals for the news by sharing it on social media.
Across the board, gamification is a trend that newsrooms are ready to experiment with. Media organisations like the Buzzfeed prompt a playful culture where novel content and news games formats are experimented with. Aside from the fact that such cultures give newsrooms an innovative edge, the addition of games to the online news repertoire comes with additional cost.
To begin with, there are staffing and technical requirements in the newsrooms for individuals who can exclusively focus on game development. This additional personnel not only changes the face of the traditional newsroom, but also calls into question the role of the journalist and the levels to which game developers can collaborate with them in building a story. After all, gamified news is still news, and requires editorial ethics to be met.
Given that there is significant investment in building news games, producers also need to grapple with the idea of where to recover their costs. Most importantly, they need to ask whether their audience is willing to pay for gamified content. Naturally, bigger news houses like the NY Times or the Washington Post would be able to provide for such creative experimentation. It is the smaller news houses and alternative media that will need to think deep before taking the plunge. However as more and more open source tools are becoming available online, this could prove to be less problematic.
What’s the score?
The ultimate goal of gamified news is user engagement. Converting a casual reader into a dedicated one is onerous. Crux, a startup built on natural language technology, built a widget called Knowledge Tracker. The widget allows you to keep track of your knowledge score on a particular news topic and nudges you to read more to better your score. Reward based systems like these do not offer material benefits, yet their appeal is strong because of the obvious social and cultural identity enhancements they provide. In the Crux Knowledge Tracker, users are able to share their score online too.
No matter how news organisations may eulogise the benefits of gamification it presents many challenges. Concerns arise regarding gathering and use of data, accessibility issues, transparency, credibility, issues of mental health and well being. For example, when Pirate Fishing was user-tested, at least one person had no idea that they had to scroll down - which defeated its purpose. In another example, The Uber Game by the Financial Times was slammed on social media as paid content, in other words, a glorified advertisement.
Is gamification then the future of news? Is it worth spending months or sometimes years to develop a game that can hook the reader, but does not treat systemic problems like the erosion of journalistic quality or the commercial decline of the news industry?
Gamification signals how the structure of finding information online is changing. It cannot be treated on its own, but must be seen as a symptom of a wider social phenomenon where technological fixes are believed to solve every conceivable problem. As it happens with new approaches to old issues, there are both enthusiasts and sceptics. For now, news games are primarily a strategy that media houses are ready to explore to get more people to pay attention to the news.