In my previous post about Shuffletime.com I raised the point that adopting a format similar to Shuffletime for news content delivery might be too problematic, because people would have a hard time trusting any news organization that offers a material reward for consuming its content. In this post I will attempt to explain why a news organization that offers a monetary rewards to its readers in exchange for consumption might face problems in readership and integrity. The danger of offering monetary rewards can be at least partially explained by the "crowding-out" effect proposed by Swiss economist Bruno Frey.

At first glance, CNN Challenge is an online quiz game revolving around the news, current events and general knowledge of popular culture. A player might have certain expectations based on the genre; for instance, most quiz games have the end goal of teaching players some body of knowledge that they did not have prior to playing. In this case, the player selects one of ten CNN personalities who will serve as a guide throughout the game, which includes giving instructions on how to play, as well commenting on the player's progress after each round.

As well as its implementation of standard quiz game conventions, CNN Challenge takes on a more nuanced and intricate approach to online news trivia. Many of these subtleties were revealed in an interview with Kay Madati, current Vice President of Audience Experience at CNN. In our talk with him, we discussed the ways in which CNN Challenge is important on its own as a quiz game. More importantly, however, Madati explains how it fits into a larger, more complex structure that extends beyond notions of play. Instead, the game can be useful as a platform through which other purposes can be served within the CNN organization.

This excerpt appears in the upcoming Newsgames book.

As game scholar Espen Aarseth has observed, all games require "non-trivial effort" to play, as player interaction is required for a game to operate at all. But community games require a different kind of labor, one that involves even greater personal effort and investment, one that goes beyond manipulating tokens on a board or characters on-screen. In addition, these games ask players to put themselves on the line, in public, often in front of strangers. This is a type of community involvement that community activism rarely accomplishes, let alone local news.

So far, just one example of this kind of community game exists. Picture the Impossible, developed jointly by the Lab for Social Computing at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, is a game situated in a specific geographic location. The website describes the game's mission:

The game engages members of the community in exploration of the City of Rochester, and encourages both creativity and charitable giving in the community. Players participate in a range of activities, including casual web-based games, games that bring players out to events and locations throughout the city, and games that involve the tangible aspects of the Democrat and Chronicle newspaper itself.

Switzerland is pumping out more than just high quality chocolates and super-secret bank accounts these days. The resolutely independent central European nation has also stepped up its production of religious intolerance as evidenced by a recent national referendum banning the construction of minarets throughout the country. Similar to the hide-and-go-seek racism employed by the hijab haters of the French Republic, members of the Swiss People's Party and the Federal Democratic Union whipped up anti-muslim sentiment in November by claiming that the offending architecture, which is only the most visible part of a larger mosque structure, was just the tip of the Islamic iceberg. Left unchecked, supporters claimed, Islam would loom as large on the political landscape as the Matterhorn over the Alps.

Into this hotbed of Alpine arrogance, Minarett Attack [sic] emerged online as a game firmly in support of the ban and its underlying logic of cultural overwhelm. The game comprises a single scene: a quaint mountain village that, based on the monuments depicted, is at least part Zurich and part Geneva. A small Swiss flag flies atop a distant mountain peak. The light oom-pah-pah of accordion music fills the air, while the entire scene is bathed in the soothing glow of an alpine sunrise.

(This post was prepared by Tanyoung Kim and Bobby Schweizer)

The iPhone has proven itself a viable platform for small game producers. Its technical capabilities serve most non-3D needs, it isn't overly complicated to develop for, and there is a plan for monetization that does not need to rely on the promises of advertising dollars. It should come as no surprise, then, that the kinds of Flash games we're all familiar with have moved onto a handheld device. This includes those that touch on hot-button issues and current events.

As one of the biggest events in the country in the couple of years, the government's bailout of the financial industry has made its way into ten iPhone games. There's Bailout Bandits, in which you play as the police capturing bankers floating down from a high rise with their golden parachutes. There's Bailout!, a spreadsheet-like financial simulation game. Bailout Ben has you piloting a helicopter, dropping money on bar charts to aid corporations in need. Bailout America is a Lemmings-style game. Bailout Bonanza is basically Activision's classic Kaboom.

Two games in particular, though, embrace a similar cartoon aesthetic whose roots can be traced back to the editorial cartoon.

Remembering 7th Street: The Virtual Oakland Blues & Jazz game was developed by UC Berkeley journalism professor Paul Grabowicz and architecture professor Yehuda Kalay. Grabowicz, who had been a reporter for the Oakland Tribune, was interested in finding a new way to tell the story of the Oakland jazz scene, which flourished after World War II but was forced into decline only two decades later. In the Fall of 2006 and Spring of 2007, the architecture and journalism departments formed project groups to recreate Oakland, CA not only as a 3D model, but as a game.

You play as a musician looking to make it big in Oakland. The game, built using Torque, recreates the block of 7th Street using models created by the architecture students in 3D Studio Max. The neighborhood is populated with non-player characters who tell bits of the history of the area and send the player on basic quests. The game's script was written by the journalism students and arranged in the familiar fashion of a branching dialogue tree. After talking to "the right people" and buying a special guitar, the player is ready to break onto the scene.

Crickler is a crossword-derived digital puzzle game named for its creators, Michael and Barbara Crick. Crickler puzzles retain the verbal clues and one-word responses of crosswords, but they explode the layout of the puzzle into a list rather than an interlocking grid. When players type an answer, letters from one response automatically fill certain cells in other responses down the page, mimicking the way a crossword's answers provide clues for orthogonal responses. On their website, the Cricks explain why this arrangement makes for a better puzzle:

Traditional crossword puzzles are incredibly successful but they have several serious drawbacks: (1) They are difficult to construct, (2) Most words are short and often silly--chosen only because they fit, (3) Matching clues to numbers is a distraction, and (4) A given puzzle is usually either too easy or too hard. Cricklers solve all of these problems while retaining the essence and feel of a traditional crossword puzzle.

Prepared by Cinque Hicks and Tanyoung Kim.

You be the Reporter: Ethanol as Fuel! was developed by the Institute for New Media Studies (INMS) at the University of Minnesota by Nora Paul and Kathleen Hansen. It was one of two games developed under the Institute's "Playing the News" umbrella and supported by the Knight Foundation's 21st Century News Challenge grant. Along with other format variations based on the same topics, this game was designed and tested in 2007 and 2008. In this article, we first explain the goal, the characteristics of the game and the procedural gameplay. Next, we look into this newsgame in a larger context in which we discuss how we might improve this game beyond its primary goal of delivering complex news content. In addition, we suggest how this game could encourage readers to take real world social action. Finally, we argue the potential of this game as a platform for further newsgames in which other community issues can be embedded.

Undoubtedly one of the strongest capabilities of the internet is its ability to make a wide range of real-time information easily accessible to anyone with a connection.  News aggregators such as Google News and Huffington Post serve as some of the strongest manifestations of this capability. 

One might think this easy access to information would lead to a more informed citizenry, but as a 2007 report by the Pew Research Center demonstrates, this is not necessarily the case.  In the report, Pew asked respondents questions that tested their public affairs knowledge in 1989 and then again in 2007, and despite the many changes in mass communication that have occurred over the almost two-decade span of time, public affairs knowledge changed little.  In some instances, it decreased: 74% of respondents could name the vice-president in 1989, but in 2007 that number dropped to 69%.

With the growing pervasiveness of new technology, educators are focusing on media literacy as an increasingly important and relevant skill for students to have. This encourages a wealth of other journalism-related proficiencies, such as having a critical eye and evaluating the accuracy of information.

Link TV is an independent media outlet (including online fora and a satellite television channel) that seeks to foster these very skills through a project called Know the News (KtN). Link TV hosts two online tools called Remix the News and News Challenge, both of which are games that encourage students to reflect on the source of the news and how it is delivered; however, the ability to be critical is not one that is limited solely to the consumption of news broadcasts, but one that plays into a more basic literacy of information analysis. It becomes a question of pedagogy: by explicitly stating their aims to encourage media literacy, is KtN successful? Bloom's Taxonomy is a model worth investigating as a constructive means of assessing the efficacy of Remix the News, News Challenge and the overall objectives of the KtN project.