The World Wide Workshop (WWW) points to an alternative set of practices that may create some fruitful trouble in the distinction between game designers and news consumers. The WWW through its Globaloria program, works with students (middle school to graduate level) to create games that might loosely be called "newsy" or "educational." It is important to state that few of the games produced are true news games in any of the 7 categories we have delineated, nor is that their aim. Instead, most of the games engage a topic of interest to the student designers at a relatively high level of abstraction, usually divorced from any particular narrative or current event. Topics range from prom preparation to issues of local food production.

A quick sampling of the games will give some flavor of the range of game types and concerns:

Learn the Bones encourages the memorization of the names of the bones of the human skeleton. Players drag cutouts of bones from a disordered pile into correct position on an outlined skeleton, learning the names of the bones in the process. In a second mode, the player attempts to identify the bones correctly, gaining or losing points based on accuracy.

In The Ultimate Lunch Tray, the player first learns about the nutritional content of food and then attempts to load his or her lunch tray with healthy and locally grown foods. A high score is determined by being able to assemble the healthiest lunch.

Super Toaster was created by 8th grade students for the purpose of raising awareness about sustainability. Game play involves 2 levels of navigating a tree character through various obstacles followed by a third level of answering questions about consumer choices and their effects on the environment.

I should begin by saying that many of the games presented by the World Wide Workshop are adorable failures. That is, from the standpoint of ideal game design standards, even the games by graduate students often betray poor playability, poor design, poor mechanics, poor programming, or a combination of these. "Anti Greenhouse Gases," for example, shuts down immediately upon start of play, and "Choose Your Party," a game of electoral party politics includes only the game setup and not the game itself as described in the student's game wiki. Therefore, as a player, one might expect little if any educational benefit or insight.

The aim of the WWW, however, is not to produce games of educational benefit to the player, but games of educational benefit to the designer. The organization's literature describes its mission:

Globaloria teaches students more than just the technology of how to become webgame makers. It teaches many other digital literacies, including writing as well as reading, expressing ideas systematically and creatively, and innovation and collaboration using social media technology. These are the basic bundle of skills needed to be productive and successful 21st-century citizens and to flourish in the community-style digital work environments students will encounter as professionals.

The program teaches technological literacy. Its method of allowing the learner to make artifacts that are personally meaningful follows the tenets of constructionist learning. This learning theory, first formalized by Seymour Papert in 1991 describes constructionism as an extension of the idea of "manipulative materials to the idea that learning is most effective when part of an activity the learner experiences as constructing a meaningful product." This is often oversimplified to the catchphrase "learning by making."

One of the core understandings of constructionist learning theory is that the products thus created do not benefit those external to the product's creation process. Rather all skills, knowledge and insights accrue to the maker, not the consumer.

In looking at the WWW games, we can therefore expect that students learn the technical skills the program emphasizes through their game design process. But in order for games to function in a news ecology, they would need to engage content at least as meaningfully as technical skills. Do WWW students engage content as a secondary effect if not an outright program goal? Some evidence, albeit slight, affirms this.

Both Phyllis and Joshua 8th graders at Sandy River Middle School report on their research process for the Super Toaster game in this video. They reveal a concern with accuracy and relevance as motivations for thorough research, and Phyllis explicitly cites an improvement in "science skills." Meanwhile WWW claims that The Ultimate Lunch Tray "expressed [the students'] ideas about making school cafeterias healthier and more inclusive of foods from local farmers, and therefore better at supporting the local economy in Louisiana. Their game and press conference about nutrition issues inspired the Louisiana Department of Education to rethink school cafeterias." While there are no details on the exact nature of the research the New Orleans students conducted, we can infer that it was at least enough in volume to have delivered a press conference on the subject.

The tantalizing prospect that this points to is that we might begin to look at the building of games as a way of engaging meaningfully with the news. One might imagine the newspaper refashioned as a kind of toolmaker, providing the raw tools with which consumers build their own games, using news material as background data, plugins and upgrades. Bogost describes something similar in the "Newsgame Platforms" post albeit with the understanding that such a system would be used by the journalist, not the reader. Could this be imagined instead (or also) as a new way of reading the news by literally constructing it from the raw materials of digital media? News consumption not as a discrete activity, but as an operating system by which to frame a series of other activities?

Imagining the news as a process of ongoing game construction very quickly makes it difficult to see how specific narratives would be foregrounded in the way traditional news privileges such informational modes. Abstraction would become king. This notion runs parallel to Bogost's assertion that:

A newsgame platform would not focus on presenting the news, but on presenting the system in which news takes place--whether that system is a country, a city, a business sector, or some other arena. It would show the complexity of relations in such a system and synthesize how changes and alterations in one part of that system might have unexpected effects in another.

A reader-side system platform (perhaps based on an even lower level of design primitives than Bogost imagines) would offer news consumers insight into these complex systems by allowing them to develop the functions themselves. What I propose is not so much a different vision of the platform technology, but of how and where the technology is deployed.

An immediate challenge arises: why games? Is there something unique about games that would make them more suitable as objects of construction than other kinds of digital artifacts? Yes and no. While it may be that other kinds of artifacts might produce similar kinds of knowledge, games offer a uniquely procedural approach to conceiving systems. Because games are tightly bound, rule-based systems, they discipline the relationship between assets in a way that felt boards, for example, do not. In order to create a functioning, meaningful game system, A's precise effect on B must be defined somewhere and enforced by code. It's not a large leap to imagine that this sort of disciplining of symbols in code could lead to insights about the relationships between the real-world phenomena they symbolize.

Here are a couple of quick further thoughts that may help make these ideas even more useful:

• Perhaps we should think in terms of tinkering rather than always building from scratch. The Quest to Learn school uses tinkering as a full pedagogical method, encouraging students to repeatedly break and reconfigure systems in order to gain a complete understanding of them.

• Similarly, we should embrace the power of failure. Of course Bogost's famous "rhetoric of failure" operates within the game system. A slightly different notion may work to wrap the game design system itself: According to constructivist theory (the foundation for constructionist theory), learners learn by attempting to act based on a flawed model of the world and having that attempt end in failure.

Undoubtedly, this idea of the professional journalist as supplier of raw materials to be assembled by the reader does violence to the traditional notion of journalist as storyteller. If people have to sift through heaps of facts and an equal number of game assets, won't they quickly become overwhelmed?

I think these are valid questions, but I also think there are historical precedents that may serve as guides for navigating this pivotal moment. The invention of writing, the flushing of Greek scholarship after the fall of Constantinople, and the invention of the printing press all threatened to overwhelm the previous information paradigm by putting more people in touch with a greater amount of information than was deemed possible to assimilate. But I'll have to save 6000 years of historical analysis for the next post.