In the early summer of 2009, the Daily Telegraph of London
revealed what Gordon Brown called the "biggest parliamentary scandal for two
centuries." All England was abuzz over it. It concerned . . . wait for it . . .
wait for it . . . a duck house. By that I mean, yes, a house that a duck lives
in.Specifically, the Telegraph obtained 2 million pages of
leaked documents covering 5 years of claims for expense submitted by members of
parliament. Claimed expenses that ultimately came to light ranged from bags of
manure, to chocolate Santas, to renovations on boyfriends' apartments--all
courtesy of Britain's taxpayers. But the emblematic expense to emerge from the
scandal was Sir Peter Viggers's Duck Island, a foot-high, one-room Queen Anne
cottage floating in the middle of a pond somewhere on Viggers's property. A
cottage purchased to the tune £1,645 that apparently his ducks didn't even
like, the ingrates.
Not to be outdone by the Telegraph, the rival Guardian
newspaper seized on the fact that hundreds of thousands of pages of documents
had yet to be reported on. Cut to one week later: Simon Willison and his
15-member team have constructed a quick and dirty crowdsourcing interface built
with Django to enlist 25,000 Guardian readers who might give a crap to sift through
the documents and identify suspicious spending by unethical public servants
The interface consists of a single PDF page of a (usually
multi-page) document presented with a series of buttons allowing the viewer to
categorize the page along 2 axes. The first axis is the type of item
represented:
- Claim (ie, expense form)
- Proof (eg, receipt, invoice)
- Blank
- Other
The second axis is the page's journalistic relevance:
- Not interesting
- Interesting
- Interesting but known
- Investigate this!
After categorizing, the viewer can then log
the line item financial data represented on the document page.
Nowhere on the site does the Guardian disclose exactly what
process the reader-reviewed documents undergo after they've been dutifully
cataloged and rated. The act of rating is presumed to be the end of the
reader's concern over questions of process as the documents then recess into
the opaque world of journalistic review. (Thanks for your time, love, now just
leave it to the professionals.) But we can assume that some review does occur,
since the Guardian has published at least 2 follow-up stories summarizing what
the readers have dug up.
A number of vaguely community-type features accompany the
site. The most prolific reviewers are listed both by pages reviewed and line
items added. Also, all reviewers' review histories are available. Finally, the
MP's themselves are summarized based on which of their documents have been
reviewed and which reviewer has reviewed them.
As reported by Harvard's Neiman Journalism Lab, the entire
endeavor is wrapped in the rhetoric of games. Simon Willison explicitly
situates the Guardian interface in the space of gaming, claiming that "making
it feel like a game" was part of their strategy for involving readers.
Willison identifies 4 features that constitute the
interface's game rhetoric:
- the progress bar on the front page, which creates a sense of a common goal or a collective "score"
- An easy categorization scheme
- reader contributions ranked by productivity to create a "competitive edge"
- a sense of narrative produced by the photos of MPs on each MP's page
If we are to take these claims seriously, then we must
consider it on the terms that its creator has explicitly set out for it. That
is, if it's "like a game," is it like a good game? Once the entire retinue of
game criteria--playability, narrative, visuals--are hauled in, Willison's claims
fall apart fast. The Guardian crowdsourcing application is in fact nothing like
a game.
The "easy" categorization scheme is identified as a primary
game component. However, this orientation runs counter to what we generally
understand to be compelling about games, namely that they are difficult. In
game paradigms, difficulty is experienced as a pleasure, not a hindrance to
pleasure. Ease kills playability.
The individual reviewer rankings are indeed game-like, and
it seems plausible that watching one's ranking rise may in fact have encouraged
an additional click or two.
Narrative implies a change over time. The inclusion of MP
photos are static and do not appear as a result of any user action. The photos
represent character, but these are characters without even plot, much less the
much grander idea of narrative.
Finally, games generally exhibit some quality of fun. That
is, they constitute play. There is nothing fun or playful about reviewing
redacted invoices submitted by the local MP. Nor, however, is there any danger
that the task might be difficult. Worse, the danger is that it's boring--the
stake in the heart of any game.
Regardless of how well the Guardian application matches up
to an academic notion of a game, empirical standards can be brought to bear to
gauge its success. By the measure of participation, the application appears to
be a partial success. Over 214,000 pages of documents have been reviewed as of
this writing, and a few reviewers seem to have made document
reviews a second job (eg, eatmypoverty). However, it should be noted that the rate of
participation, which started high, has clearly dwindled. With approximately 20
or so pages currently being reviewed per day, it seems improbable that the
remaining 244,000 pages will ever be reviewed fully.
The application's creators anticipated the "long, fading
tail" of participation. This fact is presented as a bedrock belief about the
way publics interact with information. This fading effect suggests that the
public is motivated by its hot interest in the underlying news story and
very little by the attractive quality of interaction with the interface. In
short, for most readers, the supposed game-like quality of the application is
not enough to sustain participation after the scandal of the news story has
worn off. (Compare this to many editorial games, which are compelling apart
from any particular hot news story.) A possible area of further research might
be to discover computational ways of converting short-term interest into
sustained participation.
I should note in passing that there are socio-political and
journalistic standards we could equally bring to bear here. We might ask, for
example, what new information came to light, or what was the effect on the
political system? My inquiry, however, is limited to the interface itself and
the success of its mechanics, not what the interface produces in terms of
political or journalistic content.
Willison's use of game rhetoric tells us little in the end
about the actual use of games in journalism since the Guardian application
fails almost every test of an actual game. However, the stated intention of
creating something "like a game" contextualizes the effort in an intriguing
way. We might look at Willison's proposed solutions and regress back to deduce
how one programmer (at least) framed the problem of news information in the
first place:
- a ("fun") game is needed to lure users <== news information is inherently dull
- the game requires a simple and simplifying solution <== news information is too complex
Turning either or both of these assumptions on their head
might yield some fruitful areas for future enquiries. For example, instead of
viewing news information as too complex,
designers might begin from a notion of news as always just complex
enough. Rather than deny news information's
inherent complexity, crowdsource news applications might highlight or even
increase the information's complexity. By borrowing from the leveling
convention of video games, such an application might offer the reader a chance
to "level up," attaining access to ever more complex information or
categorization schemes as progressive levels of competency are established.
Ironically, there is a sense of the word "game" that I
believe stands lurking in the background of the Nieman analysis. That is the
idea of a game as that which is trivial. This would account for why the word
"easy" would appear in connection to it. But if we take games seriously, and
take complexity seriously, we might pave the way to something that is both more
difficult and more fun.
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