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.
1. What is This Game for?
The goal of this project was to design a highly graphical and interactive environment as a way of presenting "important but (too often) boring" issues in a community. Through the development and testing of the games, the designers tried to find out whether this kind of presentation of complex and conflicting facets of an issue may lead to greater citizen engagement, understanding, and action taking.
The theme of this game is "ethanol" and is based on current news articles about ethanol's potential as a substitute for fossil fuels and the political, scientific, and economic ramifications surrounding the issue. Within this focus, players read through a series of informational text blocks to proceed through the gameplay. Through this reading, players learn complex information regarding ethanol-related issues.
This game can be categorized as an educational (purpose), mission-completing (goal), navigational (interaction style), Flash (development platform) game. Fitting this game into one of the 7 newsgame genres proposed by our Journalism and Games lab, You be the Reporter sits most comfortably under the documentary game heading. Rather than isolating a specific event or story, it seeks to "engage larger historical and current events." Documentary games exploit procedural environments to look beyond specific time-delimited events toward larger issues that may cross several social domains.
2. The Plot and Gameplay
In this game the player explores the interactive environment of the game to reveal the multiple perspectives involved with the issue of ethanol. The plot is simple: the player acts a staff member of a US senator. Her mission is to submit a report on alternative fuels, in particular ethanol, and its effects on the environment, energy policy, farming and world hunger. In order to accomplish this, the player navigates an orthogonal, 3D space composed of a variety of relevant organizations such as a university and a farm.
At each place, she interacts with the human characters to obtain knowledge. After she finds all the information, she goes back to the senator, and reports what she has heard from the various people she has encountered. The reporting takes the form of a series of quiz questions. Each question requires a simple true or false selection. If she fails the quiz, the senator becomes disappointed. The next step is unclear, as the player does not seem to get another chance to replay the game.
Although the game is certainly more informative than the linear form of a single news article, to some extent it lacks the self-discovery features that would make it a more engaging experience. At the beginning of the actual gameplay, the player is led to read a dossier displayed on the main screen. This is a kind starting point for those who are not familiar with navigational and discovery types of games.
The game, however, remains in this mode throughout the entire playthrough. It informs the player that the "blue dots" on the map provide you with what you need for the reports for the senator. As you move to the area that has the dots, you simply click people who are glowing white, indicating that they are ready to talk. Thus, it seems reasonable to see how a player deprived of any true opportunity to make her own discoveries might get bored while playing (or in fact, reading) the game.
The interactions with the non-player characters (NPCs) is extremely sparse, too; the task involves only clicking one answer out of at most 3 choices. In practice, this usually resolves to a choice between letting the NPC continue his monologue or stopping the conversation altogether. Moreover, the NPC's speech is hard-coded, not procedurally-generated based on player actions. Therefore, the game merely repackages informational content in a non-linear format. Although this game has characteristics of interactivity such as navigational and spatial experience, it does not actively incorporate the procedural mechanics by which we recognize most games.
Based on early accounts of the design process, the game was originally intended to include a series of "mini games" as the player moved from each NPC to the next. This was intended to motivate the player to continue on in her progress from encounter to encounter in the game. Because the mini games were not included in the final build, we might conclude that our experience of You be the Reporter is necessarily a truncated one.
3. Testing of the Ethanol Games
You be the Reporter was tested against a second game titled Ethanol Issues Board Game and against 3 different web page layouts containing the same information as found in the games, or external links to that information. Players were asked to give subjective evaluations of their experience, level of engagement, level of interest and assessment of the news information delivered.
The evaluative criteria as delineated in the survey, however, are broad. The issue of learning, for example, is reduced to a single yes/no question: "Did you learn something about this topic that you hadn't considered before?" Questions regarding understanding and retention are similarly broad. The broadness of the questions seems calculated to give a general impression of the overall user experience, rather than a fine-grained understanding of how each interface works and where it succeeds or fails.
According to The Wake, a University of Minnesota student magazine, the INMS's analysis showed that testers preferred an organized list of links for receiving complex news information over any other form of information presentation, including either of the game styles. INMS concludes from this finding that games are not effective vehicles for delivering serious news content.
As we have previously indicated, however, You be the Reporter contains enough shortcomings in its implementation and mechanics that it would be premature to generalize from any test of this particular game as to the efficacy of games in general to deliver news content. At most, we may draw conclusions about the efficacy of this particular set of game mechanics to deliver content. Those indeed may fail, but this fact says nothing about the potential for games as a genre for serious news delivery.
4. Relations & Processes Beyond News Contents
More significantly, the research protocol also reveals a bias in the framing of news delivery that may prove instructive for future development of news games in general. Readers are asked about their engagement with the "information . . . about ethanol," they are asked whose point of view is presented in "the material," and are asked in general to judge the "presentation of information."
In short, as evidenced by the survey questions, news is reduced to its role as information, the news ecology framed as a problem of information delivery. Thus the game privileges isolatable facts and figures issuing from authoritative sources delivered directly to the player in the form of essentially unmediated monologue. The bias toward fact delivery is encoded into the game's design at the level of core functionality. This dynamic sets up You be the Reporter to compete against an extremely efficient, pre-existing form of information delivery--namely lists of links. If the end goal is simply to get "information," the self-guided link list may indeed prove insurmountable.
An analogy: imagine engineering a high-powered automobile and testing it as a new method to get from the bathroom to the bedroom. Clearly, such a vehicle would prove useless to the task for which another, more efficient mode of transport already exists: walking. Likewise, if the problem of news ecology is reduced simply to a problem of information delivery, more effective methods may in fact already exist.
A documentary game such as You be the Reporter, however, has potential to draw upon a rich set of approaches to the news that go beyond simply learning information. Specifically, the procedural environment is ideal for highlighting complex relationships, systems, and processes that simple facts cannot communicate. For example, interactions between farmers, academia, industry and lawmakers dramatized as a dynamic interplay of forces in which the player might participate could provide an understanding of real-world relationships, systems, and processes unattainable by simply navigating a list of links.
As the designers admitted, this game lacks motivation and reward systems that encourage players to continue playing the game. What design implementations might recover some of these lost features? To increase the feeling of accomplishment in the procedural gameplay, various 'levels' of the game can be a solution. People comprehend news contents differently depending on their own knowledge. Thus when approaching broad audiences who have different levels of knowledge on the related issues, game designers might consider step-by-step strategies.
In the case of the ethanol game, the objectives of the first level could be only to know "what the heck ethanol is." Meanwhile, players who already have wide exposure to the material may pass this level very easily. Conversely, those who have never been interested in chemistry or alternative fuels can obtain the basic and important ideas. The next level could deal with more complex issues of ethanol such as its function as an alternative fuel and its economic advantages against oil.
As the designers of this game clarified, their ultimate goal is to influence player's minds so that it leads them to engage with community issues. In fact, it is hard to evaluate the ultimate social effects of playing a game, some of which may not be realized until weeks, months, or years later. However, we might imagine adding simple procedures at the end of the game that lead the player to take a real action. For example, game designers may include a link to an online petition that directly affects government's decision making.
5. Platform for Newsgame Production
In the description of their projects, the designers clarified that one of the goals of the projects was to build game creation tools that could be used to develop a number of individual games. In particular, the tools were meant for non-programmers in the newsroom who input news information through easy-to-use game GUI. We have not been able to establish if any such development tool exists specifically for You be the Reporter. However, this game has the potential to be a newsgame production platform, especially for community-related issues. In other words, the format of this game including spaces and character might be evolved to incorporate different news contents related to other community issues.
We might imagine that they are modules of community institutions including schools, various research centers, farms, factories, various shops, and others. Modules might also include numerous characters representing occupations that correspond to those institutions. A reporter in a newsroom may pick several institutional modules and arrange them in 2D space. Next, she may assign characters to the appropriate places. Then each character may be assigned news contents to be shown to the reader/player. In this way, newsmakers can produce a myriad of news contents in a game-like, quiz-based form in a timely manner.
The goal of this project was to design a highly graphical and interactive environment as a way of presenting "important but (too often) boring" issues in a community. Through the development and testing of the games, the designers tried to find out whether this kind of presentation of complex and conflicting facets of an issue may lead to greater citizen engagement, understanding, and action taking.
The theme of this game is "ethanol" and is based on current news articles about ethanol's potential as a substitute for fossil fuels and the political, scientific, and economic ramifications surrounding the issue. Within this focus, players read through a series of informational text blocks to proceed through the gameplay. Through this reading, players learn complex information regarding ethanol-related issues.
This game can be categorized as an educational (purpose), mission-completing (goal), navigational (interaction style), Flash (development platform) game. Fitting this game into one of the 7 newsgame genres proposed by our Journalism and Games lab, You be the Reporter sits most comfortably under the documentary game heading. Rather than isolating a specific event or story, it seeks to "engage larger historical and current events." Documentary games exploit procedural environments to look beyond specific time-delimited events toward larger issues that may cross several social domains.
2. The Plot and Gameplay
In this game the player explores the interactive environment of the game to reveal the multiple perspectives involved with the issue of ethanol. The plot is simple: the player acts a staff member of a US senator. Her mission is to submit a report on alternative fuels, in particular ethanol, and its effects on the environment, energy policy, farming and world hunger. In order to accomplish this, the player navigates an orthogonal, 3D space composed of a variety of relevant organizations such as a university and a farm.
At each place, she interacts with the human characters to obtain knowledge. After she finds all the information, she goes back to the senator, and reports what she has heard from the various people she has encountered. The reporting takes the form of a series of quiz questions. Each question requires a simple true or false selection. If she fails the quiz, the senator becomes disappointed. The next step is unclear, as the player does not seem to get another chance to replay the game.
Although the game is certainly more informative than the linear form of a single news article, to some extent it lacks the self-discovery features that would make it a more engaging experience. At the beginning of the actual gameplay, the player is led to read a dossier displayed on the main screen. This is a kind starting point for those who are not familiar with navigational and discovery types of games.
The game, however, remains in this mode throughout the entire playthrough. It informs the player that the "blue dots" on the map provide you with what you need for the reports for the senator. As you move to the area that has the dots, you simply click people who are glowing white, indicating that they are ready to talk. Thus, it seems reasonable to see how a player deprived of any true opportunity to make her own discoveries might get bored while playing (or in fact, reading) the game.
The interactions with the non-player characters (NPCs) is extremely sparse, too; the task involves only clicking one answer out of at most 3 choices. In practice, this usually resolves to a choice between letting the NPC continue his monologue or stopping the conversation altogether. Moreover, the NPC's speech is hard-coded, not procedurally-generated based on player actions. Therefore, the game merely repackages informational content in a non-linear format. Although this game has characteristics of interactivity such as navigational and spatial experience, it does not actively incorporate the procedural mechanics by which we recognize most games.
Based on early accounts of the design process, the game was originally intended to include a series of "mini games" as the player moved from each NPC to the next. This was intended to motivate the player to continue on in her progress from encounter to encounter in the game. Because the mini games were not included in the final build, we might conclude that our experience of You be the Reporter is necessarily a truncated one.
3. Testing of the Ethanol Games
You be the Reporter was tested against a second game titled Ethanol Issues Board Game and against 3 different web page layouts containing the same information as found in the games, or external links to that information. Players were asked to give subjective evaluations of their experience, level of engagement, level of interest and assessment of the news information delivered.
The evaluative criteria as delineated in the survey, however, are broad. The issue of learning, for example, is reduced to a single yes/no question: "Did you learn something about this topic that you hadn't considered before?" Questions regarding understanding and retention are similarly broad. The broadness of the questions seems calculated to give a general impression of the overall user experience, rather than a fine-grained understanding of how each interface works and where it succeeds or fails.
According to The Wake, a University of Minnesota student magazine, the INMS's analysis showed that testers preferred an organized list of links for receiving complex news information over any other form of information presentation, including either of the game styles. INMS concludes from this finding that games are not effective vehicles for delivering serious news content.
As we have previously indicated, however, You be the Reporter contains enough shortcomings in its implementation and mechanics that it would be premature to generalize from any test of this particular game as to the efficacy of games in general to deliver news content. At most, we may draw conclusions about the efficacy of this particular set of game mechanics to deliver content. Those indeed may fail, but this fact says nothing about the potential for games as a genre for serious news delivery.
4. Relations & Processes Beyond News Contents
More significantly, the research protocol also reveals a bias in the framing of news delivery that may prove instructive for future development of news games in general. Readers are asked about their engagement with the "information . . . about ethanol," they are asked whose point of view is presented in "the material," and are asked in general to judge the "presentation of information."
In short, as evidenced by the survey questions, news is reduced to its role as information, the news ecology framed as a problem of information delivery. Thus the game privileges isolatable facts and figures issuing from authoritative sources delivered directly to the player in the form of essentially unmediated monologue. The bias toward fact delivery is encoded into the game's design at the level of core functionality. This dynamic sets up You be the Reporter to compete against an extremely efficient, pre-existing form of information delivery--namely lists of links. If the end goal is simply to get "information," the self-guided link list may indeed prove insurmountable.
An analogy: imagine engineering a high-powered automobile and testing it as a new method to get from the bathroom to the bedroom. Clearly, such a vehicle would prove useless to the task for which another, more efficient mode of transport already exists: walking. Likewise, if the problem of news ecology is reduced simply to a problem of information delivery, more effective methods may in fact already exist.
A documentary game such as You be the Reporter, however, has potential to draw upon a rich set of approaches to the news that go beyond simply learning information. Specifically, the procedural environment is ideal for highlighting complex relationships, systems, and processes that simple facts cannot communicate. For example, interactions between farmers, academia, industry and lawmakers dramatized as a dynamic interplay of forces in which the player might participate could provide an understanding of real-world relationships, systems, and processes unattainable by simply navigating a list of links.
As the designers admitted, this game lacks motivation and reward systems that encourage players to continue playing the game. What design implementations might recover some of these lost features? To increase the feeling of accomplishment in the procedural gameplay, various 'levels' of the game can be a solution. People comprehend news contents differently depending on their own knowledge. Thus when approaching broad audiences who have different levels of knowledge on the related issues, game designers might consider step-by-step strategies.
In the case of the ethanol game, the objectives of the first level could be only to know "what the heck ethanol is." Meanwhile, players who already have wide exposure to the material may pass this level very easily. Conversely, those who have never been interested in chemistry or alternative fuels can obtain the basic and important ideas. The next level could deal with more complex issues of ethanol such as its function as an alternative fuel and its economic advantages against oil.
As the designers of this game clarified, their ultimate goal is to influence player's minds so that it leads them to engage with community issues. In fact, it is hard to evaluate the ultimate social effects of playing a game, some of which may not be realized until weeks, months, or years later. However, we might imagine adding simple procedures at the end of the game that lead the player to take a real action. For example, game designers may include a link to an online petition that directly affects government's decision making.
5. Platform for Newsgame Production
In the description of their projects, the designers clarified that one of the goals of the projects was to build game creation tools that could be used to develop a number of individual games. In particular, the tools were meant for non-programmers in the newsroom who input news information through easy-to-use game GUI. We have not been able to establish if any such development tool exists specifically for You be the Reporter. However, this game has the potential to be a newsgame production platform, especially for community-related issues. In other words, the format of this game including spaces and character might be evolved to incorporate different news contents related to other community issues.
We might imagine that they are modules of community institutions including schools, various research centers, farms, factories, various shops, and others. Modules might also include numerous characters representing occupations that correspond to those institutions. A reporter in a newsroom may pick several institutional modules and arrange them in 2D space. Next, she may assign characters to the appropriate places. Then each character may be assigned news contents to be shown to the reader/player. In this way, newsmakers can produce a myriad of news contents in a game-like, quiz-based form in a timely manner.
Greetings. You may find of interest this news reporting simulation game I did in 2001 with colleagues at Columbia University. http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/newssim/
I did earlier news reporting games back in the 1980s and 1990s (using Basic and Hypercard) but haven't converted them to contemporary platforms.
John Pavlik
Chair, Dept. of Journalism and Media Studies
Rutgers University
John, thanks so much for this link. It looks very worthwhile and we're going to give it a thorough run-through. I'd be curious sometime to see your earlier games too. We should have access to the platforms, would you be willing to share them?