Category: Development Process

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.

In looking at games and their intersections with the entire news ecology, we have so far in the main assumed a specific model of the designer-consumer relationship. Ferrari's "History of Editorial Games, Part One," for example, traces the history of one specific brand of news games as the history of exceptional individuals or groups who, in possession of a pre-determined set of information, construct games for the purpose of communicating that information to an imagined public in need of persuasion.

The remainder of the history of news games as we have so far considered it bears out the centrality of this metaphor. That is, the games are produced by a dedicated class of design practitioners, usually in the form of named authors and studios that create artifacts for the benefit and edification of a separate class of individuals called news or information consumers. Even when an individual crosses from the latter class into the former (e.g., citizen journalist, amateur game designer), the producer and consumer classes themselves remain undisturbed.

In this way, games stand in for the traditional news story, editorial cartoon, or flat information graphic. They enact a one-way flow of knowledge or ideas from the knowledgeable to the ignorant, from the journalist to the reader. In allowing the game creation process to escape our scrutiny, our critical focus shifts largely to the mechanics of game play, and all the learning is presumed to take place on that stage of play. Missing from this equation is the process by which the game design itself encodes a body of knowledge with the concomitant question of how that body of knowledge may itself be altered by the design process.

Borut Pfeifer, a friend of the blog and Georgia Tech alumnus, recently left his job as a lead AI Programmer at EA Los Angeles to strike out as an indie. While many in his position would probably be worrying primarily about their fiscal security, hoping to cash in on the massive interest in small-scale downloadable games with a quirky art style and a few novel mechanics to drive the experience home... Borut has decided to make a political game. More specifically,  he's making a documentary game about the riots in Tehran following Iran's most recent election. In order to fund the project, he has turned to Kickstarter. This website allows one to set a funding goal and enumerate a number of tiered rewards for specific levels of contribution. Potential patrons are only charged if the campaign goal is met by the end date.

Borut, like many other indies using Kickstarter, offers producer credits and an in-game likeness of the patron at the highest tiers of contribution. The lowest-tier offering, perfect for impoverished students such as myself, is $10 for a preorder of the game. Presales, if you remember, were one of the two key methods by which African Americans were able to fund their first independent film projects. It's exciting that people like Borut are trying this for games, especially for a documentary game that has the potential to define the genre if it succeeds. Here is an article by Pfeifer at Gamasutra on the process of creating a Kickstarter project. Clicking on the widget above will take you to the project site. Please consider helping him out!

In the course of our research we have examined how games or game-like interactive applications have been incorporated into some news outlets. But how do all these experimentations from the media industry relate to the training of future journalists and the research being done at Journalism schools?  Is there a space for videogames in J-school academia?

Traditionally, journalism schools, at least in the United States, have been separated into broadcast and print departments. This division of teaching has been present for decades as these platforms were completely different worlds: different skill sets, different media companies, and so forth. Today, with the efforts in the industry to converge and the growing space of the web as a blender of the traditional media, the separated platform training has been challenged.

Another focus that can be seen in Journalism Schools is a more theoretical one where it is possible to find more media, culture and communication research. Around this perspective we can see videogames taken as a cultural and societal phenomenon. For example, schools would observe how the entertainment industry is creating brands that are deployed across different platforms, including videogames, or they would assess how games affect people and society.

In both cases it is difficult to see videogames more than as an observable phenomenon, and far beyond from the idea that videogames could be something that journalists could create as news-related product. However, if I would predict how games will knock on the door of the Journalism schools, I could see that news-gaming might be introduced in the same way as multimedia and online journalism was done some years ago.

A few months ago I attended a couple of Journalism related conferences: The Society of News Design conference in Las Vegas and the Online News Association in Washington D.C. One of my goals attending these conferences was to assess the current understanding of new storytelling resources inside the online media industry, mainly interactive infographics and games, and how the newsrooms where adapting to the new challenges. It was good to see that many outlets were thinking and doing things about these topics. However, I believe their approaches are still too shy... and probably still unsuited for game development in a news environment.

For many years the word "convergence" has been present inside the media industry, but not many experiments became as successful as expected. Some companies blended their broadcast, print, and online newsrooms, others created collaboration teams between them, and many other combinations. In many cases the companies underestimated the culture clashes, technological challenges, and other issues that they would face. Others made deeper changes that seem to be going into the right direction. Even media companies where convergence was not an issue years ago are streamlining their operations and integrating as much as they can with their web counterparts.

Be a Reporter: Interactive Journalism Game is an online experience that is offered as a free online course in the NewsU.org training site, wherein people can assume the role of a reporter of a fictional town called Medina. As their official description says, it "helps users understand some of the basics: how journalists probe, clarify, verify and race against a deadline." This game was produced in conjunction with the Interactive Museum of News (Newseum).

The goal of the game is that the user reports and writes a story for a local media company in the city of Medina. The game starts with the editor's briefing, which explains to the user the issue that he needs to report about and reminds him about some core elements of a journalistic practice. The user needs to go around the city to collect the information needed to create a story by selecting different buildings or sites from an overview map of Medina. Each location contains information that can be gathered (such as news paper clips from the library) or has people that can be interviewed. Every once in awhile the editor pops up in a video screen to urge you to finish the story timely or to suggest you to go to a specific place to gather more information.

Everybody knows now that eBay and Craigslist did a number on newspaper revenue. We're told that newspaper producers were caught completely off guard by these online classifieds. One thing we wanted to know is: what would happen to the circulation of a newspaper if its game-playing constituency also migrated to the Internet?

This leads to a tacit first question: what number of newspaper-subscribers buy the paper just for the puzzles? There are some difficulties acquiring statistically significant numbers here. First, most newspapers don't do regular surveys of their readers to actually find out why they're buying the paper. Will Shortz at the New York Times shares an interesting figure - he does after all have a lot at stake here as the world's current Dean of Crossword Puzzles. In a 2004 interview Shortz discussed a survey from earlier in the decade that found 27% of newspaper readers playing the crossword occasionally. That numbers isn't particularly compelling for our purposes, but there is one other number dropped by Shortz that does carry some weight: 1%. That's the percentage of Americans who named crossword-solving as "their favorite activity in the world."