News games: Do journalists want to lose that, too?

September 11, 2008 by Kurt
Filed under: general 
Ian Bogost

Ian Bogost

Today was the first day for the Online News Association conference — the “pre-day,” actually, with a series of preconference programs. I attended the daylong “Playing the News” session hosted by J-Lab. The best part for me: The quote from Ian Bogost, author of Persuasive Games and a professor at Georgia Institute of Technology.

When asked why spend substantial money on building online games instead of paying for another reporter, freelance help or a web server: “I see (news gaming) as an opportunity as big as the web,” he replied. “You really want to give that up again?”

The room roared with appreciation for the candor.

I was impressed through the day with the willingness of the group to experiment and revise the work they’d done on news games — and the careful thought they gave to designing, structuring, researching and revising the games they developed. Example: Gail Robinson, editor-in-chief of the Gotham Gazette talked about a New York City budget game that roughly caricatured city officials. But the caricatures were rough so the game wouldn’t lose its shelf-live as the officials left office.

Here more of the highlights from the sessions.

Social media. These games are exciting when they integrate social tools. Many of the presenters talked about embedding the games on other sites, including KQED’s Meghan Laslocky, who works on the You Decide game, and Eric Brown, CEO of Impact Games. Several, including those at Impact Games, include means for players to share with other readers/players or comment on the results or the game itself.

Joellen Easton

Joellen Easton

When people play games, they want to win. And what it means to win may be something they come up with all on their own. “People bring their own ‘win conditions’ to a game.” Joellen Easton, public insight analyst at American Public Media, who talked about a number of games they’ve produced, including Budget Hero. It’s a federal budget game.

The cost and time commitment of doing games is substantial. Unclear, yet, whether there is a clear return on the effort, though Gotham Gazette clearly believes it to be the case. They’ve done at least 20 of them and have a Knight Foundation grant to do more. Everyone seems to underestimate the time it will take and the cost to program a game. Panelists said their really big games (such as Budget Hero and You Decide) cost anywhere from $30,000 to $100,000 to produce.

Grant writing. News organizations — newspapers in particular — are bad at seeking grants. And perhaps we need to work on it. Many of the news organizations that presented yesterday referenced grants they had received to work on them. Besides Gotham Gazette’s Knight Foundation grant, KQED had a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting that covered its You Decide games. Laslocky said KQED has spent around $100,000 to produce You Decide.

No question these are journalism. They take enormous amounts of research to put together. They find that readers give them good feedback, saying things along the lines of “learning more about an issue in an hour than reading a lifetime” or “the complexity of the issues was made more apparent.” This is informational, “pushing people to employ their critical thinking skills,” said Laslocky.

Extending to other journalism. Finding ways to use the games as an extension of traditional journalism is a challenge, but can be done (i.e. using it as a jumping off point for radio hosts to test against their audience, or using information gathered from the database of players to see whether there are story ideas. Example: Budget hero, how many people are willing to roll back Bush tax cuts to improve the budget situation?)

Keeping the reading down. “Gamers want to figure it out. They don’t want to read instructions. If you have to be told how to play it, you’re not really playing the game.” Nora Paul. This makes intuitive sense to me, as someone with a gamer in the house. My son never reads the instructions on a new game. But he dives in as if he’s always known how to play it.

Are games supposed to be fun or teach? Can they be engaging without being fun? Does being “fun” trivialize “important” or “substantial” issues that can be explored in a game? Are they really “games” if they are not “escapist”?

“Games suck at telling stories,” Bogost said. “It’s an interesting problem since stories are at the heart of so much news.”

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