Winning with Newsgames
I have been researching newsgames for the last 8 months with a view to making my own newsgame project, a multiplayer wordgame I’m working on with an online media partner, the best it can possibly be.
The first thing I discovered is that there is a fundamental mismatch in the way news and games are produced. Newsrooms are set up to turn out stories within minutes if necessary. Game studios require weeks, months or even years (a lá Duke Nukem Forever) to be brought to market. So if news is fast, and games are slow, how do you produce a newsgame that can “win” in the online news environment?
Luckily, the question points to two answers: you can either (1) speed up production; or (2) extend consumption.
1. Micro-newsgames
Earlier this year, I interviewed Dutch game designer Kenney Vleugels, who released a game called London Looters while the chaotic riots of August, 2011 were still rocking Britain. The game tasks players with defending their shop from marauding looters (read: “hitting them over the head”). As an expression of sympathy with the victims of the riots – and outrage at the rioters – it is effective enough. As a game, however, few could argue that the experience is very shallow and offers little replay value. London Looters’ popularity peaked not long after its release, and I don’t expect it to recover.
But what about newsgames that aren’t just about one story in particular? That brings us to…
2. System-centric newsgame design
If you think of journalism as an eco-system, containing many types of news and structures that are built around them, we can discern certain recurring features within the system. Many stories have visuals, for example. The majority of news refers to personalities. Online news has clearly measured traffic and social metrics. The list goes on: location, units of conflict, updates.
Now, when these features are carefully applied to robust game mechanics, the result is a newsgame that can be updated as often as the news itself.
Example? Look no further than fantasy sports. Fantasy sports can be deconstructed as a number of game mechanics (trading players, accruing points based on their performance) placed upon the foundation of sports statistics, a freely available, constantly updated resource within the news. The result is a thriving industry (if the Fantasy Sports Trade Association is to be believed) and millions of regular players.
News quizzes also come to mind. Facts are one of the most ubiquitous features of the news eco-system – though oddly absent on Fox News – and as a result, news quizzes are one of the only newsgames regularly featured by online news publishers (Examples: The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal & NPR). The age of procedurally generated quizzes has already dawned – Studio E9 has developed a platform that can generate quizzes automatically from a site’s existing content.
Back to my own project. Head to Head sources another freely available news resource, headlines, from various RSS feeds to put a new spin on the “free association” game mechanic seen in games like Apples to Apples. To start, the game assigns each player a number of headlines, each linked to a recent article from the world wide web. They must then submit their headline that best fits the category for that round, e.g., “Controversial”. One player will sit out that turn to be the judge, and they decide which headline wins.
I’ve thought a lot about what I want people to experience in this game. It comes down to discovery and conversation. What if you learnt that North Korea had decided to declare war on Japan inside of a game? And what would the discussion that followed be like? I want this to be a space that connects people to the news and to each other in a way that regular RSS readers do not.
No game will ever be the same, as long as the intractable entropy of the universe continues to produce fresh news (and headlines). And, because success is socially determined, there is no dominant strategy to suck the fun out of the game, at least in theory.
As much as I look forward to refining Head to Head and finally showing it to the public, this post is about the future of newsgame design. My point is: it has one. We just need to be realistic about the structural inefficiencies of the medium in a 24/7 media environment. System-centric design is one way around it and I hope it is an approach that can be developed further by journalists, game designers and the nutcases who just happen to be both.
Niel Bekker is a journalist and game designer, and a (very) recent graduate of Jay Rosen’s Studio 20 program in journalism. You should follow him on Twitter here.
Do more
Sign up to help playtest Head to Head
Read more
Bogost, Ferrari & Schweizer – Newsgames: Journalism at Play
An excellent book on the history and state-of-the art in newsgames. System-centric design can be considered as a direct response to their call for newsgames to be designed as “platforms”.
The Dynamics of News Information on the Web
A 2006 Harvard study that confirms what we already know: online news gets old fast. How fast? Well, they pin it at about 36 hours.
“Cartoonist Prototype Tackles the Most Visible News”
Bogost and co. have put their money where their mouth is, and actually begun building a newsgame authoring tool that allows journalists to generate games from stories without any coding or game design knowledge. It’s an interesting hybrid solution to the problem I describe above, combining the approach of system-centric design but with a micr0-newsgame end product. Simon Ferrari discusses the early results of their work.
Hi Niel,
i am pretty curious to see the result. It sounds like a nice idea, even so i rarely sit down with my friends to discuss the headlines. I never do that. Maybe i should.
Maybe this game could be used for teaching journalists. I do not know. Is it fun? I very much like Marc Prenskys approach in his book “Digital game-based learning” where he shows a bunch of principles one should continually ask while creating effective results: “Is this game fun enough that someone who is not in its target audience would want to play it?” Maybe that is of help during game testing sessions.
Playing with Headlines – do you know https://twitter.com/#!/scrmblr – It seems as if it was not a huge success. Why not?
Good luck and best regards,
Marcus
A systematic approach is definitely the only way of designing a news game if the goal is longevity. But I see a couple of challenges: how do you curate meaning in such a game, and how would you entice an audience to keep playing?
The choice of sources and headlines will be difficult in a world where the news cycle is driven to such an extent it almost collapses into itself, and most of time with pure noise. Would the news in the game be chosen from one single news source, a single topic, automatically, by a human? This could also partly answer why people would play (or not) such a game: would the topic/news source interest them by being specific or will it be general? Also for the audience: by having a (human, player) judge, there is an element of subjectivity. Would such a game have scores and a leader board? Feeling cheated (by another player acting as judge) can either work for or against a player returning to the game…?
Lastly: would such a game be a considered a way of delivering the news (as you imply?) or be a way of playing a game after reading the news? Learning news from a game platform might benefit from a rethink of the metadata the news organisation adds (I’m thinking geo-locations, people, locations, etc) and how the game draws from said metadata. If a news organisation can incorporate backdoor information to create a game with very specific topics or images or maps instead of just generic topics, it may be a way of increasing the density of knowledge delivered to the game user.
Very interesting though, and a field that can do with some original thought like this.
(PS: I do also think that small, throw-away games like the one about the London riots could also keep playing a role in news gaming. Games don’t necessarily need longevity to be considered a success. Small games with a limited frame of relevance and news interest (catch the dictator!) will always be a fun way to engage non-readers. Development costs and speed might be the major inhibiting factors here.)
Hi Niel.
First, thanks for this note. It is always refreshing to learn more about the other “nutcases” journalists/game designers’ projects all around the world, especially as there’s not so many of us out there. Speaking of which, I hope we’ll all get the opportunity to meetup one day.
Of course, you’re right: when it comes to newsgame design, the system-centric approach is the most sensible one. It saves time, and for journalists, more often than not, time is of the essence.
We tried to do just that when we designed Primaires à Gauche for Lemonde.fr. First, we wondered: “When could journalist find it useful to use video games as a media, to talk about the news and explain mechanics at work?” Very soon, we came to the conclusion that the newsrooms often had trouble explaining long-running, big-scale conflict situations, such as elections (but also social negotiations in a closing plant, or struggle between governments inside the eurozone for instance).
So we designed a system that could render most conflict situation. We needed to have a system with two or more “sides” the player could choose from, actions with different styles and different effectiveness, meaningful and expressive rules… In fact, such a system already existed. It was called Magic the Gathering, and it worked quite well. So we ripped it apart, and rebuilt it according to our needs.
Only then did we decide to make a game about the French primary election. But virtually, we have a tool, i.e a set of rules and a play board, which allows us to represent lots of different conflict situations. I use the word “virtually”, because in fact, we only have a prototype, and lack a couple hundred thousands dollars to design and produce the back office that journalists could use to generate on-the-fly games. We probably were too enthusiastic, and designed too delicate a system. Primares a Gauche sure has an elegant gameplay, but it is too complicated to be really meaningful for the user who plays only once, and as it takes 20 minutes to complete, very few people did in fact dig enough in it. Whatever : it was part of a research and development program, at least we met the “research” goals
The point is, what took time was to design the system frame. We now could produce a clone to Primaires à gauche, on another topic, in a couple weeks. Still quite a lot of time when talking about breaking news, but a really decent time-lapse when tackling long-term news or foreseeable events.
Back to your project. I’m a bit curious to see what a game about playing with headlines may be, and I’m pretty sure there’s room for great fun there. But you are building a system that allows people to play “with” the news, not to play “inside” the news. Nothing wrong here: I am delighted with any attempt at making news-reading more fun and engaging. I’m just saying we had a very different design goal. Anyways, I hope you’ll reach yours. I signed up for Head to Head beta-testing, out of curiosity. And as you may know, the HuffPo is arriving in France next month, so if your project is successful, there might be a French version soon !
Best regards,
Florent.
A newsgame based on Magic: The Gathering… that’s one of the coolest things I’ve ever heard of! I think “templates” are very useful in the newsgame context, so it’s great that you will be able to use the idea again, this time with the basic gameplay already tested.
As you say, there is a difference between playing “with” the news and “within” the news. That seems to be one limitation of the system-centric approach. However, for me, generating conversation *about* the news (and to a certain extent, about individual stories) is a worthwhile objective.
I’ll get in touch soon about testing the game, I would love to have your input.