Costs, Skills, and Efforts

An important hurdle many interviewees acknowledged is the high cost of producing extensive game-centered projects, in terms of funding, time, skill, and effort. Many of the most successful newsgames are collaborations between different institutions, including philanthropic organizations. Large financial outlays are necessary for pulling together design talent, programmers, platforms, and distribution channels to successfully release a truly complex game. And even after construction, game designers and journalists admit to the difficulty in making a successful product. There is no formula for designing a popular commercial video game, let alone one with a serious or news-related orientation. Gail Robinson, former editor of Gotham Gazette who won a Knight Foundation grant to build a number of newsgames, seconded this in her critique of the price and costs of producing in the medium. Ultimately she remained ambivalent over whether or not the games had brought in and cultivated new audiences, as she had hoped they would.

Robinson’s example underscores that games can not only be costly and of questionable benefit, but even successful ones may not remain relevant or useful for protracted time periods; especially with regard to the content they convey and the technology used to make them. Some of the games at Gotham Gazette are neither featured, nor playable, due to changes to the website over time. Even the much-lauded game Budget Hero from American Public Media was retired after four years.

The biggest handicap to maintaining games is the changing relevancy of their topics. Miami Herald journalist Stefania Ferro suggested that the company designed “Tallanasty” as a game surrounding a recurring subject. “The point was to try to make a wonky subject more entertaining and informative and it’s something that we always link back to and play with again whenever the legislative session comes back, as well as a resource we can come back to whenever we have a politician in trouble,” she said.

A secondary and interrelated concern of many interviewed was the lack of skills within the newsroom for producing games. Chaplin, who is researching this subject and heads the New School’s program in Journalism and Design, specifies a few of the prerequisites for integrating systems-oriented thinking into newsrooms and news products. Those primarily include the need to listen and observe audiences’ desires and to experiment and iterate in product creation. For her, this perspective is mandatory today. “Systems thinking, play, and design are really to us kind of the core twenty-first-century skills.” Chaplin confessed that traditional journalists and even modern newsrooms are not currently equipped to handle the sort of projects she promotes. She and a few others attributed this, at least partially, to the general attitude of newsrooms, which favor a “No, but,” rather than a “Yes, and” attitude about innovation and experimentation. Her conclusion is to integrate the best game designers into news teams along with other systems thinkers.

While a potentially useful addition, the creation of sophisticated newsgames may require hiring or training specialists versed in this form of design. This is indicative of a general deficit of skills increasingly essential to digital journalism. Writers appear to have less of a connection, awareness, and skill set necessary to easily coordinate and brainstorm about more playful and gamelike activity. Wei, along with others, commented “There is no place that journalism is putting more money into right now than trying to hire people with these technical skills to do this kind of thing, and those are the same people that would have the technical privilege to experiment and make games.”