The Terms of Engagement
“The news is hard to gamify because it’s the news. It’s really not fun to play something where you know people are dying,” said Joey Marburger, director of digital products and design at The Washington Post. Many journalists stigmatize games. Interviews with them revealed a subtext that finds journalism to be a generally serious pursuit while gameplay a more frivolous one. Crime, war, disasters, politics, and breaking news stories—the essence of “hard news”—are considered incompatible with game-based products. Within the games community, a similar idea exists when the subject is news. Playability supersedes content and serious news simply isn’t much fun.
However, there are examples of this intersection. Users flocked to The Miami Herald and WLRN’s “Tallanasty” game during election cycles, a scheme that underscores the entrenchment and corruption in Florida’s capital.52 The Syrian conflict inspired a choose-your-own-adventure-style game, 1000 Days of Syria.53
Because of the aforementioned tensions, a number of scholars and journalists have dropped the “play” and “game” monikers from their products, while still employing the tactics and skills of game design. Still, Heather Chaplin, Colleen Macklin, and John Sharp of the New School see some overlapping philosophies. Their objective is to make “Data Toys,” a designation which emphasizes both the systemic and manipulatable quality of games. Chaplin explained, “Games may feel as if you’re free in them, but they’re leading you somewhere, whereas a toy, it’s open exploration. I think [the word toy] maps well over what journalists are supposed to be doing.”
Tasneem Raja, interactive editor at Mother Jones, surely incorporates fun into the news, as she and ProPublica news application developer Sisi Wei asserted during the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting Conference in 2013. Such fun is discoverable within the Mother Jones website’s reproductive rights calculators54 and quizzes on the immigration system.55 Raja’s approach uses multiple modes of storytelling: “One thing we’ve put a lot of investment into here is a suite of storytelling tools,” which make it “easier to more quickly zero in on which [tool] makes sense and which ones wouldn’t, based on our history using these things” and “the general tone of the coverage.”
Others have certainly incorporated games into broader journalistic processes without explicitly naming them as such. What qualifies as game use remains idiosyncratic. Interviewees, however, came to more of a consensus about what content could be approached playfully. Foremost for a playful feature is that it employs data or revolves around a benign subject. For instance, WNYC’s John Keefe described an interactive map that asked users to take pictures of themselves measuring snow during a particularly bad snowstorm as playful.56 Playful features appeared within the coverage of major news events, like NPR’s Tetris-themed map of electoral votes, embellished by an 8-bit audio version of “Hail to the Chief” to announce the winner of the 2012 presidential election.57
These examples point to another important area of unanimity among many interviewees—playful material is particularly useful in eliciting user response and data input. And yet, although play could be a vital tool for user input, few interviewees made extensive use of it. Instead, play is seen as a way for adding flavor to already existing multimedia coverage. Brian Boyer described trying to “create a shared experience between us and our audience” and creating a “personal experience with our audience,” a feeling echoed by Marburger at the Post who talked of their continued interest in driving engagement: “More than just reading a news story, but interacting with that story basically leads to kind of a habit formed with our readers.”