Features of Play

Renowned game designers and academics Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman call the rules of the game their “formal identity”¹⁰. This chapter presents an overview of the rules for game usage in current newsrooms. Such use generally falls into two camps: In the first, producers design a particularly playful interactive feature for a specific piece of news; in the second, journalists employ stock formats, or specific reusable frameworks, for content.

Designers also apply gamelike elements—from simple reward systems to full gameworld environments where players are fully immersed—to particular news stories. This chapter also evaluates these different game “mechanics.”