Glossary of Game Mechanics

The following glossary of playful mechanics highlights and exemplifies the strengths and weaknesses of products newsmakers have already devised. These categories are only key points in a spectrum of game use and not a full disclosure of every playful possibility.

Badges, Points, and Prizes

Almost as quickly as gamification rose in popularity at the beginning of this decade, it has now fallen out of favor. News organizations, like the Huffington Post and Google News, no longer dispense virtual rewards to their audiences. When they did, elements like badges, points, and leaderboards represented some of the most facile stock formats. Easy to deploy and design, they were intended to motivate readers and garner brand recognition. University of Nevada, Reno journalism professor Larry Dailey credits games for providing a better experience to news consumption through incremental rewards and a sense of winning: “And when’s the last time that you read a news story and had that ‘Yes!’—that epic win because it helped you understand something that you didn’t understand?” he asked. According to Jeremy Gilbert, The Washington Post’s director of strategic initiatives, these “game mechanics as well as games themselves can be useful tools” for conveying news and information that is critical to users’ lives.

When not attuned to readers’ interests, points and badges can appear arbitrary or even frivolous additions to content. BuzzFeed is more subtle: It uses numerical incentives by quantifying audience reaction with stickers displayed at the bottom of its articles. Similarly, the aggregation site Reddit creates playful competition with “upvotes” and “downvotes.” Said communications director Victoria Taylor, these are part of the site’s larger ecosystem of playful content. Voting and polling, for instance, have even changed the direction of Reddit’s well-known “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) interviews. So while flagrant gamification may have faded, incentives remain a convenient way to captivate particular audiences.

Quizzes and Questions

News organizations can implement these quickly, effortlessly, and continually. Their ephemeral quality, along with a focus on primarily written content, makes quizzes and trivia formats attractive. BuzzFeed has a few different quiz- and question-based formats, including trivia and graphically rich name generators. Mother Jones, according to editor Tasneem Raja, has also built tools to animate provocative and controversial topics. Its quizzes have taken on immigration²¹ and politics,²² while its calculators have broached subjects like birth control.²³ “We’ve had a lot of success in finding ways to take wonky, in-the-weeds, policy-heavy topics and [present] these to our audience in a way that feels more personal, like they have a stake in it,” Raja said.

The strength of the quiz and question model is its flexibility. The more integrally they are built into the CMS, the more widely they can be repurposed. Similarly, they are uncomplicated and do not require players to learn new rules for play.

The results of the quiz or questionnaire can become fodder for audience discussion and social distribution. A personal stake in the results may contribute to the virality of particular content or help recontextualize serious arguments like those taken up by Mother Jones. Users’ ability to enter personal data and then reveal some aspect about themselves lends to a quiz’s virality—and helps explain why companies like BuzzFeed are so interested in how users share its content.

However, the transience and simplicity of the quiz can also deter from exploring content in depth.

Situation-specific Designs and Packages

There is no shortage of examples of situation-specific playful designs in the newsroom. The New York Times has quite a few packages with gamelike elements, from the “Spot the Ball” game and “Dialect Quiz” to an interactive that helps users build their own households.²⁴ Elections seem potent for extra playful treatment. The Guardian,²⁵ The New York Times,²⁶ PBS NewsHour, MTV,²⁷ and The Washington Post²⁸ each augmented their coverage of the 2012 election with whimsical and fun visuals.

Situation-specific designs appropriate unique data into playful modes. Game elements can help fixate on specific aspects of data and uniquely present it to consumers as they interact with the material. NPR fashioned its 2012 election page to present a quirky view of the electoral college. Likewise, its coverage this past year assumed an election party theme. Since situation-specific designs require more effort, in terms of both composition and code, those that produce these schemes tend to be larger institutions with the necessary resources already in place.

Newsgames and Gameworlds

What distinguishes a specific design or package from a more holistic game? In some ways, the game producer’s intent defines that boundary. Gameworlds are autonomous spaces that provide an immersive and unique user experience. Andrew Phelps, director and founder of the Center for Media, Arts, Games, Interaction, and Creativity at RIT, wrote in an email that “[g]ames tell stories, but they do it very differently. They give the player an agency and nonlinear approach they don’t have in reading the written word.” He added:

Think carefully about what you want to do, what story you are telling, what information you want to convey: For some things, games are great tools, particularly if you are trying to get people to understand a particular system, a particular relationship between multiple pieces of conflicting data and how they interact, or to role-play and experience from a particular point of view.

For game designer Tomas Rawlings, who works at GameTheNews.Net and has designed a variety of newsgames, this approach is particularly important in the current media environment because “news is in competition with more than just other news providers.” In an email, he explained, “On a tablet if you are reading a newspaper site, you can easily close that and open Facebook, Candy Crush, Clash of Clans—or a newsgame.”

Many classic newsgames might fall into this category. These games are built explicitly with journalistic subjects and principles in mind, and are often collaborations between journalists, game designers, and philanthropic organizations. Others include commercial video games with a news focus, such as Papers, Please—an independent game made to relate the immigrant experience²⁹—or Democracy 3—a game explicating the intricacies of world democracy.³⁰ Newsgames and gameworlds are usually more sophisticated than those found in the other three categories and their builds mostly take work from experienced game designers. They may also tackle more endemic issues, such as the game Spent, which focuses primarily on poverty in the United States.³¹

Graphically rich and more complex than their counterparts, gameworlds are novel and state-of-the-art. However, creating gameworlds can be a gamble, particularly as they require significant financial investment. They can result in marked success or failure. For instance, the Florida Sun-Sentinel’s Hunley Simulator now seems quaint and is no longer available online.³² Hopefully, The Des Moines Register’s impressive Harvest of Change, which plunges the viewer into the world of Iowa farmers using 360-degree video and virtual reality, will have greater longevity.³³