Technical Challenges

For those interested in producing gamelike news products, both traditional and new techniques can meet specific manufacturing challenges.

Utilizing Your Skill Set

Journalists aren’t necessarily the best game designers, but they are good storytellers. Gilbert highlighted that journalists are already proficient at utilizing game elements like leaderboards, however, he added, “We’re often really bad at making something fun in the way that moves you to want to keep playing.” Rather than trying to be something they are not, journalists should experiment with those inexpensive and plentiful techniques already existent in the newsroom. There are many gamelike formats that take advantage of traditional journalistic skills, ranging from BuzzFeed’s quizzes to the playful banter of The New York Times’ “4th Down Bot,” a real-time conversational analysis using statistics about NFL fourth-down conversions.⁵⁹

The audience provides yet another technical asset to journalists. User input gives audience members a stake in journalistic products. Some interviewees prioritize finding ways to capitalize on the loyalty of users. Former New York Times multimedia editor, who now chairs the University of Oregon SOJC’s Agora Journalism Center, Andrew DeVigal suggested cultivating user engagement to find “where can journalism come from outside of just journalists.”

Still, traditional games can really engage one type of user. Said Shepherd, “Games, with a capital G, that you actually play in some interactive way are going to reach one network of people and not another network of people.” University of Nevada, Reno professor and Reynolds Chair of Media Technology Larry Dailey added, “Don’t make it about ‘how easy is it for me to produce it’. Make it about, ‘What is my objective for [the game]’? And if a form helps you do that and you can verify that that’s the best way to communicate, for God’s sake, do it.”

Tools for the Newsroom

While it is prohibitively expensive to design complex games—like the console-based AAA games that have budgets in the millions—prices for the design of applications and online games are dropping. “What I really hear out of it is fear of change,” said Dailey. “The cost of production compared to what we’re doing now is nothing. The real thing that’s impossible to do is publish The Miami Herald every day.”

The continued support and expansion of HTML allows for backwards compatibility and preservation, as well as increases transmedial opportunities. Game-focused applications, such as the Unity/Unity3d engine—an ecosystem of game development and animation tools⁶⁰ —also seem promising for game design as they permit cross-platform and mobile media functionality. However, as witnessed by the current absence of many of the Flash-based games created at the height of newsgame interest, it is difficult to specify a tool set. Unity could be a good route, despite its pricey license. Grace did not hesitate to recommend it, but also forewarned how rapidly development tools change.

Advocating for Open Source

The transience of engines for fabricating games, the prevalence and salience of HTML, and the improvements of HTML5 affirm that open formats can advance the longevity of digital products. This concept may be anathema to media companies at first; media makers have a history of closely guarding their innovations and proprietary software. However, despite the precautions, copying is rampant.

Open source material facilitates the collaboration and disbursement of new techniques, and has crept into the journalistic community. For instance, the NPR Visuals team freely hosts its code using the open source GitHub platform.⁶¹ There are numerous open source tools available for digital journalists. Among them are MongoDB for database construction and Markdown language for web publishing. For those in the tech community, these sorts of open source initiatives are increasingly commonplace. For those in the journalistic world, they could augment the exchange of successful formats and prototypes.

In terms of games, open source initiatives fostered by journalists are fledgling, but growing. Director of innovations Adam Ingram-Goble and initiative coordinator at the Center for Games and Impact Juli James are creating open source game design tools for journalists at Arizona State University with the idea of embedding journalism practices into the fabric of the tools themselves. When journalism students tested these tools, they completed full games within six to eighteen hours exploring complex issues like Veteran’s healthcare, and CIA interrogation practices. “We are looking at these kind of tool platforms as being successful to journalists in their newsrooms, on the schedules they need to operate them,” said Ingram-Goble. Ultimately, open source and open access programs would reduce costs for developing playful and gameful news vehicles. More importantly, open source formats could provide journalists with a repository of potential templates and tools. Journalists can then access, iterate, and tailor software to their own coverage and audiences. This is especially beneficial for those who do not have the budgets to build such products from scratch.

Furthermore, using open source software would, implicitly if not explicitly, assist in the problem of preserving digital formats. Having access to code would permit users to save and revive previous work with more ease than when created with proprietary applications. While this will not solve issues of digital preservation, it would enable interested parties to more aggressively pursue the issue.

As open source resources develop, using free commercial software is another avenue available to journalists. New York Times senior software architect Jacob Harris, responsible for The New York Times Haiku bot published on the Tumblr platform and one of the first guardians of the Times’ Twitter account, discovered Tumblr and Twitter before their wider acceptance. His early adoption opened up unexpected possibilities for more playful activity. In general, the cultivation of free platforms seems opportune. For instance, Tasneem Raja of Mother Jones spoke about not only looking outside the company for quiz software, but also developing open source tools in-house.⁶² So, just as amassing and playing with new methods of storytelling has been fruitful, a similar process might transpire with online digital media tools.