The Game Team
BuzzFeed’s most blatantly playful unit is its six-person game team, many of whose members have backgrounds in the world of game and entertainment development. Nicole Leffel, for instance, did game design work at NBC Universal.
Despite traditional work experience, the team has produced few products that resemble the video games found on consoles and computers. Given relative autonomy to construct what they want, they primarily “experiment, try something new and see what gets stuck on the wall,” as senior product designer Jacqueline Yue put it. With products ranging from trivia questions to name generators and randomizers, their work is nonetheless decidedly playful. Yue stressed the difference in build time. Six months would be a short cycle in traditional game development, but much longer than the team spends at BuzzFeed. “It’s good to know we can sort of stop everything and work on one thing for one day and then put something out there that’s topical,” added Hansen. The members of the team take the principles of game design and apply them to BuzzFeed’s content. For instance, Yue described many of their games as “single action, single level.”
A young department, its work is situated within the general culture of sharing at BuzzFeed. Hansen described their products as “in the same space” as articles, in that a reader looks at them once, hopefully shares them with friends, and moves on. This balance between freedom to create and responsibility to the user seems ideally suited for gameful design.
The team still has relatively small exposure, or a “little knot of awareness,” as Leffel put it, to the internal BuzzFeed community. Presently, they work with specific staff members, with word-of-mouth increasing recognition of their existence and usefulness. The team has neither produced work for the investigative news wing of BuzzFeed, nor were its members hired with an explicit edict to do so. This doesn’t imply they never will. “We definitely are interested in doing more serious games, but it’s a question of how to do that,” said Leffel, after confessing that the group’s level of journalistic risk is fairly low—and hasn’t extended significantly beyond assuring it doesn’t misspell character names from Game of Thrones. Yue added that creating games about more serious content could materialize as BuzzFeed continues to legitimize a more serious brand. “I think right now we focus on things we’re really good at, which is entertainment, hav[ing] fun, and then over time, hopefully, our audience will also grow with us.”
The game designers have instead developed relationships with editors who are receptive to their ideas and, as a consequence, their attention revolves mostly around popular culture and entertainment products. The game team’s relationship with their colleagues is not dissimilar from those at other newsrooms, such as The New York Times and The Washington Post where multimedia teams described a similar organic evolution between design and editorial.