No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
The Gamification of Journalism
Abstract
Traditional news outlets are on the decline and journalism has embraced digital media in its struggle to survive. New models of delivering news to the public are being explored in order to increase the levels of readership and user engagement.The narrative of this chapter focuses on the future of journalism and media, and the potential benefits and dangers of gamifying journalism. Since gamification is a new trend, a thorough look at the intersection between the enhancements of public mobility, the digitalization of news services, and the engagement of gamified systems can bring better understanding of future channels of reading news to the users, to researchers, and to the industry. This chapter aims to bridge the gap between gamification as an emerging practice in news distribution and yet a vastly uncharted area or research.
... The use of these platforms facilitates the personalization of consumption (Lorenz, 2014) and the participation of users (Kammer, 2012), allowing the passage "from the monarchy of content to the republic of users" (Aguado & Güere, 2013, p.64). Other phenomena linked to transmedia journalism, such as the use of news gamification (Ferrer Conill & Karlsson, 2015), confirm that the future of journalism could undergo a transmedia process. ...
Transmedia content has been the subject of several studies in the field of fiction, sustaining relative unanimity about the characteristics that this kind of content should have. In the field of journalism, the situation is fairly different due to its particular specificities. Multimedia, intermedia, or cross-media are often wrongly used as synonymous of transmedia, although there are important differences between all these concepts. In part, this misunderstanding is motivated by the fact that all of them relate to convergence processes in journalism, but a more detailed analysis allows us to find differences, highlighting transmedia as the most complete concept. This chapter proposes a framework that can support journalists in the production of transmedia contents that conveniently explore the characteristics of the involved media, using formats and languages that better fit the story, and enabling the user to engage in the interpretation, change, and distribution of these contents.
Sports media coverage of mega-events is partly oriented to gamification, the use of game elements and game design techniques in non-gaming contexts. This infotainment approach to events has been developed by media outlets as an original and effective way to capture wider audience attention and to place events in context before a competition starts. This article examines 28 gamified sports pieces developed by media outlets from seven countries during the last two Olympics (2016 Summer Olympics in Rio and 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang) and Football World Cups (2014 in Brazil and 2018 in Russia). This sample comprises two categories following Ferrer-Conill (2015): “gamified pieces” (game like elements that are part of a bigger interactive feature) and “newsgames” (more sophisticated pieces often included in complex graphics or multimedia content). The results show that, despite its entertaining formula, gamification serves mainly informational purposes and adds value to sports coverage. Especially in the Summer and Winter Olympics, gamified sports pieces tend to be explanatory and data-driven in order to inform the audience about nonmainstream sports.
This study explores the way mass-media outlets make use of digital games to convey journalistic messages. Newsgames have been defined by several scholars in the intersection between digital journalism and game studies. However, because of the heterogeneity of this phenomenon, there is still a lack of clarity of what could be considered, or not, a newsgame. This study aims to shed light into this question by exploring how newsgames are used in practice by journalists. We therefore approach the understanding of this phenomenon from a bottom-up perspective to give an answer to the following research question: How are journalistic messages structured within newsgames published by online mass-media outlets? A grounded theory approach is used to analyze 75 games published in a total of 47 mass-media digital outlets from 17 countries. The results of this study have led to the proposal of a more systematic identification and analytical approach for newsgames.
This chapter explores how innovative narratives, supported by a combination of playful approaches and technological convergence, provide a reconfiguration of digital news storytelling. The use of gamification and newsgames exemplifies what has been called “Total Journalism”. Newsgames seek to integrate two opposing logics: the culture of journalism, based on truthfulness and credibility, and the culture of games, characterized by the creation of imaginary worlds, persuasion, and mechanics. We analyse The Ocean Game (2019) and The Amazon Race (2019), which use different procedural strategies. We examine the development of gamification in journalistic storytelling, which uses game elements to enhance the user experience. The relationship that gamified news products establish with the audience illuminates changes in the rhetorical and structural dynamics between the news organization, the different types of media workers, and the users. Thus, innovation in journalistic narrative through gamification and newsgames might translate into effective ways of producing content that combines rigour in substance with attractiveness in form, while preserving journalistic quality and incorporating the playful elements of games.
Given that the current media condition provides numerous channels that create interaction between news media brands and consumers, the concept of consumer brand engagement (CBE), referred as being the interactive relationships between consumers and brands is more crucial than ever in the media sector. The purpose of this study is to examine the direct and indirect effects of three motives, utility, entertainment, and pass time, on consumer brand engagement for online news media brands. A causal model that illustrates both the direct and indirect effects of the three motives on CBE reveals the critical role of entertainment as a mediator. Utility and entertainment positively impact CBE, whereas pass time is negatively associated with CBE for online news media brands. Entertainment positively mediates the relationship between utility and CBE as well as influencing the negative relationship between pass time and CBE.
This study explores the discursive, normative construction of gamification within journalism. Rooted in a theory of discursive institutionalism and by analyzing a significant corpus of metajournalistic discourse from 2006 to 2019, the study demonstrates how journalists have negotiated gamification’s place within journalism’s boundaries. The discourse addresses criticism that gamified news is a move toward infotainment and makes the case for gamification as serious journalism anchored in norms of audience engagement. Thus, gamification does not constitute institutional change since it is construed as an extension of existing institutional norms and beliefs.
Gamified news is a clear example of contemporary convergent practices which conflate the functionalities of formerly separate entities, video games and journalism. This practice marks a shift in the journalistic norms, positioning journalism and news users within the neoliberal paradigm. In this view, the study proposes a discursive approach to examine how gamified news discourse is colonized by the neoliberal values of marketization and commodification. The analysis takes a case study of Pirate Fishing: An Interactive Investigation, a gamified news launched by Al Jazeera. It is not just the narrative of Pirate that carries ideological bearings, rather the ludic design itself is found to be fit within the neoliberal mentality. Therefore, the ludic semiosis of Pirate Fishing is examined as well. As such, a dialectical relation between discourse, semiotics and neoliberal ideologies, in the context of gamification, is drawn in this article. Based on the analysis, seven interrelated neoliberal discourses are highlighted: ‘calculative rationality’, ‘self-entrepreneurship’, ‘minimalism’, ‘aesthetic preferences’, ‘individualism’, ‘sovereign consumer’ and ‘personal responsibility’.
Transmedia content has been the subject of several studies in the field of fiction, sustaining relative unanimity about the characteristics that this kind of content should have. In the field of journalism, the situation is fairly different due to its particular specificities. Multimedia, intermedia, or cross-media are often wrongly used as synonymous of transmedia, although there are important differences between all these concepts. In part, this misunderstanding is motivated by the fact that all of them relate to convergence processes in journalism, but a more detailed analysis allows us to find differences, highlighting transmedia as the most complete concept. This chapter proposes a framework that can support journalists in the production of transmedia contents that conveniently explore the characteristics of the involved media, using formats and languages that better fit the story, and enabling the user to engage in the interpretation, change, and distribution of these contents.
It is often argued that young people are among the first to adopt new media technologies, and that they are especially keen on taking on all new features connected with mobile technology and the Internet. In spite of this oft-repeated claim, one could suspect that since computers and mobile phones have become so widespread among large portions of the populations in the industrialised world, it might not be technology, per se, that distinguishes the young from the old, but rather the actual ways in which it is used. One approach to discuss this is in terms of media generations. It could be expected that generations that have grown up with different mediated experiences during their formative years will relate to the mobile technology in a variety of ways (cf. Mannheim, 1952 & Volkmer, 2006). In this article, three such generations are analysed: the radio/print generation (born in the 1930s), the TV generation (born in the 1950s), and the mobile technology generation (born in the 1980s). Access and usage patterns are researched, and the degree to which the three generations differ when it comes to their relations to mobile technology is discussed, but also the unifying character of the mobile telephony usage. Our methodological approach is quantitative, analysing results from annually conducted postal surveys that are representative for the Swedish population.
Although participatory journalism involves publishing content created by users, editorial influence is an important aspect of participatory online media. Editors shape the conditions under which user generated content is produced, the context of publication and the perceived prominence of the content. It is still unclear how this influence manifests itself, and how it can be related to the discussion about participatory media’s potential for revitalising democracy. In this paper, three online news media in Sweden are analysed comparatively: Sourze – the first Swedish participatory newspaper; Newsmill – a social media focusing on news and debate; and DN – the online version of the largest Swedish morning paper Dagens Nyheter. The question is how participation is affected by editorial influence. The findings suggest that participatory arenas are constrained by the logic of their context of production. People from different categories in society participate on different terms. Furthermore, editors influence the agenda by suggesting topics, and by rewarding articles that follow their suggestions. These findings do not challenge assumptions about participatory newspapers as more accessible channels for citizens and therefore interesting as possible means of allowing a more democratically involved citizenry, but it challenges assumptions about freedom from constraints related to traditional mass media, such as agenda setting, gate-keeping and media logic.
Gamification combines the playful design and feedback mechanisms from games with users' social profiles (e.g. Facebook, twitter, and LinkedIn) in non-game applications. Successful gamification practices are reliant on encouraging playful subjectivities so that users voluntarily expose their personal information, which is then used to drive behavioural change (e.g. weight loss, workplace productivity, educational advancement, consumer loyalty, etc.). The pleasures of play, the promise of a 'game', and the desire to level up and win are used to inculcate desirable skill sets and behaviours. Gamification is rooted in surveillance; providing real-time feedback about users' actions by amassing large quantities of data and then simplifying this data into modes that easily understandable, such as progress bars, graphs and charts. This article provides an introduction to gamification for surveillance scholars. I first provide brief definitions of gamification, games and play, linking the effectiveness of gamification to the quantification of everyday life. I then explain how the quantification in gamification is different from the quantification in both analog spaces and digital non-game spaces. Next, I draw from governmentality studies to show how quantification is leveraged in terms of surveillance. I employ three examples to demonstrate the social effects and impacts of gamified behaviour. These examples range from using self-surveillance to gamify everyday life, to the participatory surveillance evoked by social networking services, to the hierarchical surveillance of the gamified call-centre. Importantly, the call-centre example becomes a limit case, emphasizing the inability to gamify all spaces, especially those framed by work and not play. This leads to my conclusion, arguing that without knowing first what games and play are, we cannot accurately respond to and critique the playful surveillant technologies leveraged by gamification.
This paper addresses the contemporary issue of newspaper paywalls. The paper aims to analyse different paywall models and how they impact on media corporations’ revenues in the United States, the United Kingdom, Slovakia, Slovenia and Poland (Piano Media), Australia, New Zealand and Finland. The paper finds that newspaper paywalls provide roughly 10 per cent of media companies’ publishing/circulation revenues. The paper also finds that paywalls are softening and prices in some cases are decreasing as news corporations fight for new digital subscribers and revenues. The argument here is that the revenue generated by paid online news content is not substantial enough to make paywalls a viable business model in the short term. Media corporations do not disclose information about their digital subscription revenues and this lack of transparency might impact on research findings.
News media are forming omnipresence strategies to become accessible anytime, anywhere and through any device. Mobile news services and mobile applications play an increasingly influential role in contemporary newspapers. This is an in-depth study of a newspaper organization contemplating
the challenges coupled with mobile media. It shows how heterogeneous sensemaking processes emerge among media workers from editorial, business and IT departments. Most importantly, it shows two polarized constellations within the newspaper organization when it comes to the shaping of its mobile
application. Several arguments were used in their respective rhetoric, and at the loci of their attention was the negotiation of a producer- versus a participation-centric design. An alliance of media workers from the editorial and IT departments won ground for their producer-centric proposal,
enacting an iPhone application primarily based on auto-directed flows of traditional news reporting. They produced a self-fulfilling prophecy, creating cues for other newspapers in a newspaper industry characterized by isomorphism.
The technological convergence of mobile “phones” and multimedia has been taking place since the 1990s, but it was not until the commercial birth of touchscreen-enabled mobile devices, offered with flat-rate subscriptions for mobile internet, that widespread production and use of news-related content and services began to flourish. Accessing mobile news has gained traction in the everyday life of the public. In parallel, legacy news media have in recent years developed news provision, by repurposing or customising journalistic content published for mobile sites and/or applications. This article explores the production of mobile news, by discussing and synthesising the findings of the contemporary literature found in the nexus of journalism and mobile media. It posits a model of journalism focusing on the roles of humans and technology in activities characterised by customising or repurposing. The article also presents a research agenda focusing on the production of mobile news.
The developments in game industry and service design have led to an increased use of so-called game mechanics to drive customer retention and engagement outside the realm of, what can traditionally be seen as, games. This act of enhancing services with game-like features has largely been coined as 'gamification'. The phenomenon has been thus far discussed atomically, without ties to existing literature on service marketing, to which the goals of gamification is strongly related to. This paper presents a definition for gamification from the perspective of service marketing and lays ground for future studies on gamification and marketing.
Recently, scholars tested how digital media use for informational purposes similarly contributes to foster democratic processes and the creation of social capital. Nevertheless, in the context of today's socially-networked-society and the rise of social media applications (i.e., Facebook) new perspectives need to be considered. Based on U.S. national data, results show that after controlling for demographic variables, traditional media use offline and online, political constructs (knowledge and efficacy), and frequency and size of political discussion networks, seeking information via social network sites is a positive and significant predictor of people's social capital and civic and political participatory behaviors, online and offline.
This article presents six critiques of the currently dominant rendition of gamification, and six invitations to rethink it. It suggests expanding the remit of gamification (1) from the structuring of objects to the framing of contexts, and (2) from game design elements to motivational affordances. In its current form, gamification presents an additive, atomistic and deterministic conception of experience design. Truly learning from game design means to adopt a (3) relational account of experience, and (4) an emergent-systemic method of experience design. The paper suggests to move (5) from avoiding harm and coercion to facilitating the good life, and (6) from the instrumental perfection of existing orders to their critical transformation. In summary, in presents a rethought, positive vision of gamification as a critical, transformative, socio-technical systems design practice for motivational affordances in the service of human flourishing: eudaimonic design.
Using data from the 2008 and 2009 Current Population Survey (CPS) conducted by the United States Census Bureau, this article assesses the year-over-year change in the civic engagement of citizens in America's largest metropolitan areas. Of special interest are Denver and Seattle, where the Rocky Mountain News and Seattle Post-Intelligencer closed during the intervening year. The data from the CPS indicate that civic engagement in Seattle and Denver dropped significantly from 2008 to 2009—a decline that is not consistently replicated over the same time period in other major American cities that did not lose a newspaper. The analysis suggests that this decline may plausibly be attributed to the newspaper closures in Seattle and Denver. This short-term negative effect is concerning, and whether it lasts warrants future attention.
This paper contends that to understand how audiences engage with journalism in the contemporary age, we must conceive of news consumption not just as something we do, but as something we do in a particular place. It considers the experience(s) of consuming journalism, and reflects upon the influence “space” has in this equation. I ask how news consumption is integrated into, and shapes, the social spaces of everyday life, and how this may be transforming. The title, “Journalism to Go”, thus has a tripartite meaning relating to changing notions of space, speed, and convenience in journalism. Specifically: journalism is now produced to facilitate increasingly mobile places of consumption (Space); journalism is now produced to adjust for the faster pace of the information age (Speed); and journalism is now produced to interact with and provide multiple channels of access for audiences (Convenience). This paper demonstrates the analytic importance of the first of these by considering data generated through Barnhurst's “Life History & The Media” project, which details young adults’ stories of media use. This analysis uncovers that moments of media consumption do not simply take place in space; rather, the spaces of everyday life are produced through these socio-cultural practices.
This longitudinal study investigates whether the impact of political interest—a key motivational factor behind news consumption—on various forms of news consumption has increased over time. The analysis is based on a unique large-scale representative annual survey conducted in Sweden over the years 1986–2010, enabling a comprehensive analysis of citizens’ total and specific news consumption across multiple channels and platforms. Results show that news consumption has become more polarized between news-seekers and news-avoiders over time, and that political interest has become a more important determinant of news consumption in today’s high-choice media environment.
"John Carey and Martin Elton are among the most skilled and insightful researchers studying the dynamic changes in technology and the impacts on consumer attitudes and behaviors. Their comprehensive and actionable observations make this a must read for anyone interested in understanding the current (and future) media environment." ---Alan Wurtzel, President, Research and Media Development, NBC Universal "When Media Are New should be read by every media manager faced with disruptive change brought on by new technology. The book transcends the fashionable topics and themes that are here today and gone tomorrow and instead places emphasis on those areas of research and implementation where fatal mistakes are made. They capture something universal, and therefore highly useful, by stripping away the hype and focusing relentlessly on consumers and the ways they adopt or fail to adopt new media products and technologies into their lives." ---Martin Nisenholtz, Senior Vice President, Digital Operations, The New York Times Company "The burgeoning development of the Internet has deflected attention from a wider history of new media innovations that has shaped its success. John Carey and Martin Elton demonstrate that earlier initiatives to launch videophones, two-way interactive cable systems, videotext and other media innovations can teach us much about the present state and future course of information and communication technologies. This is a key reference on the new media, and must reading for students of the Internet---the platform for continuing the new media revolution." ---Professor William H. Dutton, Director, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford The world of communication media has undergone massive changes since the mid-1980s. Along with the extraordinary progress in technological capability, it has experienced stunning decreases in costs; a revolutionary opening up of markets (a phenomenon exemplified by but not limited to the rise of the Internet); the advent of new business models; and a striking acceleration in the rate of change. These technological, regulatory, and economic changes have attracted the attention of a large number of researchers, from industry and academe, and given rise to a substantial body of research and data. Significantly less attention has been paid to the actual and intended users of new media. When Media Are New addresses this research and publishing gap by investigating the human side of the technological changes of the last 50 years and the implications for current and future media. It will find a broad audience ranging from media scholars to policymakers to industry professionals. John Carey is Professor of Communications and Media Management at Fordham Business School and has extensive experience in conducting research about new media for companies such as AT&T, Cablevision, NBC Universal, and the New York Times (among many others) as well as foundations and government agencies. His extensive publications have focused on user adoption of new media and how consumers actually use new technologies. Martin C. J. Elton was Director of the Communication Studies Group in the UK, which pioneered in the study of user behavior with new media technologies, and founded the Interactive Telecommunication Program at New York University. He has published widely on user research, forecasting, and public policy and has conducted extensive research for many prominent foundations, companies, and government agencies in the USA and Europe.
An analysis of divergent online news preferences of journalists and consumers and what this means for media and democracy in the digital age.
The websites of major media organizations—CNN, USA Today, the Guardian, and others—provide the public with much of the online news they consume. But although a large proportion of the top stories these sites disseminate cover politics, international relations, and economics, users of these sites show a preference (as evidenced by the most viewed stories) for news about sports, crime, entertainment, and weather. In this book, Pablo Boczkowski and Eugenia Mitchelstein examine the divergence in preferences and consider its implications for the media industry and democratic life in the digital age.
Drawing on analyses of more than 50,000 stories posted on twenty news sites in seven countries in North and South America and Western Europe, Boczkowski and Mitchelstein find that the gap in news preferences exists regardless of ideological orientation or national media culture, and that it is not affected by innovations in forms of storytelling, such as blogs and user-generated content on mainstream news sites. Drawing upon these findings, they explore the news gap's troubling consequences for the matrix that connects communication, technology, and politics in the digital age.
I: Background.- 1. An Introduction.- 2. Conceptualizations of Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination.- II: Self-Determination Theory.- 3. Cognitive Evaluation Theory: Perceived Causality and Perceived Competence.- 4. Cognitive Evaluation Theory: Interpersonal Communication and Intrapersonal Regulation.- 5. Toward an Organismic Integration Theory: Motivation and Development.- 6. Causality Orientations Theory: Personality Influences on Motivation.- III: Alternative Approaches.- 7. Operant and Attributional Theories.- 8. Information-Processing Theories.- IV: Applications and Implications.- 9. Education.- 10. Psychotherapy.- 11. Work.- 12. Sports.- References.- Author Index.
Building on earlier empirical work in newsrooms, this paper contends that a fundamental transformation has occurred in journalists' understanding of their audiences. A new level of responsiveness to the agenda of the audience is becoming built into the DNA of contemporary news work. This article argues, however, that this journalistic responsiveness to the "agenda of the audience" has multiple, often contradictory meanings. It traces these out through a critical-historical sketch of key moments in the journalism-audience relationship, including the public journalism movement, Independent Media Center (Indymedia), and Demand Media. These different visions of the audience are correlated to different images of democracy, and they have different sociological implications. The public journalism movement believed in a form of democracy that was conversational and deliberative; in contrast, traditional journalism embraced an aggregative understanding of democracy, while Indymedia's democratic vision could best be seen as agonistic in nature. Demand Media and similar ventures, this article concludes, may be presaging an image of public that can best be described as algorithmic. Understanding this algorithmic conception of the audience may be the first step into launching a broader inquiry into the sociology and politics of algorithms.
'…a great book, exciting, and very clearly written' - Klaus Schönbach, University of Amsterdam. 'This is an excellent book that provides students with a broad series of summary outlines of key thinkers on media and communication, without conflating the two terms' - Michael Pickering, University of Loughborough. Magisterial in scope, Media and Communication traces the historical development of media and communication studies. Media Studies itself has a short history but many antecedents, and in this comprehensive and compelling book, Paddy Scannell sets out to describe and analyze its formulation in North American and Europe. Media and Communication offers an accessible and comprehensive analysis of the development of media and communication theory: Includes a summary outline of all the key thinkers; Looks at the study of communication across a range of disciplines—history, literature, sociology, philosophy and linguistics; Challenges readers to engage with the central importance of communication.
Social networking sites have become staples in everyday life in many parts of the world. Public service broadcasters have ventured on to such services, aiming to reach new users. This move triggers a line of question about the borders between the public and the commercial, the control of content and the shifting power in media policy. Focusing on the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation's use of Facebook, this article offers insights into what exactly is new about the challenges posed by social networking sites, and explores how this instance of hybrid arrangements impacts on our understanding of public service media.
The media environment is changing. Today in the United States, the average viewer can choose from hundreds of channels, including several twenty-four hour news channels. News is on cell phones, on iPods, and online; it has become a ubiquitous and unavoidable reality in modern society. The purpose of this book is to examine systematically, how these differences in access and form of media affect political behaviour. Using experiments and new survey data, it shows how changes in the media environment reverberate through the political system, affecting news exposure, political learning, turnout, and voting behavior.
Gamification is a growing phenomenon of interest to both practitioners and researchers. There remains, however, uncertainty about the contours of the field. Defining gamification as “the process of making activities more game-like” focuses on the crucial space between the components that make up games and the holistic experience of gamefulness. It better fits real-world examples and connects gamification with the literature on persuasive design.
This book studies the rise of social media in the first decade of the twenty-first century, up until 2012. It provides both a historical and a critical analysis of the emergence of networking services in the context of a changing ecosystem of connective media. Such history is needed to understand how the intricate constellation of platforms profoundly affects our experience of online sociality. In a short period of time, services like Facebook, YouTube and many others have come to deeply penetrate our daily habits of communication and creative production. While most sites started out as amateur-driven community platforms, half a decade later they have turned into large corporations that do not just facilitate user connectedness, but have become global information and data mining companies extracting and exploiting user connectivity. Offering a dual analytical prism to examine techno-cultural as well as socio-economic aspects of social media, the author dissects five major platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and Wikipedia. Each of these microsystems occupies a distinct position in the larger ecosystem of connective media, and yet, their underlying mechanisms for coding interfaces, steering users, filtering content, governance and business models rely on shared ideological principles. Reconstructing the premises on which these platforms are built, this study highlights how norms for online interaction and communication gradually changed. "Sharing," "friending," "liking," "following," "trending," and "favoriting" have come to denote online practices imbued with specific technological and economic meanings. This process of normalization is part of a larger political and ideological battle over information control in an online world where everything is bound to become "social."
Gamification, the idea that game mechanics can be integrated into assumed "non-game" circumstances has gained ascendance amongst champions of marketing, behavior change and efficiency. Ironically, some of the most heated critique of gamification has come from the broader community of "traditional" videogame developers. Connecting broadly to projects surrounding "big data" and algorithmic surveillance, the project of gamification continues to expand and intensify. This paper examines the complex relationship between game designers and the rise of arguments in support of gamification. I analyze the various actors and interests mobilizing arguments, deconstructing their underlying assumptions about the relationship between games and social phenomena. Turning toan analytic framework rooted in the Assemblage of Play (Taylor 2009) and emergent coercive forms of (played) control (Taylor 2006), the essay critiques assumptions on either side of the debate on the role of games and play. The strained connections between debates on gamification and broader interest in serious games offers an important moment to explore algorithmic surveillance.
1 Research questions
My PhD research will address the following practical and meta-theoretical ques-tions: How does mobility affect the creation, distribution, and consumption of news? What are the theoretical and practical implications of applying gamification in a mobile news context? How could gamification techniques be successfully implemented in the distribution of digital news in order to increase news consumption?
2 Background
My PhD research examines the application of gamification techniques in the distribution and consumption of news in the emerging mobile society. The focus is placed on persuasive design and game mechanics in order to motivate, engage, and create new habits of news consumption in the mobile audiences.
Taking advantage of the newest innovations in mobile technology and connec-tivity advances, mobile phones have expanded their functionalities, allowing to effectively unite mobile devices with Internet usage. The rise and ubiquity of mobile digital devices has already altered the environment of news and information [1]. Traditional news organizations and other community-based information providers are trying to respond to audience interest with pervasive, portable, real-time local information [2]. Mobile communication is being used in extremely varied ways, in some cases substituting and transforming traditional situations and behaviors [3], sparking ritual forms, reliance on co-present understandings, development, and sometimes erosion of social cohesion [4].
It is with this acknowledgement that journalism and the news industry need to re-examine the interactions with the consumers, and the shift of traditional forms of media consumption that derive from new digital and mobile media [5]. New efforts are needed in order to capture the emerging individual structures of the self, through the engagement with technological personalized systems that turn life towards short-term, fragmented information, on-the-go life styles [6] [7]. It is not technology per se that matters, but the way technology is used.
New techniques designed to overcome the challenges of going mobile and to empower and engage audiences are arising, such as persuasive design and gamifica-tion. The applications of gamification in digital news consumption, especially in mobile settings are quite promising. The idiosyncrasies of mobility and its personal nature make for the application of gamification techniques particularly suiting in order to engage users to use a service daily, and can increase levels of consumption and loyalty. Gamification has been successfully used in several fields, particularly in the large industry of mobile applications, but also in marketing campaigns, and business processes were user participation was important [8]. The reasoning behind the application of gamification in web-based system, or a mobile app, is to enhance engagement, grant choices, reaffirm progression, and provoke social habit [9]. Applied to media consumption, there is a vast opportunity to provide game elements in the systems that not only engage the news consumer, but also provide a personalized experience, a sense of relatedness, and help users create the habit of using the service regularly, translating it into a daily habit. In addition, gamification gives the tools for users to notify and engage other users, broadening the network of consumers to news engagement. The aim is to create a News Experience that is more attractive and enticing to the new mobile lifestyle of today’s news consumers.
The narrative of my dissertation focuses on the future of journalism and media, and the potential benefits that the enhancement of mobility approaches can bring to the emerging mobile society. Because gamification is a new approach, a proper em-pirical research could not only benefit academia, but also aim for business applicabil-ity in organizational environments.
Thus, this study focuses on the intersecting points of three different fields: gami-fication and persuasive technologies, mobility and mobile devices, and journalism and the news industry. Separately, all three fields carry a large body of knowledge, with a major background in media communication and information systems. Processes, challenges, typologies, success factors, media, a large variety of topics have been studied in depth when it comes to the creation, distribution, and consumption of news [10]. The adoption of mobile devices for news consumption purposes can be seen as diffusion of innovation driven by various factors, such as technological, social, and psychological. Medium Theory, Mobile Network Societies, and Reward Substitution are shaping to be the theoretical points of departure in order to examine the new mediatized social phenomenon of constant information ubiquity in everyday life. Finally, even though the topic of gamification is fairly new, scholars like Werbach, Deterding, Hunicke, and LeBlanc give an introductory look into a vast new field that is waiting to be explored. Combined, however, the use of gamification on mobile settings to empower younger generations to consume news is practically unresearched. This study aims to fill this gap.
3 Research plan
For the purpose of my PhD, a triangulation of methods will be used to collect data. Fist, a large survey to examine the current mobile news consumption will be conducted. Second, a qualitative approach in the form of semi-structured interviews will attempt to study the effect of the new mobile devices in the users’ daily life and how that affects their media consumption. Finally, user experience experiments are planned in order to study the acceptance of gamified features, metrics of engagement and usability, and overall reaction of each individual to a gamified news service.
4 Advancement state
At the time of Persuasive’14, the project will have been running for almost a year. A great deal of literature has been examined and several courses been taken. On the empirical side, ten interviews have been conducted, providing preliminary data to support the study. Planning for the user experience experiments has already started. Feedback and ideas from the Doctoral Consortium in regards gamified systems would be of extreme value to the development of the study.
5 Collaborations
The project is funded by the Anne-Marie och Gustaf Anders Stiftelse för Me-diaforskning foundation, aided by the Media and Communication department at Karlstad University. My advisor is Associate Professor Michael Karlsson. Co-advisors are Professor Henrik Örnebring and Assistant Professor Christer Clerwall. The main examiner is Professor André Jansson.
Negotiations for cooperation have been established with the Swedish Interactive Institute (www.tii.se) in order to create a mobile research lab that could lead to con-duct of the user experience experiment that should serve as a data collection method for the project.
6 References
1. Castells, M., Fernández-Ardèvol, M., Qiu, J.L. & Sey, A. (2007). Mobile communication and society: A global perspective. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
2. Purcell, K., Rainie, L., Rosenstiel, T., & Mitchell, A. (2011). How mobile devices are changing community information environments. Retrieved from: http://www.pewinternet.com/~/media/Files/Reports/2011/PIP-Local%20mobile%20survey.pdf [Accessed January 15, 2014].
3. Green, N. (2002). On the move: technology, mobility, and the mediation of social time and space. The information society, vol.18:4, pp. 281-292.
4. Ling, R. S. (2008). New tech, new ties. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
5. Westlund, O. (2008). From mobile phone to mobile device: News consumption on the go. Canadian Journal of Communication, vol.33:3.
6. Elliot, A. & Urry, J. (2010). Mobile lives. Routledge.
7. Urry, J. (2002). Mobility and proximity. Sociology, vol.36:2, pp. 255-274.
8. Deterding, S., Sicart, M., Nacke, L., O'Hara, K., & Dixon, D. (2011:a). Gamification, using game-design elements in non-gaming contexts. In PART 2 -Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, pp. 2425-2428. ACM.
9. Werbach, K. & Hunter, D. (2012). For the win: How game thinking can revolutionize your business. Wharton Digital Press.
10. Robinson, W., & Robison, D. (2006). Tsunami mobilizations: Considering the role of mo-bile and digital communication devices, citizen journalism, and the mass media. The cell phone reader, (ed.) Peter Lang, New York, pp. 85-103.
Technological convergence and altered dynamics of content circulation, what is here referred to as “transmedia textures”, change the ways in which news is consumed. This is in regard to both how individuals navigate and orient themselves through representational spaces and flows, and how their media practices amalgamate with other activities in everyday life. The aim of this study is to explore how altered dynamics of amalgamation are related to various news media orientations and how these relationships correspond to forces of structuration. The study applies a communication geographical analytical framework and combines quantitative and qualitative interview data from Sweden. The empirical data illustrate how the spatial practice of news consumption changes into an increasingly amalgamated, mobile practice. Transmedia textures flourish within geo-social settings marked by relatively affluent, mobile lifestyles and cosmopolitan news orientations. However, it is also shown that transmedia textures, due to the forces of geo-social structuration, sustain sedentary lifestyles, corresponding to more locally oriented news media practices.
Millions play Farmville, Scrabble, and countless other games, generating billions in sales each year. The careful and skillful construction of these games is built on decades of research into human motivation and psychology: A well-designed game goes right to the motivational heart of the human psyche. In For the Win, Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter argue persuasively that game-makers need not be the only ones benefiting from game design. Werbach and Hunter, lawyers and World of Warcraft players, created the world's first course on gamification at the Wharton School. In their book, they reveal how game thinking--addressing problems like a game designer--can motivate employees and customers and create engaging experiences that can transform your business. For the Win reveals how a wide range of companies are successfully using game thinking. It also offers an explanation of when gamifying makes the most sense and a 6-step framework for using games for marketing, productivity enhancement, innovation, employee motivation, customer engagement, and more.
This article presents and discusses three different approaches to the exploration of the cross-media challenges facing news audiences, as they seek access to, navigate in and make sense of the multitude of news sources across print, broadcasting, online and mobile media platforms. From a modernized uses and gratifications perspective, based on the notion of “worthwhileness” as the determinant of people's everyday selections from the “supermarket of news”, the article first reports from a longitudinal survey study in Denmark in which the author's foundational mapping of cross-media news consumption in pre-mobile 2008 is compared with replicating mappings carried out in 2011 and 2012, in a collaborative project between academics and news publishers. The analytical interest here focuses on the fluctuations between traditional news media and the surging digital news outlets of the internet and mobile devices. Secondly, the article summarizes the findings of a qualitative study of citizens' news repertoires, which was fortified with a quantitative factor analysis in order to find patterns in people's news consumption. Thirdly, findings are presented from a 2013 study that explored ubiquitous news consumption, asking respondents to specify the nexus of news platform and location of use.
This article describes and analyses the production, consumption, and form of Live Blogs at a popular UK newspaper website and contributes to related debates in journalism studies. Qualitative research interviews with journalists and editors, a reader survey, content analysis, and web metrics were used to obtain data about production practices, product outcomes, and the consumption stage of the product lifecycle. The study finds that Live Blogs are a popular daily component of the news site, used increasingly to cover serious breaking news. Although rarely authored exclusively on location, they may utilise more original sources than traditional online hard news formats. Their frequent updates mean factual verification is cursory, but compensatory factors, including their attribution practices, contribute to a positive evaluation of their objectivity by readers. Live Blogs—with their timeliness, navigational simplicity, and bite-sized content units—suit readers’ consumption of news in the workplace. Live Blogs may increase online news readers’ interest in public-affairs content, and their inclination to participate. This study contradicts some existing scholarship on sourcing practices, content preferences, and immediacy in online news, while supporting the observation that news is increasingly consumed at work. It makes the novel suggestions that Live Blogging is uniquely suited to readers’ at-work news consumption patterns and that the format provides journalists with a means to manage the competing demands of their elite and mass publics.
This is a thorough investigation into contemporary young people and their media life. The article conceptualizes a typology of media life, drawing on a theoretical body involving the sociology of generations, life course research, media life and individualization. This empirically derived typology makes a strong instrument for an understanding of the media life of the young, furnishing insights into how they have constructed their use of media. The investigation is based on a robust national survey with Swedes born 1994-2001, conducted in 2010 and focusing on four media: television, gaming, the Internet and mobile devices. Two of the findings are particularly surprising. Firstly, the results reveal that the young generally lead heterogeneous media lives, varying with age and sex. Secondly, although some young people literarily live their life in media, there are also de facto young who live a life without media. This is particularly pronounced for gaming and mobile use.
Games are part of day to day life, entertaining users, but at the same time modelling behaviors. By applying game mechanics and dynamics to tasks and e-learning processes we can increase user engagement with an e-learning application and its specific tasks. While having multiple uses in commercial practices, gamification implies well established techniques similar to those found in games. We will take a closer look at the ones that are appropriate to the learning process and moreover to e-learning and analyze relevant examples.
