No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
Gamification and Newsgames as Narrative Innovations in Journalism
Abstract
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.
... Los newsgames son videojuegos que están diseñados para transmitir información y noticias a través de una plataforma de videojuegos (Tejedor Calvo, 2022). Estos juegos pueden ser creados por periodistas o desarrolladores de videojuegos, se utilizan para comunicar información de manera accesible y atractiva (García-Avilés, Ferrer-Conill & García-Ortega, 2022). Los newsgames a menudo se centran en temas de actualidad, como las elecciones, el cambio climático, la desigualdad económica o la crisis migratoria (Marín Gutiérrez, Hinojosa Becerra & Ruiz San Miguel, 2018). ...
... Estos videojuegos pueden tener una amplia variedad de formatos y estilos, incluyendo aventuras gráficas, juegos de rol, juegos de estrategia o simuladores (Ndulue & Orji, 2022). A través de los videojuegos para el cambio los jugadores pueden aprender y experimentar los desafíos que enfrentan los individuos y comunidades afectadas por un tema determinado, al mismo tiempo que se involucran activamente en la creación de soluciones y acciones para abordar estos desafíos en el mundo real (Dale, Viktor, Schutt, & Gillian, 2022). ...
En un contexto postpandémico como el actual, donde existen millones de personas desplazadas a causa de crisis sociopolíticas, ambientales y económicas, se vuelve pertinente y decisivo diferenciar la comunicación humanitaria y los medios de crisis humanitaria, ya que persiguen diferentes objetivos y tienen distintos enfoques.
La comunicación humanitaria se refiere a los métodos para comunicar
información relevante y útil a las personas afectadas, los donantes, los socios humanitarios y otras partes interesadas, quienes son clave durante las crisis humanitarias. El propósito principal de la comunicación humanitaria es brindar información clara y precisa para ayudar a las personas afectadas a tomar decisiones informadas sobre su seguridad y bienestar, ayudando a los trabajadores humanitarios a coordinar y mejorar la respuesta. Por otro lado, los medios de crisis humanitaria se refieren a cómo las plataformas mediáticas informan sobre las crisis humanitarias a una audiencia másamplia . Los medios de comunicación pueden ser una her ramienta importante para llamar la atención del público sobre las crisis y movilizar recursos y apoyo.Pero también es importante que los medios sean precisos, éticos y respetuosos de la dignidad y la privacidad de los involucrados.
... Gami cation in digital journalism has been a pivotal approach, engaging audiences and fortifying journalists' capacities, prompting an ongoing negotiation within journalism's boundaries (García-Avilés et al., 2022;Ferrer-Conill, 2017). The discourse surrounding this practice scrutinizes criticism that views gami ed news as a drift towards infotainment, advocating instead for gami cation as a form of serious journalism rooted in norms of audience engagement. ...
... Documentary games (also known as interactive documentaries, or i-docs) provide a unique blend of game mechanics and narrative documentary journalism, which can be leveraged for problematising historical violence [27]. Similarly, newsgames provoke critical thinking by integrating elements in their design that aim at bringing the attention of the player to particular topics and their implications, communicating diferent viewpoints around those topics, and, ultimately, instigate conversation between players [36]. Another area to draw inspiration from is that of 'historiographical video games', which place emphasis on the historian driving the narrative discourse through several mechanics, whilst encouraging interaction [10]. ...
Video games are maturing as a medium to tell stories inspired by historical struggles and real-life experiences. In this regard, they could work as a mechanism in Transitional Justice pursuit. In this paper, we argue that games can become agents for promoting education, reconciliation and healing. We hence identify means by which museums and video games create empathy, reported in recent literature, and draw inceptive parallels between museum space design philosophies and design choices in modern video game experiences. Finally, we identify in the literature that there is a lack of a framework bringing together experts in memory and heritage studies with game developers, to derive guidelines for developing empathy-inducing games around sensitive topics. Thus, we propose a methodological approach on the creation of such a framework. This framework would instrument a collaborative effort to apply domain adaptation of the strategies and design philosophies for memory and Transitional Justice museum exhibitions to video game storytelling frameworks and mechanics.
... Estos videojuegos pueden tener una amplia variedad de formatos y estilos, incluyendo aventuras gráficas, juegos de rol, juegos de estrategia o simuladores (Ndulue & Orji, 2022). A través de los videojuegos para el cambio los jugadores pueden aprender y experimentar los desafíos que enfrentan los individuos y comunidades afectadas por un tema determinado, al mismo tiempo que se involucran activamente en la creación de soluciones y acciones para abordar estos desafíos en el mundo real (Dale, Viktor, Schutt, & Gillian, 2022). ...
En el mundo de los videojuegos existe el género de ‘videojuegos serios’, en él subsiste un subgénero llamado ‘videojuegos persuasivos’. Allí encontramos los games for change o ‘videojuegos para el cambio’. No podemos olvidar que existen otros tipos de videojuegos muy similares a los que vamos a estudiar. Los ‘videojuegos serios’ (o serious games) son videojuegos diseñados con el propósito principal de enseñar, informar, entrenar o cambiar comportamientos de manera efectiva. Estos videojuegos buscan combinar la diversión y la interacción de los juegos con un propósito educativo o formativo específico (Sharratt et
al., 2023).
... Documentary games (also known as interactive documentaries, or i-docs) provide a unique blend of game mechanics and narrative documentary journalism, which can be leveraged for problematising historical violence [27]. Similarly, newsgames provoke critical thinking by integrating elements in their design that aim at bringing the attention of the player to particular topics and their implications, communicating diferent viewpoints around those topics, and, ultimately, instigate conversation between players [36]. Another area to draw inspiration from is that of 'historiographical video games', which place emphasis on the historian driving the narrative discourse through several mechanics, whilst encouraging interaction [10]. ...
... They can serve as additional mean for explaining news or better understanding them. García-Avilés et al. (2022) declare that «newsgames are a genre with great journalistic potential when using the correct choice of mechanics and dynamics that allows communicating information according to news standards. The balance between both aspects does not guarantee that a newsgame provides the narrative resources to understand the information autonomously». ...
With the spread of new media, traditional media, such as TV faced a problem: how to attract and retain the audience and how to offer something new, that competitors do not have. And for a long time now even well-known and influential mass media have been using interactive content. The statement is that interactive content just for fun is no longer perceived. Interactive content includes quizzes, puzzles, crosswords, various polls, games, tests, quests, memories, interactive graphics, flash games, etc. Interactive elements in the media are used both separately and as a part of journalistic material. For the research of using interactive content in media, we examined the official sites of 30 channels in Ukraine, which belong to DTV and are translated for each region. In general, we have revealed 593 elements of interactive content on the sites of TV media. In the article, there were examined the kinds, types, themes, and amount of interactive content on each site of Ukrainian TV channels. It is investigated that such content can help to stay in touch with the audience and to popularize content that is broadcasted on the TV channel. Interactive media content has several obvious benefits, including the influx of new readers and, consequently, the growth of unique visitors, the growing number of people who talk about your media on social media and in real life, and the opportunity to draw attention to your television projects.
... Along with a review of the relationship between journalism and narratives, Vázquez-Herrero and de Haan [29] expose the value of interactive documentary and immersive journalism in the face of complexity and with the aim of finding the best way to inform the audience. On the other hand, García-Avilés and others [9] study the application of gamification elements to the creation of innovative journalistic products. The authors analyze the newsgames The Ocean Game (2019) and The Amazon Race (2019) and point out narrative and audience participation possibilities offered by this storytelling genre. ...
We introduce the book’s scope, based on the concept of ‘total journalism’. The chapters are presented following the structure of the book. The contributions of the authors offer an overview of the main elements that make up total journalism today, providing an in-depth study and reflecting the trends in its development.KeywordsTotal journalismTechnologyMetamorphosisJournalism
Das Kapitel stellt die morphologische Medienanalyse als komparative Methode vor, mit der sich einzelne Medienangebote, Medienrepertoires und der Wandel medialer Formen vergleichend untersuchen lassen. Im Beitrag wird das analytische Potenzial anhand der Untersuchung journalistischer Inhalte medienspezifisch konturiert und methodologisch als primär qualitatives Verfahren konkretisiert. Auf eine einführende interdisziplinäre Einbettung des Ansatzes folgt eine knappe Skizze des theoretischen Hintergrunds sowie die Vorstellung der für die Fallanalysen festgelegten Basiskategorien. Anschließend wird das Verfahren anhand der beispielhaften Analyse populärjournalistischer Medienangebote illustriert. Der Beitrag schließt mit einer Zusammenfassung zentraler Charakteristika und Potenziale der Methode.
2ο Ετήσιο Ελληνόφωνο Επιστημονικό Συνέδριο Εργαστηρίων Επικοινωνίας: Το μέλλον της επικοινωνίας στην
ψηφιακή εποχή www.cclabs.gr
Journalism is immersed in an ever-changing environment where professional journalistic standards and practices are being constantly redefined. In this context, new forms of news storytelling emerge to engage younger audiences and implement new distribution strategies. These forms of storytelling often overlap with other areas and grey zones, such as entertainment or opinion, challenging traditional journalistic boundaries and values. In this chapter we explore the implications of storytelling innovation in journalism, focusing on three formats that have gained prominence in recent years: (1) ephemeral content in Instagram Stories; (2) viral journalism in TikTok; and (3) comic journalism. We analyze different case studies to examine whether these new forms of storytelling adhere to journalistic standards and practices or instead they redefine them.
This chapter deals with the transformation of local media in the European context, focusing the study on the digital scenario in Spain, France and Portugal. The respective media maps are used to determine the current weight of regional, local and hyperlocal digital media. Based on the characteristics of the media ecosystem in each country, we seek to identify common trends and specific characteristics of the global mutations in journalism in these countries. Special attention is paid to the way in which the media seek to (re)create proximity with their audiences through their editorial models, the forms and channels they establish for interaction with the public or the creation of collaborative relationships.KeywordsLocal journalismLocal mediaHyperlocal mediaUser participation
Conceptually aligned with the epistemologies of digital journalism, and in line with the definition of ‘total journalism’, this chapter presents a mapping of the contemporary digital journalist’s professional profile, highlighting the skills for ‘being’ a journalist, and ‘performing’ journalistic activities in the new century. This is based on meta-research conducted on the Scopus and Google Scholar databases,
and the Capes Catalogue, for a longitudinal study of the bibliographical framework between 2000 and 2020, combined with the application of a questionnaire with 31 legacy and local digital media editors in Brazil. Evidence indicates that contemporary digital journalistic work is experiencing a trend towards platformization and surrounded by constant adaptability to new technologies, journalism is undergoing a crisis continuum, accentuated by the COVID-19 pandemic. With insecure work, and a context of datafication and algorithmization, the journalist needs to address the need for constant innovation and qualification, without neglecting the ethos of the
profession.
From crossword puzzles and quizzes to more complex gamification strategies and serious newsgames, legacy media has long explored ways to deploy playful approaches to deliver their content and engage with the audience. We examine how news and games fit together when news organizations, game creators and news audiences welcome gameful forms of communication and participation. Moreover, we reflect on the theoretical and empirical significance of merging news with games as a way to reformulate normative assumptions, production practices and consumption patterns. As a result, the boundaries between journalism and game’s logics start to erode, and they begin to find new ways of converging.
The use of games to convey the news involves wrestling with two different narrative logics: the professional culture of journalism, based on the verification of information and the standards of objectivity and truthfulness, and the culture of games, characterized by the creation of imaginary worlds, the persuasive potential of entertainment and the mechanics of the gaming experience. This article examines a sample of eight newsgame designs and the mechanisms through which they transmit information on issues related to political activity. We designed a qualitative analysis tool to examine the journalistic and gaming quality of the newsgames by analysing 28 parameters in four categories: formal parameters, content parameters, quality of use and architecture and design. Our results show that the use of playful elements is compatible with the fulfilment of journalistic quality standards and the choice of mechanics and dynamics determines how the user perceives and interacts with the information. However, the balance between both aspects does not guarantee that a newsgame provides the narrative resources to understand the information autonomously. Thus, newsgames are a genre with great journalistic potential when using the correct choice of mechanics and dynamics that allows communicating information according to news standards.
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.
This book aims to reflect how journalism has changed in recent years through different perspectives concerning the impact of technology, the reconfiguration of the media ecosystem, the transformation of business models, production and profession, as well as the influence of digital storytelling, mobile devices and participation within the context of glocal information.
Journalism innovation implies modifications in techniques, technologies, processes, languages, formats and devices intended to enhance the production and consumption of the journalistic information.
This book becomes an interesting resource for researchers and professionals working in news media to identify the best practices and discover new types of information flows in a rapidly changing news media landscape.
Television news consumption is declining, while videos on YouTube and social media are on the rise. Newscasts seem unable to attract a young audience that actively engages online. The purpose of our study is to establish how television news could be renovated by selecting the experts’ proposals and by exploring case studies of innovative audio-visual news formats. We posed two research questions: (a) How television newscasts could be renewed in the stages of production, edition, presentation and distribution? (b) Which news formats are innovating in storytelling and connecting with audiences? Our findings suggest that young audiences must be taken seriously by broadcasters for their long-term future. The experts suggest ways to experiment with new languages, diversify the news offer, foster journalists’ communicative skills and increase interaction with users.
The interest in liberating journalistic
storytelling from its traditional confinement
to a specific medium or distribution
model (paper, radio, television
and web) has led producers to focus
their interest on the combined exploitation
of traditional media and new
interconnected devices. This multiplatform
production has its main model in
the Web, due to the multimedia quality
of this medium. In this context, journalistic
storytelling has started going
further by means of stories which are
close to the transmedia philosophy.
This has been understood as a sign of
the deep and constant experimentation
that journalism has been experiencing,
especially since the emergence of the
Web. To date, the entertainment industry
has been the best breeding ground
for transmedia storytelling, even if it
has also started showing a particular
idiosyncrasy in journalism and nonfiction,
where the transmedia narrative
strategy appears as a response to the
need to open new pathways to news information (Fagundes, Cecília y Crispim,
2012). Taking as a starting point the
current status of research on the issue,
focused on precedents such as the hypermedia
and multimedia narratives,
this paper approaches current developments
in transmedia in the journalistic
field with a descriptive aim through the
review of different cases. This review
aims to contribute to outlining a map of
current professional practices in regards
to this innovative narrative.
For over a century, crosswords, puzzles, and quizzes have been present in newspapers. Digital journalism has only increased the trend of integrating game elements in news media, often blurring the traditional boundaries between news and games.
This dissertation aims to explore and understand how and why news organizations and newsworkers use gamification in digital news websites and to analyze the objectives behind its implementation in news production. The importance of trying to understand this development stems from the different roles that digital games and news have in contemporary democratic societies.
While journalism is often regarded as the main source of information for the public to act as citizens, digital games predominantly remain considered as entertainment media.
Drawing from media sociology and new institutionalism, this study engages with the literature on converging processes of popularization and professionalization of journalism, and how different institutional logics of gamification and journalism interact. Methodologically, this qualitative multiple case study analyzes four diverse news organizations (the Guardian, Bleacher Report, the Times of India, and Al Jazeera), interviewing 56 newsworkers, and conducting game-system analysis of their respective gamified systems.
The findings suggest that while news organizations often frame their motivations within the celebratory rhetoric of gamification, a deeper look into the material manifestations of gamified news systems tend to problematize the empowering claims of gamification. Instead, a complex interplay between the professional and commercial logics of
journalism and the hedonic and utilitarian logics of gamification shapes how news organizations and newsworkers implement gamified systems. This dissertation contributes to a larger debate on the friction professionalism and the market, on institutional interaction, and the increasing transgression of journalistic institutional
boundaries.
More than ever before we’re consuming news in strange contexts; mixed into a stream of holiday photos on Facebook, alongside comedians’ quips on twitter; between Candy Crush and transit directions on our smartphones. In this environment designers can take liberties with the form of the news package and the ways that audiences can interact. But it’s not just users who are invited to experiment with their news: in newsrooms and product development departments, developers and journalists are adopting play as design and authoring process. Maxwell Foxman‘s new Tow Center report, Play The News: Fun and Games in Digital Journalism is a comprehensive documentation of this world.
El creciente uso y popularidad de las narrativas transmedia ha propiciado la aparición de nuevos géneros y formatos periodísticos. Es el caso de los newsgames, un formato interactivo que bebe del videojuego y el periodismo para mostrar las noticias de una forma lúdica, inmersiva y participativa. La presente comunicación tiene como objetivo proponer una herramienta de análisis que permita medir de forma cuantitativa el componente periodístico y lúdico de cualquier newsgame o videojuego periodístico. De este modo, se pretende determinar si predomina la información periodística o la jugabilidad del contenido. La propuesta metodológica aúna en una única ficha de análisis los criterios de calidad del relato periodístico, así como los elementos propios del diseño de videojuegos. Finalmente, se pondrá a prueba su eficacia mediante el estudio de caso de El bueno, el malo y el tesorero, un videojuego periodístico elaborado por El Confidencial Lab y Journalism++ que forma parte de un proyecto transmedia sobre la corrupción a nivel europeo.
The article presents a reflection about innovation in web journalism, with special focus on the expressive contents and narratives. From this perspective, it appears that features like longform text, the refreshing use of audio and immersive content, such as graphic or imagistic representations in 3D and, more recently, virtual reality (VR), have stood out in this kind of news product at least since 2012. The paper also introduces a state of the art of some existing products and the media labs in some leading news organizations. It discusses the concept of innovation in the light of authors dedicated to the subject, in a literature review, complemented by descriptions of initiatives such as media labs in some online newsrooms, and analysis of narratives that we consider innovative in web journalism.
Several news media have started to introduce gamification techniques into their digital
platforms as a new storytelling format for news consumption. Since habit strength is the
most powerful predictor of news consumption, the goal is to not only engage news
consumers, but also to provide a personalized news experience and to persuade users to
foster the habit of consuming news regularly. However, there is a large research gap in
the intersection of journalism and gamification. This article aims to discern how digital
news media have introduced game mechanics into their online platforms, and the logic
which it serves. This assessment is primarily based on four case studies of gamified news:
The Guardian, The Times of India, Bleacher Report, and Al Jazeera. The results are
ambivalent since the driving forces of the implementation process combine an attempt
to engage users and a set of commercial motivations.
From a global vision of journalism innovation, this article presents a matrix that analyses and measures an innovation index of market-specific media initiatives, providing a valuable tool for comparative analysis. A method has been designed that consists of (1) sample collection and selection, and (2) the quantitative and qualitative analysis of each innovation identified in the cases
studied. With the aim of generating an Index of Media Innovation, 25 of the most innovative cases within the field of reference in Spain were studied during the period 2013–2014 through a database consisting of 196 innovations that were analysed as a function of area, degree and technological basis. The results indicate that, in Spain, journalism innovation occurs at the margins of the traditional news industry and, for the most part, innovation is expanding among digital native media outlets, niche initiatives and start-ups.
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1461670X.2016.1161496
Narrative long-form journalism is going through an international upswing. Existing media
companies and journalistic start-ups have taken narratives into the digital environment, using
multimedia elements to tell their stories in new ways and attempting to get their stories to
become viral. This essay analyses The Atavist and Long Play as examples of long-form
nonfiction publications, and offers results from a small international survey of long-form
publishers. The findings suggest that digital online environment provides narrative
journalism with new possibilities, such as multimedia elements and online presence, which
have the potential to both strengthen the authenticity of a story and weaken its immersive
effect due to too many sensory stimuli.
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.
There is no doubt, journalism faces challenging times. Since the turn of the millennium, the financial health of the news industry is failing, mainstream audiences are on the decline, and professional authority, credibility and autonomy are eroding. The outlook is bleak and it’s understandable that many are pessimistic. But this book argues that we have to rethink journalism fundamentally.
Rather than just focus on the symptoms of the ‘crisis of journalism’, this collection tries to understand the structural transformation journalism is undergoing. It explores how the news media attempts to combat decreasing levels of trust, how emerging forms of news affect the established journalistic field, and how participatory culture creates new dialogues between journalists and audiences. Crucially, it does not treat these developments as distinct transformations. Instead, it considers how their interrelation accounts for both the tribulations of the news media and the need for contemporary journalism to redefine itself.
By making work seem more like leisure time, gamification and corporate training games serve as a mechanism for solving a range of problems and, significantly, of increasing productivity. This piece examines the implications of gamification as a means of productivity gains that extend
Frederick Winslow Taylor’s principles of scientific management, or Taylorism. Relying on measurement and observation as a mechanism to collapse the domains of labour and leisure for the benefit of businesses (rather than for the benefit or fulfilment of workers), gamification potentially
subjugates all time into productive time, even as business leaders use games to mask all labour as something to be enjoyed. In so doing, this study argues, the agency of individuals – whether worker or player – becomes subject to the rationalized nature of production. This rationalization
changes the nature of play, making it a duty rather than a choice, a routine rather than a process of exploration. Taken too far or used unthinkingly, it renders Huizinga’s magic circle into one more regulated office cubicle.
Gamification is often promoted as a user-centred initiative, engaging and motivating the alienated masses. Yet is such rhetoric reinforced by the design of these programmes? By incorporating a diverse suite of theoretical frameworks that accounts for the social, cultural and psychological
effect of design features, this article argues that gamification too often invokes organization-centred design, treating users as zombies: senseless mechanisms urged onwards by a desire for extrinsic rewards. Gamification still often fails to acknowledge the user’s context and innate
psychological needs. This can be accomplished in practice through an incorporation of motivational psychology and a concurrent shift towards user-centred design, accounting for the situatedness of the participant. Further, this article claims that for gamification to reach its full, radical
potential, it must not only transform the way the user is evaluated and rewarded but also the activity the subject is tasked with performing.
Gamification as the process of turning extra-ludic activities into play can be seen in two different ways: following Bataille, we would hope that play could be a flight line from the servitude of the capital-labour relationship. Following Adorno and Benjamin, however, we might discover
that the escape from the drudgery of the worker leads to an equally alienating drudgery of the player. I argue that gamification might be seen as a form of ideology and therefore a mechanism of the dominant class to set agenda and to legitimize actions taken by this very class or group. Ever
since the notion of gamification was introduced widely, scholars have suggested that work might be seen as a sort of leisure activity. This article analyses the controversial dialectics of play and labour and the ubiquitous notion of gamification as ideology.
Recent years have seen a rapid proliferation of mass-market consumer software that takes inspiration from video games. Usually summarized as "gamification", this trend connects to a sizeable body of existing concepts and research in human-computer interaction and game studies, such as serious games, pervasive games, alternate reality games, or playful design. However, it is not clear how "gamification" relates to these, whether it denotes a novel phenomenon, and how to define it. Thus, in this paper we investigate "gamification" and the historical origins of the term in relation to precursors and similar concepts. It is suggested that "gamified" applications provide insight into novel, gameful phenomena complementary to playful phenomena. Based on our research, we propose a definition of "gamification" as the use of game design elements in non-game contexts.
This article discusses the potential of participatory game design to encourage and capture youth reflection, discussion, and participation around news literacy topics. Based on data obtained during a game design workshop with youth participants, we analyze two youth-produced games about fake news and discuss the personal, social, and cultural dimensions of youth attitudes and practices in relation to news literacy, as manifested through the process of game design. Our findings paint a rich picture of the ways in which youth understand and engage with fake news, their attitudes toward news literacy, and their playful approaches to collaboratively designing and prototyping news literacy games. This research sheds light on the opportunities and challenges related to the use of games and participatory game design for news literacy research and education, while also contributing to our understanding of the emerging processes that can support youth’s roles as designers, and not only consumers, of educational games about the news.
Creating successful newsgames requires effective boundary work between journalists and game developers. Both groups come to the job with different professional vocabularies, technical know-how, and work cultures. Our goal was to understand how they approach these challenges as they create a product that satisfies their professional expectations and the demands of media organizations and audiences. This article presents the results of semistructured expert interviews with pioneers in German newsgame production. We found that effective newsgame creation entailed complex coordination efforts. However, expected clashes between the different professional cultures did not occur. Conflicts were eased by a general agreement on news as a public service and by emphasizing nonhierarchical decision-making in teams. Our interviews detail the economic and technical obstacles that have resulted in newsgames not making major inroads. The decline of newsgames was related to the development of other digital media forms that matched journalistic conventions more closely. These findings led us to extend the model of journalistic boundary work to a more interactional concept that highlights the contributions of both sides while acknowledging the obstacles of operating in a larger media system.
Declining consumption rates of traditional news have led media outlets to search for innovative ways for engaging their audiences. News gamification emerged as a way to offer a more personalized news experience and a playful content by employing tools like badges, points, and leaderboards. As we are beginning to understand the benefits and pitfalls of gamifying news, the influence of the gamification on the news reporting techniques and news delivery structures is still not fully explored. The current study analyzes two games: Pirate Fishing: An Interactive Investigation and #Hacked Syria’s Electronic Armies, for the main generic news frames employed within interactive gamified contexts. Drawing on the integrative framing analysis approach, the study employs an innovative qualitative content analysis to investigate the multimodal – structural, textual, and visual – generic frames each game involves. By revisiting a contemporary list of news values, the study provides a further discussion about changing news values in the gamified setting.
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.
Boundary work describes the active process by various actors to define and delimit the contours of legitimate journalism. It stems from a sociological approach to the production of systematic knowledge that eschews an essentialist approach to knowledge or truth to instead accentuate ongoing discursive and material processes that construct and reshape what is deemed acceptable. The value of boundary work for journalism is clear in the constant questions surrounding what counts as journalism or who is a journalist. This entry considers a typology of journalistic boundary work built around Thomas Gieryn's three categories of expulsion, expansion, and protection of anonymity. It then confronts the particular usefulness of boundary work in response to digital media, and the opportunities and challenges facing future conceptual and theoretical development.
Newsgames are a young genre of digital journalism. This article analyses the genre on the basis of cases from various countries, puts it into context, critically examines the theoretical foundation and presents a study of utilization. A scientific definition takes the perspective of ‘boundary work’: It distinguishes Newsgames from other digital games (such as interest-driven, entertaining or educating games) and draws a boundary between Newsgames and other digital journalistic genres (such as multimedia reports, web documentaries or types of data journalism). The drawing of Newsgames boundaries highlights the general problems of drawing boundaries of journalism in digital media. To date, no study on the utilization of Newsgames exists. Our explorative and qualitative interviews and observations are situated within the framework of uses and gratifications research. Main categories are the level of awareness, information performance and success factors of Newsgames. The results show that the new genre possesses a wide range of possibilities that cannot be uniformly assessed. Ethical doubts as to whether serious topics should be played in games are offset against the benefit of creating interest and empathy. Users want to experience success when playing – an aspect that emphasizes the competitive character and distinguishes Newsgames from other genres.
Sociological inquiries into journalism have considered journalism as the product of cultural, economic, political, and technological forces in different times and spaces. As part of (and like) the field of media sociology, the sociology of journalism is an interdisciplinary subfield. It has several objectives of inquiry: examining situational and larger cultural differences of journalisms; analyzing systemic complexities in which journalism arises (i.e. technological formats and change, events, normative crises or organizational structures); illuminating intended and unintended consequences of practical routines of journalism; and exploring long-term patterns of professional, institutional, and organizational changes in journalism. Analyzing journalism through the sociological prism is central for understanding its larger societal implications and a continuous reminder that journalism studies is not an end in itself. Starting in the late 1950s, the gradual relocation of sociology of journalism from sociology to communication coincided with the establishment and professionalization of the two social science disciplines in US academia. Even as communication science has now produced generations of graduates in its own doctoral programs, the intellectual centrality of the sociology of journalism continues and has been recently confirmed through post-financial crisis academic hires. This paper introduces some of the major strands of the sociology of journalism research from the beginning of the 20th century to today. It also argues that the sociology of journalism took on a new ideational and professional significance within the field.
This paper conceptualises immersive journalism, and discusses the implications of the technology for users who then get a first-hand experience of being at a news event through wearing a virtual reality headset. The paper surveys current approaches to 360-degree immersive journalism films that were produced by early adopters in 2015, identifying the contrasting narrative forms and style of the stories. Focus group studies add new, significant understanding to the types of narratives that work and the impact that immersive storytelling has. The focus group is a study of 18–24 year olds in the UK who are being targeted by this new technology as a way for news broadcasters to reach a new audience. This first study into immersive journalism content produces a new understanding of the impact of the narratives. It identifies the value for news producers adopting this technology, whilst raising concerns over the production of filming 360 degrees. A framework is offered for further research studies into immersive technologies and storytelling in the field of news.
This study interrogates if newsgames are meaningful supplements to already existing forms of journalism. Using the case of refugee and migrant issues, this study examines how the newsgames The Refugee Challenge, Against all Odds and The Migrant Trail convey information about migration in interactive game-play, and how migrants and their situation are represented in these games. The games are discussed in relation to empathy, objectivity, complexity and the representation of distant suffering. The overarching question is how newsgames compare to traditional journalism when it comes to helping audiences understand political events of global concern and power asymmetries between “Others” and “us.” We find that these newsgames especially enhanced journalism when they cleverly employed game logics to generate experiential engagement with the existential crisis of involuntary dislocation. Nevertheless, the games did not use their game capabilities to the fullest, which would have entailed opening up a discourse that allows for contradictory life worlds and different perspectives of and by Others in context.
Scholars who use textual approaches to study news often blend theoretical perspectives in their work, asking some combination of questions about how news narratives function culturally, how news narratives are produced, and how news narratives are situated epistemologically. These perspectives often lead to compelling insights, and this article argues that a more fully fleshed-out approach to genre in journalism studies offers a robust means for contextualizing a wide array of theoretical concerns. Methodologically, attention to the textual conventions of a genre helps scholars attend to news narratives as both the products of standardized journalistic routines and evidence of broader cultural forces at play, cultural forces that rely upon journalism’s implicit authority over the truth. This article lays out guidelines for performing genre analysis while also offering examples for potential future studies.
As the use of mobile phones spreads through society, traditional news consumption is steadily being substituted by innovative environments and behaviors, sparking new ritual forms of media consumption. Additionally, video games have become a pervasive type of media that attracts the big majority of youth, sometimes displacing news consumption. For this reason, several news platforms have started to introduce game mechanics into their web-based systems or mobile apps creating a new storytelling format for news consumption. Since habit strength is the most powerful predictor of news consumption, the goal is to not only engage news consumers, but also provide a personalized news experience, a sense of relatedness, and persuade users to foster the habit of consuming news regularly.
While digital news media outlets have already started using gamification techniques within their services, there is a large research gap in the intersection of journalism and news, and gamification and persuasive technologies.
This paper aims to discern how digital news media have introduced gamification within their online platforms in order to re-invent several fronts of the journalistic practice. This assessment is primarily done through four case studies of gamified news: The Guardian, The Times of India, the Bleacher Report, and Al-Jazeera.
These case studies provide the room for discussion on the potential use of game mechanics within journalism, and gamification of news can potentially re-invent journalism, with an ambivalent set of results. On the one hand a gamified news service has the potential to engage users to read news and most importantly, to foster an intrinsic motivation to consume news while creating a habit out of it. Additionally, introducing game mechanics to news websites could introduce a profitable business model, by increasing readership, making it a service much more attractive to advertisers. On the other hand news outlets could use a gamified experience to exploit their users, either by manipulating their reading choices through game mechanics, or by monetizing the content and data they generate while they interact with the system. This could become a serious privacy risk involved with tracking the users’ every move and owning such data. It is at least ethically dubious. Furthermore, the interface and storytelling format could become the central aspect, relegating news to a secondary role, or delivering only the news that fit the narratives shaping the gamified system.
Theoretically, the gamification process is meant to deliver a new format of storytelling creating a news experience with relevant, targeted news, embedded in a social environment, while keeping the quality of the news intact, and always aiming for a broadening of views, avoiding selective exposure, and emphasizing improvement of the users’ knowledge. Ultimately, the goal is to generate a feeling of competence, autonomy, and relatedness to generate the intrinsic motivation of consuming news in the user through persuasive design and game mechanics. However, the current way of implementing gamification within journalism points to ambivalent results, where the driving forces of the implementation process is a mixture of an attempt to engage users and a set of commercial.
An exploration of the way videogames mount arguments and make expressive statements about the world that analyzes their unique persuasive power in terms of their computational properties.
Videogames are an expressive medium, and a persuasive medium; they represent how real and imagined systems work, and they invite players to interact with those systems and form judgments about them. In this innovative analysis, Ian Bogost examines the way videogames mount arguments and influence players. Drawing on the 2,500-year history of rhetoric, the study of persuasive expression, Bogost analyzes rhetoric's unique function in software in general and videogames in particular. The field of media studies already analyzes visual rhetoric, the art of using imagery and visual representation persuasively. Bogost argues that videogames, thanks to their basic representational mode of procedurality (rule-based representations and interactions), open a new domain for persuasion; they realize a new form of rhetoric. Bogost calls this new form "procedural rhetoric," a type of rhetoric tied to the core affordances of computers: running processes and executing rule-based symbolic manipulation. He argues further that videogames have a unique persuasive power that goes beyond other forms of computational persuasion. Not only can videogames support existing social and cultural positions, but they can also disrupt and change these positions themselves, leading to potentially significant long-term social change. Bogost looks at three areas in which videogame persuasion has already taken form and shows considerable potential: politics, advertising, and learning.
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.
Research about online journalism has been dominated by a discourse of technological innovation. The “success” of online journalism is often measured by the extent to which it utilizes technological assets like interactivity, multimedia and hypertext. This paper critically examines the technologically oriented research about online journalism in the second decade of its existence. The aim is twofold. First, to investigate to what degree online journalism, as it is portrayed in empirical research, utilizes new technology more than previously. Second, the paper points to the limitations of technologically oriented research and suggests alternative research approaches that might be more effective in explaining why online journalism develops as it does.
Video games have been created about political and s ocial issues since the early days of the medium. In rece nt years, many developers are rapidly creating and releasing games in response to current events. These games are bei ng referred to as newsgames. With an increasing number of people citing the internet as their primary news so urce, it would appear that newsgames could become an important part of how people understand current events and co uld rise to be an important and expressive video game genre. However, the word "newsgame" is currently only quite loosely defined, resulting in the term being applie d to many forms of serious, or nonfiction games. Also, despi te the quantity of games that relate to current events, ve ry few newsgames can be said live up to the defining claim s that newsgames are the video game equivalent of politica l cartoons (25) - a well developed and established me dium for political expression. This paper fleshes out the political cartoon compar ison in order to learn from the long history of political c artoons and give direction to the current state of fledgling an d unsophisticated newsgames. It also suggests clear and flexible definitive criteria for newsgames as well as a re- declaration of their expressive power.
Newspaper reading in its subjectivity seems to be play, pleasing one's self as in a child's game, the author says. His “ludenic theory” states that ludenic newsreading is communication-pleasure.
ABSTRACT During the last few years, a debate took place within the game scholars community. A debate that, it seems, opposed two groups: ludologists and narratologists. Ludologists are supposed to focus on game mechanics and reject any room in the field for analyzing games as narrative, while narratologists argue that games are closely connected to stories. This article aims at showing that this description of the participants is erroneous. What is more, this debate as presented never really took place because it was cluttered with a series of misunderstandings and misconceptions that need to be clarified if we wantt o seriously discusst her oleof na rrativei n videogames. Keywords
Computer games have a long history as entertainment media, but their use for educational or political communication is relatively
recent. This paper explores the use of computer games as news media. Newsgames are computer games used to participate in the
public sphere with the intention of explaining or commenting on current news. The paper provides a set of concepts for analyzing
newsgames, based on public service theory. The paper expands this analytical approach with a reflection on game design methodologies
for creating newsgames.
Typescript. Thesis (M.A.) - California State University, Fresno. Includes bibliographical references.
Converged media content: reshaping the ‘legacy’ of legacy media in the online scenario
- J A García-Avilés
- K Meier
- A Kaltenbrunner
García-Avilés, J.A., Meier, K., Kaltenbrunner, A.: Converged media content: reshaping the
'legacy' of legacy media in the online scenario. In: Franklin, B., Eldridge, S.A. (eds.) The
Routledge Companion to Digital Journalism Studies, pp. 449-458. Routledge, London (2016)