A brief history of the news game

One of the first popular news games was Wired’s 2009 Cutthroat Capitalism, which lets players learn about piracy by taking on the role of a pirate. Since then, many publishers have experimented with embedding games in journalism. The American University Game Lab has an archive of news games here.

Publishers can still learn a lot from games about engagement, community and collaboration.

Lindsay Grace, director of the Game Lab at American University, and I co-facilitated a Newsjam – a variant of a hackathon – meant to demonstrate some of those lessons. In a Newsjam, participants form interdisciplinary teams and have a limited amount of time to create a working prototype for a news-related game.

The Newsjam grew out of the two-year-old JoLT initiative at American University, a program that uses games to demonstrate new lessons for publishers. The team has published some of their learnings here, with more to come.

The newsjam begins

My background is in journalism, so I was to advise teams as to their games’ news value. In my opening presentation, I asked the participants – a group of about 20 graduate students, gamers and game designers – what journalism and games each do well. Together, we filled in one of those classroom staples: a Venn Diagram.

Our Venn diagram. Photo by Anika Gupta.

According to the participants, journalism got points for speed and accuracy, while games got credit for building communities, engagement and describing dynamic systems. Both fields, at their best, can excel at storytelling, while neither seems to have mastered diversity or online harassment (at least, not from our participants’ perspective).

As co-faciliators, we used the newsjam to test a few ideas:

• Can teams produce games at a pace that keeps up with the 24/7 news cycle?
• News articles are supposed to inform, but do they have to be serious in tone to succeed?
• How can the news production process emphasize moments of surprise, discovery and learning? How can we “keep it fun,” as Matt Carroll suggests in this post?
• Can games create an interactive, two-way experience for news consumers?
• Finally, can games help news organizations understand or rethink their communities in useful ways? For large mainstream news organizations, one of the challenges in building community has been how they conceptualize their audience, which influences what they build. Questions like “Whom is this game for? Why are they playing it? How?” can break large audiences into smaller, more accessible communities.

Some of the mentors. From left to right: Artist Joyce Rice, journalist Maggie Farley and professor Lindsay Grace advised students at the Miami Newsjam. Photo by Cassandra Keith.

The teams tackle issues in the news

Most of the teams at the Newsjam chose to create games that explored current news issues. Participants got advice from mentors, gave interim presentations, and refined their prototypes and their art. They used tools like GameSalad and Twine to help them build their narratives.

Teams used tools like GameSalad to build their prototypes. Photo by Cassandra Keith.

The descriptions of the final projects often included humor. The creators of  “I am a Bot” described their game as follows: “It’s the 21st century and humanity has uploaded themselves into computers. There they met their greatest match: The Overmind, Bot of bots. Bots control everything now, the only way to survive is to hide yourself among them. You are Emma Abbot and you must change your profile so that bots believe you are also a bot.”

A screenshot from I am a bot, courtesy of the creators and Lindsay Grace.

The winner was “Rising Tide,” a climate change game. Players work together to beat global warming. They perform actions like “planting trees, throwing away trash and preserving water,” the creators write. If they don’t work together, the glaciers melt.

The title screen from Rising Tide, courtesy of the creators and Lindsay Grace. The pixelated art is part of the game’s aesthetic.

Finally, some of the mentors got together to create “Hurl the Harasser,” a game that tackles sexual harassment, a topic that might not initially seem like a great match for the game genre.

The road ahead

The jam answered a few of our initial questions: the teams worked fast, they had a fun time, and they produced a few enjoyable games (although they might need some refining). These games challenged our ideas about how to interact with a news story. But what about understanding audiences better? It would take a deeper commitment, field testing and user research to address that question. The JoLT team is working on some of these questions – they plan to publish learnings from year two of their project soon. But news organizations can also do this type of experimentation and in-depth testing, if they have the will.

Anika Gupta has been a product manager, user researcher and travel writer. Her product work focuses on collaborative journalism. She lives in Washington DC. You can find more info about her at digitalanika.com or @DigitalAnika.

The post Using Digital Games to Make Engaging Journalism at Miami Newsjam appeared first on MediaShift.

At the Computation and Journalism Symposium, which took place October 13 and 14 at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., I sat down with three co-panelists to talk about the exciting new tools they’re building for collaborative journalism.

We discussed everything from the New York Times’ new comment moderation software to experiments in more transparent investigation. Below are a few highlights from our conversation. A note on the panelists: Corey Haines is Chief Technology Officer for the engagement startup Hearken, while Amy Zhang experiments with new forms of online discussion in her research as a computer science graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Michael Reifman recently joined the New York Times, where he’s a senior engineer on the community team.

Reading (and Fixing) the Comments

Comments have been around for years, and they still matter.

The New York Times has been experimenting with automatic comment moderation through a partnership with Google Jigsaw, the Alphabet incubator that builds security technology. Until recently, a human moderator had to look at and approve almost every comment that appeared on the Times website. Now, thanks to their new software, certain comments are auto-approved while other, potentially troublesome, comments get deferred for review by human moderators.

One big challenge with a system like this is that readers don’t always know what constitutes a problematic comment, and a phrase or word that’s appropriate in one setting might be totally inappropriate in another. How does the Times’ auto-moderator filter for context, and how transparent is it about its process? Reifman admitted that it’s a bit of a “black box” and says that the Times is proceeding “with caution.”

But why have comments at all? Corey Haines, whose startup builds engagement tools for public media and small-scale publishers, wondered whether comments – even well-moderated ones – are necessary.

“If we want to provide a place for community, a threaded stream is a pretty bad way to build community,” he said. “If you’re saying you want comments to be like a forum, then build a forum.”

But Zhang, who builds experimental tools that reframe online discussions, suggested a few ways that a new generation of comments could break into more collaborative territory.

“I don’t think there’s a distinction between ‘forums are one thing and comments are another thing’,” she said. Zhang pointed to experiments like “designing how the comments are shown, letting people organize, summarize, annotate, direct comments to some people not others” or even “breaking up the audience” as ways to completely change the commenting experience by offering more control to readers and more value to journalists.

“There’s a richness of engagement that we’re missing and that can be [achieved] by providing better tools to users and to moderators,” Reifman said. He said the main focus for the Times right now is achieving scale, but that in the future, they’re looking at letting readers search and explore comments.

Zhang pointed out that if there’s a need to summarize and organize comments, readers might be willing to do it, Wiki-style.

The Coral Project, a collaboration between the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Mozilla Foundation, recently rolled out a new tool called “Talk” to their first partner, the Washington Post. According to Coral’s website, Talk is a “a streamlined system that can improve how people behave and interact in the comments space, and allow moderators to more easily identify and remove disruptive comments.” In a demo on the Coral website, the community’s guidelines appear at the top. Readers and commenters respond to each other’s comments by clicking a “Respect” button rather than a “Like” one, since research has shown that a “Respect” button encourages readers to engage with diverse points of view.

Tools like Talk and auto-moderation might help organizations create more valuable discussions, which in theory could create more space and better avenues for richer collaboration.

Engineering Empathy

Good technology blocks offensive comments and online harassment. But great technology addresses why harassment exists in the first place. Or, as Zhang explained, there are ways that thoughtful commenting interfaces might encourage greater empathy among collaborators.

In an experiment, Zhang and her MIT lab asked readers to annotate news article with “moral framing.” The researchers drew on Moral Foundations Theory, which organizes human thinking around five core sets of moral values (watch Jonathan Haidt’s TED talk about the theory).

The goal of the experiment, Zhang says, was to get readers “to think about the underlying moral values that are being deployed in an argument” while reading a set of articles about immigration. By thinking about others’ core moral values as well as their own, it would hopefully be easier for readers to contextualize moments of disagreement.

Larry Birnbaum, a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Northwestern, asks a question during one of the panels at CJ 2017. (Photo by Seong Jae Min)

Zhang says the research team saw an increase in empathy in their test users after a week of framing discussions in this way. (NewsFrames has a fuller explanation of the experiment and its results.)

From a news organization’s perspective, tools that encourage empathy could help promote more diverse and productive conversations around the news. For readers, it helps them collaborate with the process – even after the fact – by emphasizing that journalists, like anyone else, have points of view that can be debated.

Transparent Reporting

One of the big problems with comments, according to the founders of Hearken, is that readers only get to engage after a story is published. But what if they could engage from the start, including helping the newsroom decide what stories to cover and how? That’s the premise behind Hearken, or as Haines said: “How do you change the culture to bring the audience into the process?”

When a radio station in Michigan wanted to do a series on mental health, Hearken helped them build tools that let the station ask readers what they wanted to know about the topic before the series even began.

Asking questions can help news organizations target their stories in an era when clickbait articles make it hard to figure out what readers actually value. Metrics like time on site and pageviews are “passive signals,” said Zhang.

“People are being inundated with information and don’t have the tools to manage all the clickbait that’s coming at them,” she said.

Hearken is also working on a new tool that will let readers ride along while a story is being reported, offering feedback along the way. Variations of this idea exist at other outfits, as well. The Dutch journalism outlet De Correspondent refers to it as “being open about the new things you’re learning as a journalist” and the end result, they say, is that stories are more accessible.

The goal behind these tools isn’t to reinvent journalism, but to acknowledge that in an era of distributed information and diverse perspectives, the best defense against misinformation is a partnership between journalists and a media-literate population. When it comes to core values, collaborative journalism takes two-way trust as a given: journalists and audiences have something of value to offer each other. News organizations and media companies are still working on building the right tools for that level of trust, as well adopting the right mentality, but hopefully they’re getting there.

Anika Gupta has been a product manager, user researcher and travel writer. Her product work focuses on collaborative journalism. She lives in Washington DC. You can find more info about her at digitalanika.com or @DigitalAnika. 

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