Playing the News
The Knight Foundation’s 21st Century News Challenge grant program was looking for ideas that “use innovative news methods to help citizens better connect within their communities.” The Institute for New Media Studies pitched five ideas. Four got into the second round of consideration, and one was awarded a $250,000 grant.
The award-winning project, “Playing the News,” was pitched as a game prototype for a news scenario-building program allowing citizens to “play” through a news story, interact with the stakeholders in the issue and, hopefully, result in a more in-depth understanding of complicated and ongoing news issues. This games in the newsroom concept evolved from the co-researchers’ prior experience and success at modifying an off-the-shelf video game to teach information-gathering skills in the journalism classroom.
Co-researchers, Nora Paul, director of the Institute for New Media Studies, and Kathleen Hansen, director of the Minnesota Journalism Center, started work on their winning proposal in 2007.
Year 1 - Building Game Creation Tools Not Child’s Play
The grant project focused on one issue - corn-based ethanol for fuel - to develop and test games for news information delivery and greater community engagement. The goal was to develop an easy-to-use game GUI (Graphical User Interface) for non-programmers in the newsroom to input new information.
After a change in vendors and the original game concept in the first year of the grant, the co-researchers sooned learned building this game project was not child’s play. Before embarking on a different game building strategy, Paul and Hansen needed to determine the effectiveness of the game approach for use in the newsroom.
Using ethanol as fuel information from the game versions, they designed three different news story page layouts for comparison. They created a web site and online survey to compare and analyze the game versions and three traditional-style news page designs.
Year 2 - Games on Serious Topics Don’t Play Well for News Delivery
User tests revealed games are not particularly effective for delivering serious news content in the way most news consumers want it.
However, in the course of their testing, Paul and Hanson learned respondents preferred the topic-focused news web page with organized links design that allowed them to drill down to the issues most interesting to them. While this finding does not have anything to do with their original investigation about which game format was better, it is of great value to news organizations designing effective news websites for their readers.
As with any innovation, anticipated and unexpected outcomes are often unknown until well into research and design. Over the course of the two-year grant exploring and testing games for delivering news, Paul and Hansen concluded their board/card game idea might be more useful for delivering feature-related content such as whether to choose a cat or dog as a pet.
What they did discover with using games to deliver news, is that if the goal is to get readers to spend time online, then the game-style format is a clear winner with an added "fun factor" value.
Utlimately, the project’s grant findings add to the growing body of scholarly research on the use of games in learning. Designing the project specifically to help the news industry craft innovative ways to reach and engage their communities will hopefully inspire others to try similar endeavors.
Playing the News Related News
- The Future of News and Civic Media Conference at MIT (2009-06-20)
Knight Challenge Grant winner Nora Paul demos "Playing the News" - Games for Change (G4C) (2008-06-02)
Journalism, Games and Civic Engagement panel - We Media (2008-02-23)
A convening on citizen reporting and user generated content - Press Coverage of Serious Games Summit talk (2008-02-21)
Neverwinter Nights mod featured at the Serious Games Summit - Director Nora Paul on NPR’s Future Tense (2007-07-09)
Nora discussed plans for a recently received Knight Foundation grant
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