J-games: What do players think?

Anne Derryberry, 2010-2011 Fellow

For some months, and particularly since a cadre of interested folk convened (alas, without me) a couple of weeks ago at the University of Minnesota’s Journalism Center, there has been an on-going discussion about newsgames and the “gamification” of news, mostly on the Mediashift Idea Lab blog. For the  most part, this discussion has been in support of the idea of newsgames, with the occasional input from naysayers and skeptics like Paul Carr at TechCrunch. The conversation has been interesting, but limited. Interesting, because participants have offered their personal views of 1) the value of games as a news storytelling format bolstered by data about the growing popularity of games as an entertainment medium and 2) the potential of games to attract and engage people, as evidenced by the current frenzy around gamification (the overlay of game-ish interactivity on top of an otherwise non-game-based web property) among online marketing types. Limited, for exactly the same reason. What’s missing is any examination of the journalism experience, either from the perspective of the player or of the writer.

As a Fellow at Reynolds Journalism Institute, I have been iterating a prototype of a game-based news outlet, called noozYou. The site offers:

• current events reporting (we just published our 13^th story/game)
• a weekly news quiz
• a compendium of previously produced, third-party J-games*
• two blogs (“Fair Game” offers critiques and reviews of specific games within the genre, “White Space” is a discussion of the issues and challenges in designing and producing noozYou)
• user discussion

We are using WordPress to develop the noozYou platform, ImpactGames’ “Play the News” as the authoring tool for our story/games, Big Door provides the gamification layer, Disqus is our commenting tool, Facebook Connect gives us a unified login (well, it’s supposed to, anyway), mTouch Quiz is our quiz builder, and Twitter. Newsy is our primary media partner.

So What Do Players Think?

While far from completion (at the end of this week, we’ll be at version 0.4), noozYou is sufficiently far along to commence user/usability testing, although we’re still at the “friends and family” stage. Because RJI is attached to the J-school at University of Missouri, demos and testing have been with journalism students, faculty and staff. Since the site has been open to whoever stumbles across it, we have gotten responses and feedback from some far-flung places, but non-journalist input has so far come very haphazardly.

Feedback has been generally, though not universally, positive. This week, we held a discussion with about a dozen people from the school – mostly undergraduate students, with a smattering of faculty/staff. The focus of our conversation was the 13 story/games.

“Play the News” provides a single story/game format built around four screens, with a prescribed character limit for each element on each screen:

1)   Headline and teaser video/image
2)   Basic story, consisting of text (1081 characters) and video
3)   Story background – includes a full-screen image to illustrate the overall background over which are super-imposed multiple links; the links launch pop-windows that provide text (526 characters) to describe the image element they’re attached to together with a secondary thumbnail image; and, a ribbon of roll-over images that activate additional pop-ups for presenting other factors that come into consideration in the story
4)   Decisions – the main protagonists in the story and the decisions those protagonists are faced with at this point in the story’s progress; key advisors to each protagonist provide the various points of view that the protagonist should take into account; player selects both what “should happen” and what “will happen”.

Generally, players liked the non-linear format; they appreciated the ability to pick and choose (or not) the order in which they accessed various content elements, and liked being able to jump back and forth at will. In the words of one participant, “I liked feeling in control of the story.” They also appreciated the variety of media (i.e., text, images, graphics, and video) used in each story/game.

Participants felt the amount, type and depth of content that each story/game includes enabled them to gain a good understanding of the complexities of a story and the varying perspectives. In some ways, they felt they could “identify” with protagonists and their situations, a possibility that usually isn’t present in standard linear journalistic formats.

Most surprising to me was how players viewed the act of making predictions about what protagonists would do next. To a person, players noted that the questions made them focus on the details of the story so that they came away with a better understanding of what was at issue. They felt that the story/games provoked critical thinking, learning, and would help them remember the story better moving forward. In fact, the consensus recommendation was that more questions be included in future story/games.

Will they come back to noozYou? A qualified “yes,” with the qualification being that there needs to be lots more content produced on a regular basis. Other recommendations included adding a variety of game formats and developing team-based games.

Strikingly, the biggest impediments to uptake, from the discussants’ point of view, are games and gamification. They feel calling these packages “games” is to give them a “bad label.” And while they liked the challenges and look forward to learning whether they had predicted accurately, the points they might accrue seemed beside the point, if not meaningless. This was true in spades for the gamification layer, which they found gimmicky and pointless – certainly not a reason to return.