News Games in Digital Journalism?

The next speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Carlos Ballesteros, whose focus is on news games as a vehicle for digital journalism. Such news games have been around for some time, but they exist in many different forms, and there’s still a lack of conceptual clarity with respect to this term. The general hope is that such games might increase the amount of time people spend with the news media.

But how are such games used to convey journalistic messages? Carlos examined some 84 news games from 48 mass media outlets in 17 countries, classifying these across a number of categories: interpretive, informative, and opinionative news games. An example of the interpretive category is a BuzzFeed News game that simulates the travelling experience of a wheelchair user in the UK; another is the Financial Times’ Uber Game, simulating the financial situation of a Uber driver (and producing an impressive average engagement time of 40 minutes); a further is ProPublica’s Waiting Game, simulating the decision-making processes of an asylum seeker and by design leading inevitably to the player giving up.

Informative news games provide more objective experiences: examples of this are the the ABC’s Catchment Detox game, to learn about cleaning environments; or the New York Times’ Rock Paper Scissors game, which explains how AI systems make their decisions.

Finally, opinionative news games are exemplified by The Guardian’s Line Climate Change Denier, which demonstrates the rhetoric strategies of such activists. Overall, such a taxonomy might help us understand what roles such games might be able to play.