Playing the News

The Playing the News project is testing the idea that presenting the facets of complex news issues through the use of game environments or interactions would engage and inform the news audience.

We are developing two different game approaches.

One (already developed) is essentially an interactive info-graphic - the "player" moves through a graphic environment and interacts with characters who present different perspectives about the issue (we are using Ethanol as the issue for these game prototypes.)

The other (in development) is more of a "board-game" interaction wherein the player gets question cards, must move to the area (upon roll of the dice) of the game board that would have answers to that question (representing the different perspective areas), and then select the correct answer card.

In order to see how these game interactions impact users' understanding of and engagement with the topic we will test the two game versions against traditional displays of the information. Research participants will be asked to look at one of four versions of the information: the game, a news story on a web page, a web page with a current ethanol story and links to "related stories", and a subject focused page with infographics and links. We want to see where the versions of information display impact information acquistion, engagement and enjoyment, and other measures.

A further goal of the project is to create the game versions with a easy to use front-end which would allow a newsroom to "unplug" the content about one issue and plug in information about another issue. If we find that these information supplements to ongoing news reporting on a topic engage and inform citizens, we hope these game templates could be easily and widely adapted by newsrooms.