What do Gannett newspapers and Hasbro have in common? If you’re not sure, check out Picture the Impossible, a joint venture by the Gannett-owned Rochester Democrat and Chronicle and the Lab for Social Computing at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
Picture the Impossible is an alternate-reality game developed to attract young readers to the newspaper. It’s one of several ventures into “news gaming” that have popped up in the last few years. Those experimenting with the technologies say they can be used to explain complex issues in ways that are more engaging than a traditional news story.
“A hundred years ago, putting news in a newspaper caused people to take action in certain ways,” managing editor Traci Bauer, told Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab. “That doesn’t seem to motivate people under 40. The people who write letters to the editor to newspapers aren’t people under 40, they’re people in their 60s. That’s no longer the way to get people to use information and act accordingly.”
The games can take significant time to develop, though, and require special skill sets not available at many news organizations.
The Rochester game is especially unique in the news game realm because it also incorporates a social element. Users of the game are competing against other people in the community and interacting with them, which takes the game to a different level of complexity from an administrative and development standpoint.
As the Nieman Lab explains, the game’s storyline is derived from the town’s history. Gamers are split into teams that will compete for local charities. There are scavenger hunts, online games and even elements that incorporate the newspaper’s printed product.
Some have also experimented with smaller scale games, without the community element of Picture the Impossible. The Institute for New Media Studies at the University of Minnesota developed a gaming project with funding from the Knight Foundation called “Playing the News.”
In Playing the News, users are placed into a virtual city and tasked with interviewing key stakeholders in the debate on ethanol fuel, the results of which appear in a virtual notebook. The professors at Minnesota also built a virtual board game on the issue. Ultimately, the researches who created the games found them to be unappealing to users, likely because they dealt with serious issues, but recommended news games for feature-type news content. The Knight Foundation continues to fund experimentation in this area.
Other examples include Switch, which challenges users to balance energy distribution New York City’s electric grid, and Balance, where users must balance a city’s budget successfully using figures from the actual budget.
Most of these games are produced through grant projects or as one-time experiments. Issues still remain about how the projects can be sustained. In-game advertising is a possibility as is a sponsorship model. The games also provide increased engagement levels, which addresses a long-held belief by many that low engagement is one of the most daunting problems facing news organizations online.
On the advertising side, popular game makers have already experimented with in-game advertising. See these stats here from in-game ad agency Engage, and check out Google’s efforts at selling ads in popular online games.
Games are also being used as advertisements in other cases. Game-maker Hasbro’s interactive division currently has a live example of this. The company launched a massive, worldwide online version of Monopoly to promote its newest version of the board game and was swamped with demand within hours of launching the game. Chevron also has experimented with games, launching Energyville to teach users about clean energy.
Afterthoughts: To see some academic research in progress on games and news, check out this blog by Georgia Tech researchers.
The issue raises several questions. If the technological barriers to entry are decreased, will this become a viable storytelling method someday? How can these games be monetized for news organizations? A great deal of in-game advertising is subtle and doesn’t allow for the typical wall between editorial content and advertising that is a stable of mainstream news. And, will advertisers grow to appreciate the value of hyper-engaged active users enough to make advertising in games a valid monetization method? Finally, what are the possibilities for mobile games, where software sales are rapidly increasing?
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