Gamification of the News

Lately, I’ve been turning my ears to Another Castle, a series of interviews with exceptional games thinkers. The interview with Heather Chaplin in particular makes an amazing clarification that resolves one of my questions about the relationship of videogames to journalism. Chaplin’s comments target a common mistake people make when examining James Gee’s suggestions about games in education. She says this (at the 40-minute mark):

I’ve interviewed [James Gee] a bunch of times and one of the things people mistake about his work, because his book is called What Videogames Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, people think he’s advocating the use of videogames as teaching, but really what he’s saying is that videogames and the way that people play with them is a model for learning that the education system could learn from, which is a very different thing from saying we should start pumping videogames into the classroom…It’s more saying look at how people learn while they’re playing videogames. Something’s going on there that we could learn from.

I see the same two approaches showing up with games and journalism:

1. Do we pump games into the paper and turn journalism into games?
2. Or, do we learn from what’s going on with people playing games and apply that to news?

Here’s the thing, I think both are valid approaches and would fit into Dave Cohn’s metaphor that any experiment in journalism right now is a plank in the water that we may use for building the raft.

On the first point, you have things like Persuasive Games‘ news/editorial games, which actually inspired me to start this blog in the first place. However, matching development process and time of games with that of regular news delivery is still a large challenge (this learned partially from personal experience). Experiments with newsgames are still important/worthwhile and they are especially well-covered by the News Games blog out of Georgia Tech’s Knight-funded research project dedicated to studying the relationship between videogames and journalism. While many of the posts evaluate specific games, there are more than a few that point out the gamification of the news.

Gamification of the news is what point two is about. The Unity3d blog had an interesting post about 2010 being the gamification of everything. The basic thought being that everyone’s going to start picking up on what sites like Foursquare and TheSixtyOne have been up to. That is, using quests, goals, rewards, points and social activity to stimulate engagement. 2010 is a good guess with smart mobile devices, geo location and social media all crashing into each other right now. If 2010 really is the gamification of everything, than my cynical side wants to guess that gamification of legacy media will be occurring somewhere mid-2011. We’ll should see some good planks in the water here and there though.