I'm going to be speaking on a panel on Games and Journalism at the Games for Change conference in New York on June 5th. In coordinating the panel, the moderator asked us to send in a little bit about what our angle would be. Here's what I wrote up...

"I've been doing some eyetracking and usability research on different games that have been created for news organizations. One is Budget Hero by American Public Media / MPR. (It hasn't launched yet.) Others are ones on the Discovery Channel, made by a former news graphics guy who is now a professor of multimedia at UNC.

These efforts by news organizations demonstrate the real challenge for news on two fronts - game play and news / information content:

-- If you make the game too simple, gamers are bored or distainful and won't play (or they say, "This would be fine for little kids" -- and little kids aren't a real target audience for most news sites.)
-- If you make the game too complex, non-gamers don't get it and won't play (and the real gamers still won't think it is complex enough...there's lots of "I don't really play online games / Flash games.)
-- If you make the content too "fun", it makes serious topics (like federal spending) seem trivalized and people really interested in the topic get huffy (one long-time MPR listener played the Budget Hero game and said "The responses to my budgets choices were insulting.")
-- If you make the content too serious, it won't appeal to those mostly likely to be drawn to a "game" approach to the news. There was a lot of "Well, the game is ok, I just won't want to spend any time with this topic / I don't know anything about this topic." (Which is, of course, precisely, and admirably, what MPR's trying to overcome.)

Throw in the challenge of "objective" information presentation and you really make news gaming tough.

The eyetracking / usability research we have been doing scares me as a news issues game grantee / developer, but has also opened up my eyes to potential ways around some of these issues. We are exploring several of these options.

My other angle will be the need for assessment of the effectiveness of these approaches to creating an informed and engaged citizenry and the need, if they are found to be effective ways to inform, to make their creation easy enough for a newsroom to unplug one set of content and plug in new information about a new issue that people should understand deeply."

We have our work cut out for us...and we thank those who are boldly going forward with exploration in this area of media content development. It is a real challenge -- thus the name of the grant program. ;>)

Nora Paul

We had some experience with creating a game, a mod of Neverwinter Nights that we used for the Information for Mass Communication course at the University of Minnesota. In the game, we created a town populated with 24 different "stakeholders" or potential information sources that the player / reporter had to choose amongst in order to complete their reporting assignment. We created a fictional situation, populated the city with fictional characters (but did embed real documents and information into the game, as well.) It has been a successful technique for getting students to be sensitive to the stages involved in seeking information, practice good interviewing etiquette, etc.

But now, thinking about using this type of environment to create a scenario based on real situations, involving real stakeholders, and absent the motivation ("gotta play the game to get the grade" is a powerful motivator for undergrads) how could we create something with enough of the elements of game play to make it be, in fact, a game but that does not trivialize or homogenize the important issues being presented.

We struggle with what would be the motivation for playing. Games have a goal, and a reward system that clearly lets the player know they have won (or not.) Is just "getting smarter about an issue" motivation enough to play? What could the challenge be?

We struggle with the issue of representing "reality" in a virtual space. Do the confines of journalistic practice and ethics make it harder to graphically represent someone who really exists? Do we need to make generic anyone specific? How do we represent a space that actually exists within a fictional space?
How true to reality do we have to be?

What is the level of complexity that we can expect a news issues game player to tolerate? Make it too simple and it will be distained by seasoned players (who, frankly, are the audience most needed by the news industry). Make it too complex or impenetrable for the non-game player and you'll miss out on the goal of getting citizens involved in community issues.

One of the greatest benefits of being part of the Knight News Challenge community is the access we have to people who are really tuned in to innovations online. As we sort through our planning and development of this game project (and as other issues come up) it is going to be so great to have this forum for comment, advice, and, probably, some well-deserved "what were you smoking when you thought of that?" feedback!

I have to admit I haven't been a blogger for any number of practical, philosophical, and probably psychological reasons - but I'm glad that this is a part of the Knight News Challenge challenge...to blog the progress and process of our project. Thanks to all who set this up. I look forward to being part of the conversation.