That's a question I've been asking myself a lot, as we prepare to launch our Remembering 7th Street video game project, something we've been working on for nearly three years.

We hope that our re-creation of Oakland's old blues and jazz club scene might inspire local media companies to produce their own virtual world replications of aspects of a community's heritage.

But to create a video game like ours would require several game programmers and a budget few local publications could afford.

There are some alternatives, such as Second Life, in which the creation of a virtual world is relatively easy. But Second Life has limitations I've noted before, such as difficulties creating engaging game play and having to host your virtual world on the Second Life site.

There are a lot of other companies that offer virtual worlds in which which people can create avatars, pick and furnish a virtual living space and interact with others (see, for example, Kaneva ). And for years, many popular video games have allowed "mods," or modifications in which a player can create a new level to a game or a new version of it.

But none of these comes close to allowing a layman to create from scratch a rich virtual environment with complex game play.

Two other Knight News Challenge Grant recipients - the Gotham Gazette and the University of Minnesota - also have projects to produce video games for news sites, and they've commented on this blog about some of the challenges they've faced (see especially this post by Fabio Berzaghi, who makes a point similar to mine).

If anyone knows of other people or companies experimenting in this area, I'd love to hear about them.

- Most newspaper chains reported online revenue growth in single or low double digits this quarter, compared with growth rates of 15-20% or more a year ago.

- The amount of time the average visitor spent at most newspaper web sites declined in February compared with a year ago, according to an Editor & Publisher report on Nielsen Online data. E&P reported similar data for January.

The stagnant economy and the tailspin in the housing market no doubt contributed to the deflated online revenue numbers. And there's the statistical reality that sustaining high percentage growth rates becomes more difficult as the base number gets larger.

But that doesn't account for all the sluggishness in online revenue, and newspapers appear to be losing ground to other web sites that advertisers prefer. And if growth in online revenue is slowing, at best that means stretching out any projections about when online advertising at newspapers will finally make up for the decline in print ads.

The drop in average time spent at newspaper web sites may be the result of success on another front: newspapers are expanding their overall online audience, bringing in new visitors who aren't staying at a newspaper's website as long as regular readers.

But can newspapers effectively sell advertising if many readers just dive bomb in and skim a story? Will advertisers, especially local ones, be interested in such readers, many of whom may be arriving from afar via a search engine or news aggregator?

Which leaves me with several questions:

- Are there national advertising networks that are proving effective in selling ads for only casual readers of newspaper web sites?

- What newspapers are effectively selling ads to local businesses and still showing robust growth in online revenue?

- Or is there some other explanation for the dip in time spent online at newspapers and the tapering off of online revenue growth that yields some light somewhere in this tunnel?

This is a question we're pondering in the wake of some user testing of our Remembering 7th Street video game.

We previously showed a video version of our game world to people who remembered Oakland's 7th Street blues and jazz club scene from the 1940s and 1950s, and were surprised by their generally positive reaction to the virtual re-creation of what they had actually lived.

Several also said they hoped the game would help young people in Oakland learn about the important role 7th Street played in the city's heritage, especially the connections between the old jazz and blues musicians and the music young people enjoy today.

More recently we tested the game on a group of 10 high school students (not from Oakland). Three of the students said the game was interesting or fun, seven said it was somewhat so, and none of them said it was not. Six of the 10 said they would be interested in playing the game on their own time.

The students also had a number of suggestions for improving the game, including wanting more interaction with other players and historical characters.

Most interesting was the enthusiasm they expressed for the idea of playing the game simultaneously with older people who remembered 7th Street and learning about the music scene directly from them. Some said they didn't feel they absorbed a lot about the history of 7th Street from the existing game and thought interacting with older people might improve it.

While we've been trying to design a game that appeals separately to young and old, we hadn't really focused on how shared game play might be the key to a really enjoyable and educational experience.

This opens all kinds of possibilities for using video games to bring people together across generations to better understand their local communities or other events. The older people could bring their direct knowledge of historical events to the game, while the younger people could bring their expertise in navigating game worlds. They could draw on each other during game play to create a new, and possibly more enriching, form of interactive learning.

If anyone knows of successful video games or virtual worlds that have similarly focused on joint play by adults and youngsters to improve learning I'd appreciate hearing about them.

What a turn-around from the not too distant past when such sentiments would have been denounced in many newsrooms as pandering to the public and giving people what they want, not what they need.

This shift in perspective was predictable in the face of hemorrhaging print circulation and broadcast viewership and the recent precipitous decline in ad revenue, at least for newspapers.

But I think it also should inform some of the recent discussion on this blog about the need for a new business model for journalism, and especially the sentiment that nonprofits might be coaxed to help bail us out of the mess we're in.

When I hear suggestions that we should be pitching nonprofits and foundations on the need to preserve journalism because of its vital role in democracy, I cringe because I fear that may only perpetuate the problem by allowing us to slip back into the old ways that haven't worked.

What the journalists surveyed implicitly were saying is that the key to preserving journalism is not charity or even a new business model, but a new and better product on which a new business could be built.

Howard Owens in a recent post on his weblog got to the heart of the issue in his provocatively titled: "Maybe it's journalism itself that is the problem."

Howard documented the overall decline of the audience for traditional news media even before the advent of the web and wondered if it was something about how we practice journalism that was the cause. News organizations' past control of the information pipeline only disguised the fact that the product we thought was serving the public interest actually had relatively little appeal to people.

Interestingly, if you read what people say in public opinion surveys about the kind of journalism they value, they often point to watch-dog reporting and bemoan the lack of in-depth coverage on issues they care about.

It's not the ideal of great journalism that people reject, but something about the way we produce and package it that's broken. That's something on which the public and now perhaps most journalists both seem to agree.

What could a new journalism product look like that might appeal to people and be true to the ideals of informing the public about important issues and nurturing democracy?

It would be a product focused on connecting, something others on this blog have mentioned.

Empty the newsrooms for a week or a month, and have reporters and editors - and even ad sales people - connect with people in the community and talk with them about their lives and what they say they want and need.

Then use all the tools of digital technology to connect people with the information that best meets those needs, whether it's a database or a map mashup, a guide to local businesses or a space for sharing content.

Then nurture online communities and social networks to connect people to each other and to us, and uncover new connections.

And finally connect those topics and conversations with the larger public policy issues that underlie all of that, but often in subtle ways.

So great journalism wouldn't be served up as a sermon. Instead investigative articles and in-depth contextual stories would be the end product of a new, bottom-up relationship with the public.

And that might be a product on which a new business model can be built, by selling it to advertisers who want to go where audiences go or selling it to readers who value what we are offering them. And it might be something nonprofits could support, not to preserve the past but to serve democracy and the public interest with a product in which the public is interested.

It's an interactive map and database on plane delays at McCarran Airport. You can check a particular flight, look at patterns in delays to other airports and find out how long it takes to go through security checkpoints at different gates at different times of the day.

And there's a video of interviews with people at the airport, along with time-lapse videos showing planes arriving at the airport and the bustle in the baggage claim area.

And oh by the way, the page also links to an in-depth story the newspaper did analyzing the problem with flight delays and what was causing it.

Which is why I think this may show the future of investigative reporting - featuring a map or database that people can play with to get very personalized information: What delays am I facing at security checkpoints at my gate? What's the likelihood my flight is going to be delayed? How big a problem is the airport I'm planning to fly to?

And then using people's engagement with the information to draw them to the stories that provide the background and context for understanding the data they've just explored.

This idea is of particular interest to me, because it fits in with a project I'm currently doing on video games, in which we're trying to use game play to help inform a community about its history and heritage.

Interactive, customizable databases accomplish much the same thing, allowing people to "play" with the data. On the Las Vegas site I found myself clicking on the links on the map and sifting through the flights database just out of curiosity and for fun, even though I rarely fly to that airport.

And as a former investigative reporter, I'm especially concerned with how digital technology can be used to do better investigative stories. Making use of the data that lies behind most investigative projects is one way to give people a personal stake in the information contained in those stories.

Much of the attention of news organizations right now is on using the Internet for breaking news and 24/7 coverage at continuous news desks and doing quick podcasts and blog posts. But what journalists really have to offer are the skills, time and resources needed to do in-depth reporting.

Taking long investigative projects written for newspapers or magazines or as TV/radio documentaries and then shoveling them online, perhaps dressed up with a little multimedia, is only jamming old media forms into a new media pipe. But understanding how to present data in an appealing way, and making that data accessible so people can mess around with it and create their own "stories," is taking advantage of what digital has to offer.

Several of the other Knight Challenge Grant winners are already doing great work in this area. Rich Gordon's initiative at Northwestern to get computer programmers to come to journalism schools will help create the tools needed to build audiences for quality journalism. Rich also has written about the importance of databases in his article on Data as journalism, journalism as data .

Adrian Holovaty has launched the EveryBlock site that aggregates local data from a variety of databases. Imagine the stories that could grow out of this data if the public and journalists worked together on analyzing it.

Adrian has spoken before about the need to get reporters to focus on the raw data they gather for a story, and how that might be put online. I'd only go a step further and try to get reporters to think about how online databases might be the gateway into their stories, rather than the other way around.

The folks at the Gotham Gazette have been exploring how news organizations can make use of online games to cover complex stories and how to present data in a visually more effective way.

And Ingeborg Endter and Chris Csikszentmihályi at MIT's Center for Future Civic Media suggested some good resources for thinking about how to better present data online:

- IBM's Many Eyes project

- Ben Fry's book on Visualizing Data and some of his projects when he was at the MIT Media Lab.

I've also started collecting links on the delicious social bookmarking site to some online databases and map mashups.

If anyone has more ideas on this, or suggestions about other resources, I'd love to hear them.

Why is a journalism school doing a video game? How does video game storytelling square with the craft of journalism or the mission of news organizations? Aren't video games about entertainment, not news?

The pat answer to such questions is that kids are increasingly using game platforms to consume information, and news organizations need to embrace games if they're going to reach young people.

For me personally, a video game also was a way to tell a more engaging story about the history of Oakland's 7th Street jazz and blues club scene, something I'd written about as a reporter at the Oakland Tribune.

I had been frustrated by the limitations of a print story to really give people a sense of what 7th Street was like. Creating a virtual world replica of 7th Street offered the opportunity for people to actually experience the music scene in a way that no other media form could approach.

Since we've been working on the project, I've also come to believe that video games can help news organizations and journalists break down some of the barriers we've erected between ourselves and the communities we serve.

Every community in America has a 7th Street - some aspect of its heritage or history that has been lost and could be brought back to life in a video game. Since we started the 7th Street project, we've learned about similar jazz and blues club scenes in cities all across the country - from Detroit and Houston to Newark and the Bronx.

A newspaper or other local news organization needs to be more than just a pipeline for informing people about current news and events. It also should provide context for people to understand their community and its history.

A video game can do that, by letting people re-live the history of their communities and understand not just what's happening today but what came before.

In the case of Oakland's 7th Street, there are a number of revitalization projects now being proposed for the area. Understanding how that community once thrived, and especially how a succession of ill-fated development projects led to its demise, could help inform decisions about issues now in the news.

For individual journalists, video game storytelling also challenges our traditional notions about being detached, third-person, objective observers who produce stories for passive consumption by readers and viewers.

A video game reverses that relationship - the story must be written from the perspective of the player, and the story unfolds according to what the player decides to do. A game in which you try to impose on the player a rigid linear narrative is doomed to failure.

This doesn't mean the journalist's role as storyteller goes away - you're still constructing the game world and shaping the play that exists within it.

But you have to tailor that to the player's experience and what might interest or engage them. You have to see the story through their eyes, something from which journalists could surely benefit.

This is something we've discussed adding to our Remembering 7th Street video game project, possibly using GPS devices, such as GPS-enabled cellphones.

Our game currently exists entirely inside a virtual world - a re-creation of the jazz and blues club scene on Oakland's 7th Street in the 1940s and 1950s. Game play is confined to that virtual world, with the player exploring the jazz and blues clubs and engaging in game-play quests to learn about the history of 7th Street and its music.

Adding a GPS-component would allow people to play a version of the game in the real world or even move back and forth between the virtual and the real as part of game play. Some of the GPS-related ideas we've kicked around include:

- Sending text messages to players with GPS-enabled cellphones as they pass by the sites of old jazz or blues clubs on 7th Street that appear in the video game. The messages could lead people to other locations on the street as part of a game, or they could direct the player to a web site that has more information on the locations and serves as a gateway to the video game world.

- Including riddles in the video game that require real-world exploration of 7th Street to find the answers. A system similar to the Geocaching game could be used, in which players go on treasure hunts using a GPS device to help find the location of hidden objects. We could direct players to GPS coordinates on 7th Street to uncover hidden clues needed to solve puzzles in the video game.

We've also discussed just using mash-ups of mapping software like Yahoo! Maps, Google Maps or Google Earth to create a virtual tour of 7th Street, with markers for the jazz and blues clubs and other establishments that once existed there.

Something similar to this was done by two other Knight challenge grant recipients, Leslie Rule and Paul Lamb, who did a Mississippi Blues Trail Tour in Google Earth.

At a Knight Foundation sponsored seminar on games at MIT last month, Eric Klopfer of MIT's Teacher Education Program discussed augmented reality games that use GPS-enabled devices to provide information about real world locations and how those might be integrated with virtual world video games.

Hewlett-Packard is experimenting with something like this with its Mediascapes initiative.

Advances in GPS devices and cellphones are opening all kinds of opportunities for delivering location-based information. Couple that with the sophisticated virtual environments being created in many video games, and you can create a game experience that moves seamlessly from the virtual to the real, providing an even more compelling and enriching experience for the player.

One of the games MIT produced is Revolution, a video game recreation of historic events in colonial Williamsburg. You can read more about it on the blog of Henry Jenkins, director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program.

There were a number of parallels with our game:

- While the Revolution game is designed to be educational, the designers believe "much of the learning takes place outside the box as the experience of gaming gets reflected upon by teachers and learners in the context of their everyday lives," to quote from the blog posting.

We similarly decided to limit the amount of historical information presented in text form in our game because it bogged down game play. Instead we hope young people will be intrigued by their exploration of the 7th Street virtual world and seek out more information about the area on a companion website or from other sources online or in the community.

- The MIT game allowed two levels of play - players who actively tried to shape events or those who wanted to simply observe.

In our game we also built two levels of participation. A player could just explore 7th Street and learn about its clubs and musicians through simple encounters with non-player characters and objects. Or a player could engage in active game play, pursuing multi-step quests with the ultimate goal of performing a piece of music at one of the 7th Street jazz and blues clubs.

One reason we're allowing these two levels of participation is to accommodate older people, who might want to just explore and "re-live" what they remember of 7th Street, while also trying to appeal to younger people who enjoy active game play.

- The MIT game developers faced challenges preserving historical accuracy. For example, men in colonial Williamsburg would remove their hats on entering a building, but the game engine MIT used (a modification of the Neverwinter Nights role-playing game) only allowed modeling of player characters with hats or without hats, not with hats that could be removed. The MIT team settled on using male players that always wore hats.

We confronted similar dilemmas trying to make our game as true to life as possible. The game world we modeled (we modified the Torque game engine) was only about a 5-block stretch of 7th Street, but some of the establishments we wanted to include were at addresses outside that area. So we had to fudge the exact location to still include them in the game world.

We also had to disable the ability of players to leap (something Torque builds into its avatars), because seeing people jumping around on the street seemed to trivialize the experience.

We couldn't find photographs of some segments of 7th Street, so Architecture School students working on the project had to model generic buildings for parts of several blocks. The insides of the clubs also proved problematic, because we didn't have photos of every room or the clubs would remodel over time and the photos we had showed several different interiors. So we sometimes wound up with a composite of the layout of a club, and with some details filled in based on our best guess about what a room looked like.

- The Revolution project had to deal with the issue of violence: "Leaving violence out of a revolutionary setting would not convey the proper historical content. On the other hand, we'd have a disaster if we let students fight whomever they wanted at any time," as the blog posting on the project described it. The MIT game developers decided to allow students to be violent in the game, but with consequences, such as being arrested and detained briefly.

On 7th Street, violence also was a fact of life, with frequent knifings and shootings. One of 7th Street's most famous composers and record producers, Bob Geddins, bemoaned "cuttin' and shootin'" and other violence in his song Tin Pan Alley.

But we didn't want to make violence a central part of the game. Oakland has enough problems coping with its high homicide rate, without our adding a violent video game about the city.

So we decided to mention the violence in the game, but without making it part of game play.

One thing is certain in all this: there aren't easy answers to any of these questions. I'm looking forward to having more discussions with the MIT people about how we've dealt with very similar problems in our respective games. MIT is also a recipient of a Knight challenge grant for its Center for Future Civic Media, and one of the things they'll be exploring is how to make games for specific geographic communities.

Here's a note from Becca MacLaren, one of the journalism students working on the game, about our discussions:

One puzzle we're trying to solve in our Remembering 7th Street video game project is how to reach as broad an audience as possible - from people who lived in the neighborhood in the 1940s and '50s to teenagers who know very little about West Oakland's rich cultural history. Game play and the virtual world we're creating need to appeal as much to the 85-year-old (who has perhaps never played a video game) as the 15-year-old (who grew up in an online world).

We also hope to make the game as historically accurate as possible, which raises additional questions for video game storytelling. As student journalists, we're using our reporting skills to gather information, including archival research and interviews, to gain as complete and accurate a picture of 7th Street as possible. But as video game scriptwriters, we're in new territory, trying to write compelling narratives that combine a real-life character's biography with fictional scenarios that advance the game's story line.

For example, the first time a player encounters a main character in the game, such as a famous musician, they need to learn about the musician's background. But game play is based on quests or objectives in which the player must gradually uncover facts about the musician's life to move forward in game play.

So which parts of a character's background do we present to the player up front? And how much information is too much, especially since the information is being presented in text form? Conventional wisdom among game developers is that only very short blocks of text and lots of interaction are the keys to engaging players. But ours is an educational game - one that we hope will offer entertainment and learning. And will older people who remember 7th Street be more interested in the textual information, while younger people are more interested in game play?

To meet these conflicting goals, we've decided to only present a quick portrait of a musician when first encountered by the player, with cryptic allusions to other aspects of the musician's life that we hope will draw players into the game world and entice them to the tasks they need to perform to play the game. Other biographical facts about a character will emerge during game play. And for those who wish to dig deeper into a musician's biography, we'll include links to a companion website that has background information presented as a more familiar journalistic narrative.

Whether this approach works is something we only can answer by testing the game on actual players. We're hoping within the next month to have developed a prototype of at least a portion of the game world and game play that we can show to teenagers at a West Oakland high school. After that we'll do similar tests with people who remember 7th Street (we've already shown a video of the game world to some old timers, and the initial reaction was encouraging). Then we'll know if we're on track to creating a vivid game world that is both fun and educational, and that resonates equally with people who lived and worked on 7th Street as with young people gaining an entirely new perspective on their community.

A couple of the speakers on the Using Serious Games to Engage Readers panel cautioned against including long textual entries in games because they tend to turn off game players.

"You can't provide reams of text, because they won't read it," said Duane Dunfield of
Red Hot Learning, a video game company based in Canada that worked with the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communications on a game about political redistricting. The point is particularly important for educational games that need to be informative without being boring.

In the journalism class that's helping develop the 7th Street video game we had just debated this very topic a few days before - how much written text we should present in the game, especially biographical information when introducing a historical character for the first time.

After I told my students what had been said at the ONA conference, we decided to re-structure how we presented characters in the game and pare back the text used to describe them.

One of the students is writing a note for this blog about our discussion and what we finally decided to do. I'll post that here soon.

When we started our project about two years ago, we took a long look at Second Life and discussed hosting our project there with some of their executives. Second Life offered a number of advantages, such as a relatively easy tool set for building things and an existing community of users, many of whom might be interested in helping with or joining our effort.

But Second Life also had some limitations for our particular project:

-- While the avatars players create in Second Life are very sophisticated, the tools for creating buildings aren't that advanced. The Architecture students who model the buildings for our project use the 3D Studio Max computer assisted design program, and those models couldn't be imported into Second Life.

-- Automated 3D characters (non-player characters in video game jargon) can't be created in Second Life, and we wanted to populate our game world with re-creations of many of the characters of 7th Street, especially some of the famous jazz and blues musicians.

-- Young people are not allowed into the same version of Second Life as adults, and we wanted young and old players to have the opportunity to explore the 7th Street virtual world and play the game together.

-- Hosting on Second Life could get expensive, because we'd have to buy an "island" in the game world and server space.

-- Finally, when we were considering Second Life in the summer of 2005, it had only been public for about two years, and we were concerned about having our game locked up in what amounted to a start-up at the time. If the company failed, our game could vanish with it.

None of this is a knock on Second Life. It's obviously now very popular and its feature set keeps improving. We just had particular needs that weren't a good fit. So we instead went with the Torque game engine, which the Architecture students can customize to add the features we want. When we go public with the game, planned for Summer 2008, we'll host it on a server here at UC Berkeley.

But others who want to re-create historic communities like Oakland's 7th Street as virtual worlds may find Second Life a good choice. We're still discussing the possibility of doing another version of our game in Second Life. And the lessons we're learning about video game storytelling, both technical and conceptual, can be applied to many different virtual world platforms.

Would it look like what they remembered? Or would it seem an alien world to them? Worse, would the game just trivialize a precious memory?

On Oct. 8 we got a chance to test this when my journalism students and I went to the West Oakland Senior Center to interview people about their memories of 7th Street and show them a video of the virtual world we've been creating.

When we played the video for the first of the seniors, I cringed over how he might react.

To my surprise, he seemed to immediately connect with the game world.
We had modeled a generic pawn shop on 7th Street, and he pointed at it and said, "Moon's, that was it," referring to one of the biggest pawn shops that had existed on the street.

Another old-timer was viewing our re-creation of Slim Jenkins' Place, the area's premiere jazz and blues club, when he suddenly got animated when he saw the bar we had modeled from old photos.

"That's where Joe Lewis would sit, and people would line up to see him," he said, jabbing his finger at the stool at the end of the bar.

The buildings the Architecture students working on the project had modeled seemed to resonate with the seniors and even triggered some old memories.

So we had passed an initial test - the game world was engaging enough that these players were willing to overlook the unreality of some aspects of it. This is what video game developers, borrowing a concept from Coleridge, refer to as willing suspension of disbelief.

But this little test only involved a handful of seniors, and we're planning more extensive viewings of the game with many more older people in the future. So we'll see how they react.

And a different test looms with another group that's part of our target audience for the game - young kids from Oakland who we hope will learn about the history of 7th Street through the game. There the main challenge will be not the realism of the game world, but whether the game play is engaging and fun for them.

Note: the photograph above of the bar at Slim Jenkins Place is courtesy of the African American Museum & Library at Oakland. The museum has provided us with access to their photographic collections, including one on Slim Jenkins Place. For people in the Oakland area, you check the the schedule on the museum's Web site for visiting the library and museum and viewing their exhibits and collections.

That's the question we're trying to answer with our "Remembering 7th Street" project that uses a video game to tell the story of Oakland, California's old jazz and blues club scene.

During the 1940s and 1950s, Oakland's 7th Street was a vibrant community and a mecca for jazz and blues musicians from all over the country. But in the late 1950s and 1960s the area fell victim to a series of ill-fated redevelopment schemes, and barely a trace of the jazz and blues clubs remains today.

We're trying to bring 7th Street back to life as a virtual world and video game.

The project is a joint effort by the UC Berkeley Architecture Department and Graduate School of Journalism. Architecture students are modeling the virtual world and programming the game play. Journalism students are researching the jazz and blues scene and writing the video game narrative that tells the story of 7th Street. You can read more about the project and view a video of the game world at the project home page.

We've been working on the project for nearly 2 years now, and we've faced many challenges, some expected, some not. There have been technical obstacles, problems getting photographs and other information needed to do a realistic representation of 7th Street as a virtual world, and many permutations of the game narrative.

I'll use this space to describe the issues that have come up and how we're addressing them. Our hope is that what we're learning will ease the way for others, especially news organizations, that want to use video game technology and virtual worlds to help local communities reconnect with important aspects of their cultural heritage and history.