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Thursday, November 10
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JOS05
Playful Journalism: At the Intersection of News and Games
R. Ferrer Conill
1
, M. Siitonen
2
1
Karlstad University, Sweden
2
University of Jyväskylä, Finland
For over a century games and playful elements in the shape of crosswords, puzzles and quizzes, have been present in newspapers all over the world (Foxman
2015). The transition towards digital journalism has only increased the growing trend of combining news and games storytelling techniques to inform
the public, sometimes blurring the traditional boundaries between news and games. The importance of trying to understand this development stems from
the different roles that digital games and news have in contemporary Western societies. While journalism is often regarded as the main source of informa‑
tion for the public to act as citizens (Costera Meijer 2001), digital games predominantly remain considered as entertaining media (Vorderer et al. 2004). But
are they?The multifaceted nature of journalism and the many types of games provide a room for interaction in which both worlds can coexist in meaningful
ways. And yet, the process in which games and playful thinking have been incorporated to digital journalism taking advantage of new technological ad‑
vances remains largely under researched. Newsgames are digital games put to use in the context of journalism, embraced by producers in order to engage
the audience playfully in news events. As such they present possibilities and limitations as they emerge as a prominent platform for journalism. Games have
become pervasive. Much of what is now communicated at a societal level has been subverted by the mechanics of game-play (gamification). Yet the idea
that the future of news will be played, rather than read or watched is hard for many to accept. This panel focuses on the use of games and playful thinking
as an overarching theme for journalism practice, ranging from production, consumption, and interpretation. First, paper (A) sheds light on the tensions that
emerge in the experiential immersion of a playable virtual documentary. The way in which play and virtual reality intervene in journalistic content demon‑
strates journalism’s struggle to reinvent itself and adapt to playable environments. The second paper (B) reflects upon the processes by which ludic content
and playful thinking seep into existing journalistic practices. The third paper (C) empirically analyses the effects of gamifying a news story by conducting
an experiment that measures the response of readers towards an Al Jazeera news article that uses gamification as a storytelling technique. Fourth, paper (D)
analyses how a major political scandal in Spain influenced the patterns of creation, distribution, and reception of 23 newsgames. Finally, the fifth paper (E)
exemplifies the tensions between the general understanding of news and games and how readers negotiate those tensions depending on which frame they
use to approach newsgames. Literature Costera Meijer, I. (2001). The public quality of popular journalism: Developing a normative framework. Journalism
Studies 2(2), 189–205. Foxman, M. (2015). Play the news: Fun and games in digital journalism. Tow Center for Digital Journalism. Columbia Journalism
School. Vorderer, P., Klimmt, C., & Ritterfeld, U. (2004). Enjoyment: At the heart of media entertainment. Communication theory, 14(4), 388–408.
PN 045
Journalism ‘Feelies’ – Play and Simulacrum Through Experiential Immersion
J. Jones
1
1
London South Bank University, London, United Kingdom
This paper will consider how a new technologically enhanced virtual reality‘simulacra’has the potential to reinvent our relationship to the mediated factual
through play. Since Nonny De La Pena’s pioneering work in ‘immersive journalism’
(www.immersivejournalism.com), technological advancements coupled
with the increase in uptake of home‘virtual reality’devices, enable factual audiences to gain first-hand experiences of the story through a ludic, experiential
encounter. News games and experiential journalism are both increasingly attractive to UK broadcast commissioners. My current consultancy work with
the BBC and independent documentary production companies is witness to a trend where ‘deep’ television commissioning of factual series now takes VR
seriously. It is seen as a way to engage audiences, especially the younger ‘lost’generation, not acculturated to the legacy forms of delivery, more fluent and
attenuated to gamic environments with multiple screen deliveries. AHRC funding has allowed me to create a playable documentary that transports the user
to 1880s East London to the scene of Jack the Ripper’s horrific murders. (A VR version is now being developed). It uses traditional documentary conventions
creating templates for merging archive, talking head etc. within a closed dynamic rule based system. It aims to create a playful simulation that produces
real knowledge about real things. Through experiential immersion it asks participants to play a part in an imaginative construct as a way of generating
knowledge. The user can learn about Victorian society, its political intrigues, contexts surrounding immigrant stereotyping, the victimisation of women
and the poor, and even the state of Victorian forensics. Players have a choice to manage their own exposure to the more horrific, real photographic images.
As producers we seek to disturb but not to exploit. Constructed environments depicting reality are nothing new, but now the ludic is accentuated as users
game their own authentic engagement with the subject, invested in their own agency. Friedman anticipated how computer simulations would increasingly
‘bring the tools of narrative to mapmaking, allowing the individual not simply to observe structures, but to become experientially immersed in their logic’
(Friedman 2002, 14), Understandably, journalism’s struggle to reinvent itself and adapt to these playable environments is proving an uneasy transition. Yet,
documentary has often been caught in this epistemological battlefield between the impulse to record and the impulse to simulate social reality. These ten‑
sions have underpinned our historical encounters with the mediation of factual content, from Grierson to Direct Cinema, from Cinéma Vérité, to Docu-Soap
and finally Reality TV. As the Big Brother game show became an international sensation in 2000, commentators noted that, ‘empirical observation appears
now to be of only limited utility – it needs to be augmented by simulation in order to have anything very useful to say about our shared world.’(Dovey 2004,
243). Literature Friedman, J. (2002) (ed.) Reality Squared: Television Discourse on the Real. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Dovey, J. (2004). It’s
Only a Game Show. In E. Mathijs & J. Jones (Eds.) Big Brother International: Formats, Critics and Publics, (pp. 232–256). London: Wallflower Press.