Using game design techniques in journalism
At the PRACTICE 2016 game design conference in New York in November, I had the opportunity to present an ‘open problem’ to the assembled group of designers and practitioners in attendance.
I’m interested in using game design techniques in journalism, so the problem I presented was:
“How can I both allow the player to make meaningful choices, and yet have everything presented by the game be fact-based? How can I best use the mechanics of the game to convey the story? Also, whose work should I be looking at to learn more about this?”
I received some great advice and recommendations in that 4-minute rapid fire session:
- Crowd-sourced family feud mechanics: it’s not about getting the right answer to a puzzle that you’ve set which woudl be hard to scale, but rather about finding things that other people haven’t
- Backstory of more context for the information that shows up: it maybe about getting in the historical context or more information that might help me understand the content material
- Simple management games / resource allocation are much easier to pull off because anything that’s real-time/reflex based is going to end up in a spiral of tweaking
- Require interpreting the fact using certain keywords
- Using real-world statistics as basis for a lot of stuff like fairness and unfairness
- Use familiar or existing games and try to draw metaphors from that. Any time you teach someone a new game they’re never extract (as much)
- Start by just finding ways to play with data. How would you play around with this information - even just as an analyst, how would you analyse this? Find a way to make that playful, and go from there
- Create problems that don’t have an answer within the game so it requires the user to do research outside of the game
Who and what to check out
- Her Story
- Nikki Case
- Paolo Pedercini
- Noni de la Pena
- Michael Block
- Peace Maker
- Syrian Journey: Choose your own escape route
What to read next: PRACTICE 2016 conference notes