The Gamification of Digital Journalism

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THE GAMIFICATION OF DIGITAL JOURNALISM

This book examines the brief yet accelerated evolution of newsgames, a genre that has emerged from puzzles, quizzes, and interactives augmenting digital journalism into full-fledged immersive video games from open-world designs to virtual reality experiences. Critics have raised questions about the credibility and ethics of transforming serious news stories of political consequence into entertainment media, and the risks of trivializing grave and catastrophic events into mere games. Dowling explores both the negatives of newsgames, and how the use of entertainment media forms and their narrative methods mainly associated with fiction can add new and potentially more powerful meaning to news than traditional formats allow. The book also explores how industrial and cultural shifts in the digital publishing industry have enabled newsgames to evolve in a manner that strengthens certain core principles of journalism, particularly advocacy on behalf of marginalized and oppressed groups. Cutting-edge and thoughtful, The Gamification of Digital Journalism is a must-read for scholars, researchers, and practitioners interested in multimedia journalism and immersive storytelling.

David O. Dowling is an associate professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa. The author of nine books on publishing networks and industries, his works on digital culture, technology, and the economics of media production have appeared in journals such as Convergence, Digital Journalism, Digital Humanities Quarterly, Games and Culture, Journalism & Communication Monographs, and Literary Journalism Studies. “Bring in the (news) games! Dowling’s rigorous and enjoyable analysis of what digital technologies offer journalism and how journalism advances the potential for games is a vital read for knowing the news world today and preparing and predicting news of tomorrow. The Gamification of Digital Journalism is part cultural studies, part business analysis, and part techno science rooted in empirical analysis and expert interpretation to reveal the breadth and depth of news games in advocacy journalism, immersive storytelling, and audience engagement. Herein are tools for the future of journalism.” Robert E. Gutsche, Jr., Senior Lecturer in Critical Digital Media Practice, Lancaster University, UK

“Video games, like any other medium, can be used for journalistic purposes, and their interactive nature can help players understand the situations of others. Dowling’s book is a thorough exploration of games as journalism, examining the connections between games and politics, news, social media, and documentary.” Mark J. P. Wolf, Professor of Communication, Concordia University Wisconsin, USA THE GAMIFICATION OF DIGITAL JOURNALISM

Innovation in Journalistic Storytelling

David O. Dowling First published 2021 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Taylor & Francis The right of David O. Dowling to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-07623-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-07625-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-02170-1 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC CONTENTS

Acknowledgments vi

Introduction: The Mainstreaming of Gaming Culture and Journalism’s Ludic Turn 1

1 Journalism and the Politicization of Game Content 21

2 News Branding Through News Experiences 42

3 Games as Advocacy Journalism 64

4 Open-World Game Narratives 84

5 Documentary Games 104

6 Social Media and Mobile Gaming 123

7 Immersive Design: VR Journalism 144

Conclusion: The Ultimate Empathy Machine? Games About Refugees and Migrants 164

Index 185 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The sources of inspiration for this book range from media and journalism studies scholarship to the realm of gaming and its myriad developers, aficionados, and academics. Kyle Moody, the instructor of the first course on video games taught at the University of Iowa in the early 2010s, introduced me to the burgeoning field of game studies. His innovative syllabus inspired me to develop and teach my own course on digital and gaming culture. My appreciation for the power of the global games industry is indebted to Nicholas Yanes, an accomplished scholar, gaming journalist, and industry insider deeply connected to its culture and diverse communities. Henry Jenkins, the major figure behind the field of transmedia studies, connected our thinking more than any other. Christopher Goetz of the Department of Cinematic Arts at the University of Iowa enriched this study with his theoretical expertise, which informs Chapter 1 of this book. Tanya Krzy- winska, editor of the journal Games and Culture, was instrumental in the support of my initial work in the field in collaboration with Professor Goetz. A special thanks is also due to Mark J.P. Wolfe for his feedback and support. Fernando Javier Canet Centellas offered encouragement and useful advice, particularly with regard to the genre of i-docs and the intersection of documentary games with activist journalism. My appreciation goes to the organizers of the Media Indus- tries Conference, organized by the Media Industry Studies Interest Group of the International Communications Association (ICA), who accepted my work examining the global games industry’s influence on digital publishing strategies among major news organizations. This book owes a great deal to Ian Bogost for his pioneering research that established the first definitions for understanding gaming and journalism’s intersection in his book Newsgames: Journalism at Play. The students of my Digital and Gaming Culture course at the University of Iowa were vital to the expansion of my purview into open-world and immersive Acknowledgments vii genres. Their passion and enthusiasm carried from the classroom to the page. The faculty at the University of Iowa in the School of Journalism & Mass Commu- nication deserves acknowledgment for their insights, friendship, and collegiality. Emma Sherriff and the editorial staff at Routledge provided essential guidance and friendly advice for which I am grateful. It was a pleasure and an honor to work with them. My wife, Distinguished University Professor Caroline Tolbert, our daughters Jacqueline and Eveline, and son Edward provided love and the spirit of play essential to the book’s original vision.

INTRODUCTION The Mainstreaming of Gaming Culture and Journalism’s Ludic Turn

The brief yet fierce evolution of newsgames has emerged from puzzles, quizzes, and interactives augmenting digital journalism into full-fledged immersive video games from open-world designs to virtual reality (VR) and mixed reality (MR) experiences. Critics have raised questions about the credibility and ethics of transforming serious news stories of political consequence into entertainment media, and the risks of trivializing grave and catastrophic events into mere games (Ferrer Conill, 2016, p. 48; Lange, 2017). Yet the use of entertainment media forms and their narrative methods mainly associated with fiction can add new and potentially more powerful meaning to news than traditional formats allow. During the spring 2020 global pandemic, nonfiction games took on heightened significance, asWalden: A Game, based on Henry David Thoreau’s nineteenth-century classic, was distributed free for homeschooling. The New Yor- ker’s Puzzles and Games Department announced Partner Mode for its crossword puzzles, a digital remediation of a pre-digital newsgame form “in the spirit of virtual togetherness” (“Announcing”, 2020). For the first time in media history, the World Health Organization encouraged people in quarantine to play video games, Google offered its Stadia Gaming service free, and most news organizations dropped their paywalls (Schiesel, 2020). Games and journalism have arguably never been more essential in connecting citizens and providing an alternative mode of civic engagement. Experimentation with news forms traces back to Tom Wolfe and the New Journalists’ use of techniques reserved for creative writers to revolutionize longform journalism in the mid-twentieth century into what he called the nonfiction novel. Today’s “hybrid media system” (Chadwick, 2013) has given rise to newsgames, which operate at the intersection of video games and journalism. 2 Introduction

They now include documentary video games such as Culture Shock’s We Are Chicago, a narrative-based adventure game that borrows from Rockstar Games’ visual aesthetic and gameplay in a blend of activism, advocacy journalism, and documentary filmmaking “using the real stories of residents of a South Side neighborhood” (Mello-Klein, 2017a). The game’s immersive experience encour- ages empathy for those negotiating the pull of school, gang, and family life in a city plagued by unprecedented murder rates. Within the industrial and cultural contexts of newsgames and gamified journalism, this book considers the transformation of journalistic principles as identified by digital journalism scholarship (Webster, 2016; Conboy & Eldridge, 2014; Deuze, 2005; Curran, 2005; Entman, 2005) and the Society for Professional Journalists (SPJ, 2020). The current use of gaming logics, culture, and digital platforms for journalistic storytelling inform the book’s central question of how video games function as journalism. Previously the question arose as to whether video games qualify as journalism (Chokshi, 2010). News organizations now tend to address not whether, but how to better combine journalism and game design. Just as editorial staff and academics no longer focus on whether “journalists should use writing or photography,” but rather how to develop each independently and/ or integrate them more effectively, games have become increasingly accepted as a potent storytelling medium to compete in the world of digital publishing (Daily, quoted in Mello-Klein, 2017). The current migration of journalism across digital media has enlivened and enriched its expressive power (Thon, 2016), especially as stories become longer and more immersive on multimedia templates designed for mobile audiences (Mitchell et al., 2016; Marino et al., 2016). Just as journalism borrowed from the aesthetics and grammar of photography to ascend to nonfiction art in Walker Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men on migrant agricultural life, and drew upon the novel for Upton Sinclair’s the Jungle to expose the atrocities of the meat packing industry, journalists have been tackling important subjects such as urban homelessness and hunger through interactive video game platforms since the late 2000s. This book considers it axiomatic of the centrality of gaming to digital journalism’s evolution that Nonny de la Peña’s pioneering Hunger in L.A., an acclaimed VR “news experience,” is set in a virtual environment closely resembling that of Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto series. Her other VR and MR projects, Across the Line and Project Syria, display how VR has become “the ultimate empathy machine,” one whose journalistic storytelling power to elicit compassion has reached unprecedented levels (Milk, 2015). The evolution of immersive storytelling and VR journalism, as Bucher (2018) points out, owes a great deal to video games. This book explores how online journalism has incorporated tropes and digital architecture associated with video games since its inception, from the kinetic terror and exhilaration of the graphic animation of the skiers’ decent in the New Introduction 3

York Times’ “Snow Fall: Avalanche at Tunnel Creek” to the arresting interactive data visualization demonstrating the vulnerability of our private information on the Internet in the Guardian’s “NSA Files: Decoded.” Even august outlets like the Wall Street Journal deployed gaming in its WSJ Studios product titled Cocainenom- ics, a sponsored content piece designed to promote the Netflix series Narcos on the Pablo Escobar Columbian cartel of the 1970s and 1980s. The landing page of the multimedia feature spells out the title in cocaine, as the reader moves the powdery substance around the screen, in effect playing with the story’s deadly subject. This intimate and morally compromising interactive element initiates this exploration of the business economics and psychosocial dynamics of one of the most notorious cartels in the history of illegal drug trade. The WSJ Studios piece ends with a quiz, testing the reader’s comprehension of the economic concepts and finer points of the cultural and social history of the network surrounding Escobar’s lucrative and turbulent career. Interactivity in this case involves more than hitting play, stop, or pause, or simply scrolling through a piece. Instead, it invites the reader to make choices that alter the content in a feedback loop that transforms the reader from passive to active while maintaining intimacy (Opgenhaffen & d’Haenens, 2012). The role of interactive elements—in a wide variety of gestures from drawing letters with a deadly narcotic to answering quiz questions—in gamified journalistic stories ideally reinforces the feature’s narrative rather than unnecessarily crowding the screen or confusing the user (McAdams, 2015). Producers of multimedia features have streamlined design to avoid cluttered or crowded screens with excessive and potentially distracting embedded elements (Dowling, 2017). Distracting audiovisual elements that detract from rather than compliment the main narrative are anathema to effective digital design for immersive video games (Zeman, 2017; Therrien, 2014; Marsh, 2016). As van Krieken’s (2018) study of “Snow Fall” demonstrates, optimal conditions for immersion therefore occur when multimedia elements effectively combine for scene reconstructions (in text, video, picture, and graphic), event structure (text and picture signaling temporal markers), and viewpoint techniques (of text, video, and audio expressing both direct and indi- rect speech and thought) (p. 3, 11). In addition to digital journalism’s gamification through such augmenta- tions, multimedia news stories have developed allowing users to choose their own paths through the narrative. In the case of “Rebuilding Haiti,” created by the European Journalism Centre and the Innovation in Developing Reporting Grant Programme, the reader not only determines the course of the narrative, but also does so in a way that shapes a plan for recovery from the 2010 earthquake that destroyed Haiti’s infrastructure, leaving 1.5 million people home- less and 220,000 dead. The reader cannot progress from the introduction to the main chapters of the piece, which consist of video footage, graphic ani- mations, and interactive quizzes, without selecting one of three projects to 4 Introduction alleviate homelessness, combat disease, or improve the public schools. After the user navigates the administrative dilemmas of their chosen goal, they arrive at “The New Haiti,” the final chapter describing the nation ten years after the earthquake. Flaurent Maurin, the journalist and game designer behind “Rebuilding Haiti,” intentionally made the task difficult to alert privileged audiences to the very real budgetary constraints and resource limitations facing such developing countries. The aim was to illustrate—without resorting to “stern or esoteric language on the reports of NGOs,” or dehumanizing statistics from government charts devoid of their sociocultural context—how difficult and provisional many solutions actually are, and that there are no panaceas in such a situation (Reid, 2014). As one user said in an industry study of how millennials interacted with the piece, “it wasn’t just a game for game’s sake. There was information I was getting by playing the game” (Marino, 2016). By challenging users to implement a recovery protocol themselves that could only partially or provisionally achieve success, Maurin’s method conveyed that “reality is far more complex than they may believe.” He explained, “that’s one philosophy of newsgames that can be summed up in a single sentence: I lose, therefore, I think” (Reid, 2014). Newsgames challenge readers by casting topics drawn from events and issues in complex ways. Failure is instructive not simply in a didactic sense but as cause for deeper reflection, a process Juul (2013) describes in “The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games.” The drive for mastery of gameplay and the game’s internal system of rewards and risks of failure results in correspond- ing command of the material, a point that has brought gaming into educational curricula in institutions from elementary schools and universities to the military. Placed in a competitive environment, the stakes rise for the formerly passive news consumer. Challenging endeavors—whether computer software development or mastering a musical instrument—can be motivated more deeply through intrinsic rewards of autonomous mastery rather than extrinsic material rewards in the form of capital incentives (Benabou & Tirole, 2003). The drama of that quest for mastery, from pitfalls to moments of triumph, are no better showcased in the gaming world than on the online streaming service Twitch and the skyrocketing popularity of video gameplay on YouTube that began when PewDiePie (Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg) became the platform’s num- ber one channel in July 2012 according to OpenSlate’s ranking. Games themselves in this segment of the bourgeoning industry have almost become secondary to the performance of gameplay, whether comedic in the case of PewDiePie and many like him, or serious as in the rapidly growing world of esport team competition. Fortnite, the world’s most popular video game in 2019, is also the most watched game of all time, as evidenced by the combination of skilled gameplay and comedic banter fueling the unprecedented reach of Twitch streamer Ninja (Tyler Blevins) (Paumgarten, 2018). The trajectory extends from Pong’s Introduction 5

1970s basements to global billion-dollar events whose rich revenue streams have attracted investments from media titans such as ESPN. Newsgames are a rapidly growing sector of this expanding video game industry. From a business standpoint, newsgames “are difficult to copy, scalable, and increase the value proposition of media companies” (Blejman, 2017). Addition- ally, “they can become the news themselves and generate the viral audience that can increase direct and social traffic,” as Blejman (2017) of Grupo Octubre and Media Factory pointed out. From a consumer’s standpoint, newsgames provide a deeper understanding of content itself by encouraging the user to apply inter- pretations of meanings associated with their experience to larger issues of society and culture, which is a core purpose of literary journalism ( Jacobson et al., 2016, p. 538). Thus video games enjoy good company with literature and journalism, “media that discovered social realism when they were already mature,” as Bogost et al. (2010, p. 64) observe. Social realism has a long history in journalism and fiction dating back to Rebecca Harding Davis’ “Life in the Iron Mills,” originally an Atlantic piece exposing oppressive labor conditions at the dawn of the industrial revolution. Newsgames, as Bogost et al. (2010) note, are particularly adept at achieving social realism’s goal of highlighting political and economic injustices. Represent- ing subjects according to a gritty visual aesthetic harkens back to the Jungle and Lewis Hines’ unflinching photojournalism of the poverty and suffering in the dark recesses of urban life. Crucially, they do so to “allow us to address systems instead of stories” and “can offer an experience of how something works rather than a description of key events and players” (Chokshi, 2010). Bogost (2017) has gone further, arguing in “Video Games Are Better Without Stories” that something different altogether than traditional linear narrative is the great strength of open-world video games, which never were as adept at storytelling as print and film. (The claim raised the ire of several gamers’ intent on defending the medium’s storytelling prowess, the most conspicuous of whom rather predictably voiced their rage on Reddit.) Instead, open-world games, like many newsgames, thrive on what he calls “procedural rhetoric” that simulates how things work through models (or systems) that users can interact with (Bogost et al., 2010). Narrative, however, remains essential to that procedural rhetoric because “stories in games, as stories in a narrative format, have the role of communicating emotional and relational information” (Zeman, 2017, p. 219). Narrative journalism is enhanced by gaming according to the principle that “the human mind is not really a fact-memorization machine, as a computer might be considered,” according to Zeman (2017, p. 219). Instead, it is an “association-making entity” that draws on empathy, which gaming is particularly adept at eliciting by placing the user in the place of others for a simulated experience of their emotions to build emotional memory. Newsgames are effective at conveying narrative because a “story creates a framework inside of which the players’ objectives are given 6 Introduction meaning and significance from a human perspective” (Zeman, 2017, p. 219). While newsgames have evolved considerably since 2010, Bogost’s taxonomy of newsgames published that year still proves helpful in mapping the terrain of editorial, infographics, documentary, literacy, and community video games that function as journalism (Bogost et al., 2010). Among the many quizzes and games that have augmented digital journalism (by applying game elements to digital interfaces) as well as full-fledged “computer games used to participate in the public sphere” include “What is Code?” by Bloomberg Business Week, the German website Opinary, the New York Times’ “You Draw it,” and Berliner Morgenpost’s “Einheitsreise” (Ferrer Conill, 2016). Budget- ary constraints and concerns for credibility have been overcome in creative ways by many organizations both in and outside mainstream media. According to a 2015 Tow Center for Digital Journalism report, the industry is a hotbed of innovation, as “no two games from the same studio necessarily use the same business model” (Foxman, 2015, p. 38). Tow’s finding suggested that since “amalgamations abound, newspaper and media companies could benefit from similar product flexibility.” Specifically, “newsrooms might attempt more dynamic and fluid means of monetization, based not only on their specific brand but also on specific products they release” (Foxman, 2015, p. 38). At the heart of the new business models for newsgames and gamified journalism is a tension between the commercial logics of attracting audiences in service of the financial interest of the publisher and journalism’s democratic service to the public interest (Ferrer Conill, 2016, p. 48). The use of quizzes to attract the online news audience began with BuzzFeed in 2008. Despite the platform’s focus on lists as the main mechanism for expanding its audience, BuzzFeed maintained its use of quizzes to draw additional traffic. The strategy paid dividends, as the market for gamified journalism and newsgames soared within the next six years. Slate’s Name Generator became the most popular story in its history in 2014 and the New York Times’ dialogue quiz was its third most popular piece that year (Lichterman, 2015). Each of these examples helps illustrate the industrial shifts toward the mainstreaming of gaming culture and journalism’s development of digital interactivity into thoughtful gameplay.

The Nexus of Digital Journalism and Game Studies Building on Bogost et al.’s (2010) groundbreaking Newsgames: Journalism at Play, this book accounts for a decade of advances in the genre to answer the question of how games function as journalism, especially in the areas of the mobile audience, social media, and sponsored content. Power Play: How Video Games Can Save the World shares my concern with serious video games that advocate for social change. The rise of this burgeoning subfield of digital journalism studies is evident in the recent dedication of a 2020 issue of Convergence to the topic, which Introduction 7 features a study by Tim Vos and a piece on the production of newsgames by Plewe and Fürsich. Another telling sign was the publication of journal articles on newsgames in Journalism and Communication Quarterly and Games and Culture that both appeared in 2020. This scholarship builds on studies by Meier (2018) and Plewe and Fürsich (2018), which helped refine Bogost et al.’s (2010) older taxonomy of newsgames. Meier (2018) notes that “the genre [of newsgames] is characterized by a lack of clarity and overstepping of boundaries between journalism and non- journalism as well as game and non-game” (p. 440). Findings based on interviews with users indicate “the general problems of delimitation of journalism in digital media,” particularly in establishing firm “boundaries between newsgames and other digital games or journalistic genres” (Meier, 2018). This book suggests that this lack of rigid boundaries has enabled newsgames to thrive as a highly adaptive genre capable of transgressing arbitrary genre classifications and their attendant narrative conventions. Media convergence has opened a wide array of storytelling tools for nonfiction narrative. Newsgames function beyond the mere delivery of information associated with conventional news, a purpose that particularly aims to “(re-)create enthusiasm among the general public for journalistic contents and especially for relevant political topics” (Meier, 2018, p. 440). Heightened interactivity combines with greater immersion in subjects to render more lasting effects on users. According to media effects research, higher levels of immersion in media content are associated with more intense identification with subjects and greater memory retention of the information imparted (Perse & Lambe, 2016). As an extension of immersive digital journalism, newsgames have begun to perform these roles more effectively than conventional forms of passively consumed, more abstract news media. The definition of newsgames according to Plewe and Fürsich (2018), who argue for a broad, inclusive understanding of the genre’s distinguishing characteristics, is especially useful given its responsiveness to the radical experimentation that has yielded new levels of media hybridity. Newsgames are “created in response to actual events,” readily accessible (often online and thus aimed toward a mass audience), carry a persuasive intent, and provide an alternative to traditional news through both transparency of revealed intent, particularly by conveying information through the procedural rhetoric of rules and text (Plewe & Für- sich, 2018, p. 2472). Media scholar and game designer Gonzalo Frasca originally coined the term “newsgames” to describe the interactive computer simulations of political cartoons he developed, which fall under the category of editorial newsgames. They now include infographics, documentary, literacy, and community video games that function as journalism. As Meier (2018) points out, newsgames often appear as stand-alone products, unbundled from the publication that produced them. The shareable, autonomous news story has also become a prevalent feature of digital journalism, especially since the advent of the smartphone and mobile news in 2007. The hybrid 8 Introduction world of games and journalism is no longer inhabited only by news organizations attempting to gamify their content. The current condition has evolved considerably from earlier “discourse about the way news and computers go together [which] has focused on translations of existing approaches to journalism for the Web” (Bogost et al., 2010, p. 5). Currently, not only innovative news organizations but also game developers such as We Are Chicago’s Culture Shock are increasingly venturing into the terrain of journalistic reporting and storytelling. Games for Change, for example, represents independent alternative publishers of journalistic media products. If “the future of news is not an article,” as the New York Times Research and Development Lab proclaimed in 2015, especially one associated with the ephemeral nature of the print medium (Lloyd, 2015), its evolution toward immersive longform and interactive storytelling has propelled journalism directly into the world of gaming. As this migration of news organizations into games continues, major advances and innovations in hardcore indie and serious games’ investment in journalistic and documentary-based storytelling escalate. With this dual interest emanating from both news and gaming industries, journalism now not only finds itself situated in a medium more interactive than any in its history but also enters a realm of radically powerful storytelling drawing on the conventions of fictional entertainment. Unlike the fantasy content of traditional video games, newsgame content focuses on reality, and gameplay functions as a tool for understanding the world, or in the case of Culture Shock, to serve as a whistleblower of social injustice and economic inequality in an attempt to foster fruitful conversation for reform. Given their persuasive nature, newsgames seek a wide audience in service of the public interest. Most are therefore available online and are played through a web browser. Nicky Case’s serious games and interactives such as We Become What We Behold (a McLuhan-inspired meditation on media effects), and The Evolution of Trust (on game theory and the prisoner’s dilemma) epitomize the accessible, free-to-play model that has come to characterize newsgames. Case invites all users to remix her work according to open source (code-sharing) practice, an ethos that resonates with the alternative business models of slow journalism characterized by openness and transparency, particularly in digital independent magazines such as Narratively (Dowling, 2016). Although the internet, rather than console gaming, and digital journalism are direct extensions of newsgames, serious games based on documentary reporting have become prominent in recent years. With the content and analysis often associated with longform investigations and depth reporting, newsgames probe beneath headlines and events, both contemporary and historical, drawing from the methods of print feature writing and documentary video journalism. Yet, the key difference is not only in the user experience of the news narrative through procedural rhetoric, but also in the game’s value itself as something more than just an ephemeral “first draft of history,” but a “synthesized second draft” Introduction 9 functioning as a “resource for knowledge and civic understanding in new and powerful ways” (Lloyd, 2015). The persuasive intent of newsgames is evident in the intimacy of the gaming experience through an avatar or gameplay elements based on real, rather than fictional subjects. The heightened sense of empathy gameplay can elicit is often used as a catalyst for political change. Plewe and Fürsich (2018) demonstrate that not only games function as effective journalism but also that their capacity to inspire empathy in users has been successfully applied in several instances to the topic of the refugee crisis associated with recent mass immigration from war-torn nations plagued by oppressive regimes. In addition to the cases they examine of Against All Odds, The Refugee Challenge, and The Migrant Trail, such persuasive empathic projects include the open-world game on the Iranian revolution 1979 Revolution: Black Friday by iNK Stories, which immerses players in the context of revolution- ary Iran. Rather than adopting the perspective of a combatant as in traditional first-person shooters such as Call of Duty, the user is tasked with covering the event as a photojournalist. This trope is played upon in Refugees, in which users are invited to be the “special correspondent and tell the story of refugee camps” (quoted in Meier, 2018, p. 436). This use of gameplay to expose the process of journalistic production is also evident in Al Jazeera’s game Pirate Fishing, which places users in the role of a reporter to experience the ethical challenges and risks inherent in policing illegal trafficking by sea. From its onset, digital journalism has exhibited a playful and experimen- tal relation to the news. As designs have moved toward less distracting, ad-free environments, the cinematic and interactive elements have borrowed extensively from the world of games. The aesthetic use of the landing page, the looping video, and the cutscene are all transitional elements in digital journalism such as Greenland Is Melting Away that draw from video games. Google’s interactive documentary “Beyond the Map” borrows the trope of the first-person racing game genre by taking the user on a 360/VR motorcycle ride through the streets of the Favelas in Rio de Janeiro. As Dominguez (2017) notes, “being inside the scene of the action and being able to interact with it means rethinking the conventions of audiovisual editing” in addition to “the visual experience of the audience,” especially with regard to the “relevance of the three-dimensional nature of real sound” (p. 1). In the ongoing search for new forms of journalism that draws on preexisting narrative resources and new immersive technology, immersive longform storytelling has become not just technological, but narrative, which for nonfiction, means that such immersion is rooted in journalistic reporting and writing. Quizzes and interactives, the short form counterpart to open-world longform narratives told on an epic scale, typically challenge the news consumer with a mental puzzle. These are not diversionary challenges, but ones bearing on existentially important choices faced by real subjects, a pattern particularly evident in games such as Papers Please, Against All Odds, and Blindfold, a single-scene 10 Introduction epilogue to 1979 Revolution: Black Friday that recreates the experience of interrogation with more visceral nearness and lived intensity than prison simulators such as the Guardian’s “6 X 9.” In tracing the use of preexisting narrative resources and immersive media technologies in newsgames, this research responds to Meier’s (2018) call for intervention into the “specific narrations and storytelling aspects” in addition to the development of knowledge about user experience of this new digital genre (p. 440). With respect to narrativity, this book places newsgames on a contin- uum with the digital animation of literary journalism, the development of which Jacobson et al. (2016) have examined. In terms of user experience, the method accounts for literary journalism’s orientation toward the reading experience as an act of imagination for the reader. In journalistic games based on nonfictional events, the user is transported inside of the news event for a sense of presence in the represented reality that approximates the necessary physical experience for the reporter, particularly one immersed in an environment and in close contact with the story’s subjects (Dominguez, 2017). Games thus emphasize transportation, not only to a remote place, but also one where a real story is unfolding. Docu- mentary games are particularly adept at extending the mise-en-scène for a sense of spatial immersion (Bogost et al., 2010, p. 66). In transcending the limitations of journalistic forms such as the inverted pyramid and 5 w’s of objective-based journalism, literary journalism’s unique power is to make news events more intimate through not only felt detail, but also the techniques typically reserved for fiction that include setting, character point of view, dialogue, and scene-by-scene construction with an eye toward tension building and plot dramatization. Docu- mentary cinema, as Dominguez (2017) points out, utilizes an audiovisual style that bears the same function of literary journalism’s dramatic narrative structure, designed specifically to immerse the reader. The key element newsgames add is interactivity, which can take the form of a ludic competitive challenge allowing autonomous movement through the narrative.

Journalism’s Immersive, Ludic Turn With its concern for the culture, aesthetics, media, and technology of digital longform journalism’s pivot toward the world of gaming, this research examines cases that stretch the generic boundaries of cinema, video games, and journalism. For example, Prison Valley, a first-person road film about the California prison system that enables users to select their own path through the narrative, is clas- sified as an interactive documentary, a gamified version of cinema rather than a cinematic form of a video game such as Walden: A Game and We Are Chicago. Liberation from the arbitrary boundaries separating cinema, print, and photography from video games drives exuberant experimentation. Alan Gershenfeld’s Never Alone, for example, blends procedural gameplay with linear documentary Introduction 11 film, techniques previously understood as incongruous within the same product (Gershenfeld, 2018). His meditation on Native American culture blends documentary film into a game environment, a technique also integral to Attentat 1942. A telling sign of increasing media convergence in video games is the curation of interactive documentaries (i-docs) for the MIT Open Documentary Lab. Doc- umentary journalist and i-doc producer Cédric Mal notes that since its origin, “documentary cinema has played,” adding that “never has documentary pushed so far this ‘role play,’ in a more subtle, and above all, interactive way” (Mal, 2014). The medium defies conventional wisdom in the game industry suggesting “video tend not to do well in video games” because film is linear rather than interactive, thus making for an “inorganic alignment” when paired together (Gershenfeld, 2018). The 26 short documentaries embedded in Never Alone’s kinetic gameplay, for example, are among the best-reviewed aspects of the game, according to Ger- shenfeld (2018). That aspect of the game was instrumental in attracting 3.2 million downloads on Xbox and Playstation. Apple named the mobile version Game of the Day and App of the Day not just nationally but globally. Documentary filmmakers have since been approaching Gershenfeld—who estimated the game’s total global reach at 676 million—with the suggestion of building video games around their documentaries in an effort to bring them to a mass audience (Ger- shenfeld, 2018). Such potential raises the question of whether journalism—and the media con- ventionally associated with it that include print, video, documentary film, and audio—belongs with gaming. The news has been gamified for more than a century, with puzzles and quizzes dating back to at least 1913 (Longo, 2016; Bogost et al., 2010, p. 7). In the digital age, online journalism has become increasingly interactive and immersive, incorporating game logics, strategies, and competition in the process. News organizations have had to evaluate the relative costs of production times, skill sets, and return on investment (ROI). Industry practitioners and game designers face the dilemma of selecting not only from new digital storytelling tools and templates, but also must consider the new principles, culture, and politics bearing on their media design choices, especially with regard to audience impact. Certainly digital journalism’s latest expansion into gaming justifiably raises concerns over ethics, given the extraordinarily persuasive power of the medium. Can diverse multimedia elements combine in multimodal products to function as effective narrative? According to van Krieken (2018), complimentary technological elements not only confirm the realization of narrative balance and coherence in multimodal forms but also reveal that they can deliver the message with greater significance and power than traditional news forms. Her anatomi- zation of the digital elements of multimedia storytelling indicates that interactives can complement rather than detract from the main narrative. This mutually reinforcing effect of graphics, video, text, and audio is attributable mainly to its 12 Introduction app-like cognitive container designed to effectively screen out distractions of the open web such as advertising (Dowling, 2017). As Lloyd (2015) notes, the hyperlink “is not an ideal affordance, as it requires the reader to leave the article and read a second one” to obtain necessary context and background information. Jacobson et al. (2016) and Hiippala (2017) represent a scholarly community that has welcomed multimodality for longform journalism as a uniquely powerful genre. Although some have characterized interactive digital design as anathema to narrative literary journalism (Giles & Hitch, 2017), Green (2018) has established the compatibility of interactivity with narration. As with journalism, “video games are now and have been, in one form or another, since their inception telling stories.” She explains that “advancing technologies,” especially those integrating documentary journalism with interactive game rhetoric, “merely allow for continuing degrees of complexity in storytelling” (Green, p. 7). Fears of media technology’s evolution toward increasingly interactive forms causing language decay and narrative deprivation are thus greatly exaggerated. Drawing unnecessary boundaries between media forms falsely presumes what can and cannot be considered rich storytelling. Such arbitrary distinctions elide the powerful storytelling of works, such as Never Alone, bearing important political and cultural import. The notion of the literary, as studies by Jacobson et al. (2016), Dowling and Vogan (2015), and Dowling (2017) have proven, is best understood as an expansive category inclusive of interactive multimedia digital journalism. The cases examined in this book thus exemplify how narrative nonfiction video games constitute the latest iteration of digital literary journalism. Games produced outside of the news industry, I argue, are further evidence of the game industry’s foray into digital and interactive narrative storytelling, arguably the newest genre of literary nonfiction. As digital journalism has become increasingly interactive, exploratory, and in some cases, competitive, video games themselves have evolved toward nonfictional subjects. As a branch of indie games, serious games include the subgenres of education, health, history, and science games. The connection between journalism and games is evident in the work of figures like Graham Roberts, who was the lead graphic designer for the milestone achievement of “Snow Fall” in 2012. Roberts also helped establish the New York Times’ partnership with Google to manufacture one million cardboard head-mounted displays (HMDs), the first ever attempt at an affordable, mass-produced immersive wearable technology. The intersection between games and journalism is also visible in Games for Change, which was founded by Never Alone creator Alan Gershenfeld in 2011 in an effort to encourage the development, promotion, and distribution of such titles as Asi Burak’s PeaceMaker. The 2007 launch of PeaceMaker pre-dated the “golden age of digital distribution,” leaving Burak’s marketing budget inadequate to the task of appealing to a mainstream audience in the intensely competitive global games industry Introduction 13

(Burak & Parker, 2017, p. 27). Despite its commercial shortcomings, PeaceMaker “helped unify all the other games and game developers in this field under the banner of games for change” (Burak & Parker, 2017, p. 33). Emerging out of an early wave of socially conscious games like A Force More Powerful, Darfur Is Dying, and Food Force promoting a deeper understanding of some of the world’s most complex and intractable problems, PeaceMaker thus set the keynote projects to follow. These early 2000s works established that a video game could simultane- ously inform at a depth ideally suited to procedural rhetoric’s unique power to “simulate how things work by constructing models that people can interact with” while also sparking empathy for the game’s real-world counterparts (Bogost et al., 2010, p. 6). Thus the concept of video games designed not just as entertainment, but as a means of informing citizens about real-world concerns “is more accepted now than it was in 2007” (Burak & Parker, 2017, p. 32). Such an approach to nonfictional subjects had always been journalism’s natural inclination. Now it was gaming’s new promise—to emerge from Columbine and allegations of social decadence with a fresh commitment to serving the public interest beyond just keeping gamers entertained, but in transforming them into edified and engaged citizens of the world.

The Commercial Viability of Documentary Games As Burak and Parker (2017) explain, “With video games, the opportunity to see life from another point of view is even greater, because games’ inherent interactivity promotes agency and a new type of emerging experience” (xii). That principle guided Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s sponsorship of Disaster Hero, produced in collaboration with Legacy Interactive and the American College of Emergency Physicians and distributed online by Games 4 Sustainability. Fueled by a $1.5 million FEMA grant, Ariella Lehrer described her game company’s pivot in 2012 toward what she called the booming market for serious games. A trained psychol- ogist who holds a doctorate, Lehrer noted that serious games were growing at a faster rate than educational games targeted at youth and brain-boosting games for older adults, whose reach is limited by their narrowly defined audiences. Beyond entertainment, serious games offer a wide array of government sector training applications for military, federal, and local law enforcement agencies including the FBI. Such agencies have conscripted the services of game companies to train personnel in skills from tank operation and cyber security to crowd control in riot preparedness in prisons (Clay, 2012). Released in 2013 after three years in production, Disaster Hero instructs players of all ages in how to prepare for an emergency such as a natural disaster. The lucrative FEMA grant provided shelter from the financial vulnerability faced by independent game entrepreneurs in the free market. 14 Introduction

During the early 2010s, the public service potential of serious games—in this case directly serving public health and welfare—had captured the attention of federal grant committees, and soon after, legacy media. Graham Rob- erts’ (2018) speech at Games for Change provided the historical perspective necessary to see that journalism had emerged as a major innovator in serious games. As the leading figure for the New York Times’ advance into interactive VR journalism, Roberts (2018) was ideally situated to testify that “More has changed in the last decade than in the entire 365-year history of the New York Times.” The point of immersive platform storytelling is to transport readers to understand stories through a sense of place and presence. Newsgames have evolved from the pixilated primitive graphics of Gonzalo Frasca’s editorial game, September 12th, frequently cited as the first digital newsgame. Now VR is used to cover everything from sports and culture to politics and conflict, challenging the user to approach each subject actively, thus transforming the news audience from passive consumers to interactive, playful explorers. Under a Cracked Sky, for example, is Roberts’ most acclaimed piece, which borrows from the visual, interactive grammar of video games for an underwater exploration of sea life in Antarctica. The piece not only defined arbitrary hard/soft news categorical divisions, it also virtually transported the user to the news subject. Augmented reality (AR) technologies, as showcased by Roberts’ work for the Olympic Games, bring the news into the user’s environment. Previously scanned holographic images of life-size Olympic figure skaters appear in one’s living room with an iPad or smartphone. “As you circle the athlete, you enter different information zones that are particular to that athlete,” Roberts explains. “No pinch and zoom, just interact with the item as if it were there” (Roberts, 2018). The effect is to “bring news objects at scale to readers,” allowing “them to interact in ways that enable greater understanding of stories” (Roberts, 2018). The immersive newsgames and interactives designed by Roberts exhibit characteristics of the new wave of serious games in which entertainment and profit reinforce civic participation and cultural understanding, major goals of journalism that date back to the Hutchins Commission recommendations during the Civil Rights Movement. Although mainstream commercial game content has become larded with manipulative in-game purchase opportunities in the last decade consistent with the rise of neuromarketing tactics, serious games based on reality are not plagued by profit-driven mechanisms common to games such as Middle Earth: Shadows of War. Newsgames run counter to such trends as in-game microtransactions built on loss-aversion, reward escala- tion, and priming for short-cuts sold first for in-game currency, and then sold for in-game cash bought with real money. The industry’s move in this direc- tion has raised major concerns for public safety regarding at-risk populations such as young children, prompting Belgium, the Dutch Gambling Authority, Introduction 15 and the state of Hawaii to press for the classification of video games as gambling (Stellinga, 2017). Whereas the industry increasingly recruits psychologists with an eye toward manipulating effects on users to increase revenue, some psychologists like Lehrer at Legacy Interactive have applied their expertise in human behavior and brain science toward service to the public interest through government-funded projects supported by massive grants. The documentary games Roberts has created, like those of Gershenfeld, are not without their commercial appeal. Indeed, Gershenfeld’s goal with Never Alone was to avoid the pitfall of the Games for Change pioneer PeaceMaker, whose political relevance and impact were limited by its lack of an effective marketing and distribution plan. While certainly avoiding exploitative profit- seeking associated with entertainment game companies, both Gershenfeld and Roberts are more attuned to the importance of marketing and publicity than first wave developers of serious games. As serious games evolve, they have become more market savvy. In working with the Cook Inlet Tribal Council, for example, Gershenfeld discovered that the Alaskan Native American group’s desire to become more financially independent and less reliant on government grants aligned with the concept of creating a video game. “They wanted to make money, but in a way that was aligned with their culture and values,” he recalled, “specifically to empower their youth” by producing “the first authen- tic indigenous video game.” Integral to the plan was the imperative of reaching a market at the intersection of indie gamers and cultural creatives in order to “push the boundaries of not only the art form, but of new perspectives and themes” (Gershenfeld, 2018). The game would be situated culturally among such titles across the media landscape of cinema, music, and games as Whale Rider, Putumayo, Braid, and Limbo. For the aesthetic of Never Alone, Gershenfeld consulted Sean Vesce, the creator of Pitfall and the multibillion dollar franchise, Tomb Raider. With the team assembled, they launched into extensive depth reporting and interviewing of Inupiaq Alaskan writers, elders, and community members.

Innovation in Digital Journalism Through Game Design This book’s chapters are sequenced to emphasize the ways in which game design can drive progressive politics and technological innovation in digital journalism. The first three chapters establish the connection between gaming and journalism; the next four explore forms and genres from mobile interactives to open-world narrative and immersive documentary games. Chapter 1 examines the role of gender in the cultural and digital convergence of video games and journalism. Women indie game developers were originally a major creative force behind the advent of serious games bearing an advocacy and/ or activist agenda. Gamergate supporters began their campaign in 2014 officially 16 Introduction opposing corruption in gaming journalism, but #GamerGate on Twitter was actually an attack on progressive feminist gamers and developers (Braithwaite, 2016; Massanari, 2017; Chess & Shaw, 2015; Mortensen, 2016). The hashtag campaign was designed “to perpetrate misogynistic attacks by wrapping them in a debate about ethics in gaming journalism” ( Johnston, 2014). Research on Twitter revealed that “GamerGate’s issue publics are absolutely not primarily con- cerned with ‘ethics in games journalism’ ” (Burgess & Matamoros-Fernandez, 2016, p. 79). The defense of misogynistic gaming content against social critique posits the medium as apolitical, a position anathema to the inclusive and progressive ethos of newsgames. Chapter 2 examines the use of newsgames for promotional news branding and sponsored content. Game design studios have begun to produce cost-effective scalable sponsored content, as in the case of Marcus Bösch’s company The Good Evil that can develop a game in five days at a cost of between $7,000 and $5,000 (Eveleth, 2016). Case studies focus on news organizations invested in producing games to promote digitally published articles and documentary films including Pirate Fishing and #Hacked by Al Jazeera, Narcos: Cartel Wars in collaboration with Netflix, andThe Uber Game by the Financial Times. The former and latter illustrate the importance of a journalistic foundation of thorough reporting and research supporting game content. Chapter 3 analyzes newsgames that perform as advocacy journalism, coun- tering the stereotype of gaming as part of the “move toward softer, more entertaining, audience-pleasing content . . . thus undermining democratic citizenship and government responsiveness” (Entman, 2005, p. 61). Gaming formats enhance the core democratizing function of journalism to expose policy, power, ideology, and self-interest otherwise less apparent in traditional news stories (Burak & Parker, 2017). Advocacy journalism aimed at producing material results to aid their subjects is well suited to documentary games. Glasgow to London in a Wheelchair and Endgame: Syria are examined among other games that advocate on behalf of oppressed and/or marginalized populations. Chapters 4 and 5 explore open-world and documentary newsgames as an extension of narrative storytelling. In Newsgames, Bogost et al. (2010) mention Tracy Fullerton’s announcement at a 2009 Games for Change conference (“the Sundance of Gaming”) of plans to produce a video game on Henry David Tho- reau’s Walden (p. 61), “arguably the most import work of literary nonfiction in the American canon” (Pogue Harrison, 2017). Eight years after the announcement, the release of Walden: A Game on July 4, 2017, was timed to commemorate the first day of Thoreau’s experiment in deliberate living according to a subsistence economy. This chapter examines such open-world structures as alternatives to acquisitive systems of reward (i.e., badges, points, and prizes) that simulate the accumulation of status and capital. Chapter 5 then considers the intersection Introduction 17 between video games and documentary film inWe Are Chicago and 1979 Revolu- tion: Black Friday. Social media and mobile gaming are the focus of Chapter 6. The mete- oric rise of the mobile audience within the last decade has prompted news organizations to partner with tech companies to produce engaging content, especially as recent data have shown users spending more time with news stories (Mitchell et al., 2016). The industry has witnessed a sharp rise in political and historical games for iOS and Android systems addressing topics of contemporary relevance, and thereby contributing to the medium’s broader diversification. Chapter 7 centers on how gaming logics and design aesthetics have influenced the evolution of VR journalism since their inception. Graphic animated aesthetics and gameplay inform the work of Nonny de la Peña, a pioneer producer of VR journalism. Case studies include de la Peña’s Across the Line, Greenland Melt- ing, Out of Exile: Daniel’s Story, and After Solitary. Other titles discussed are Day in the Life of a Refugee and Stasi Hearts: Manipulated Confessions. The conclusion draws together major themes of activism and advocacy in mobile and immersive games through an exploration of games about refugees and migrants. By re-humanizing migration discourse with the “strategic ritual of emotionality” of high-quality journalism Wahl-Jorgensen (2013) calls for, video games on migrants and refugees represent the most recent expansion of narrative journalism beyond the inverted pyramid formula. Such games extend digital journalism’s capacity to humanize news subjects depicted as a faceless aggregate (Plewe & Fürsich, 2018). Case studies include the pixilated retro game Razor Wire (2018), the social-media-inspired mobile game Bury Me, My Love (2017), and the immersive mixed-reality experience A Breathtak- ing Journey (2016). Together these cases and their forerunners represent the wide spectrum of production practices informing migrant representation in games. Games are being used within stories and as stories. They have altered business models, developed different genres and styles, and transformed publishing and editorial practices. The principles of journalism as outlined by the Society for Professional Journalists take on new meaning in the context of gaming’s digital spaces. The mainstreaming of gaming culture has brought many newcomers to the world of gaming, particularly those who intend to bring social and political reality to bear on games. It is to that world of indie gaming and its progressive gender politics that we now turn.

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