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 trans- forming 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 poten- tially more powerful meaning to news than traditional formats allow. During the spring 2020 global pandemic, nonfiction games took on height- ened 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 organiza- tions dropped their paywalls (Schiesel, 2020). Games and journalism have argu- ably 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 long- form journalism in the mid-twentieth century into what he called the nonfic- tion 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,