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A Growth in News Games?

Posted by Hsing Wei on 07-13-09

Since its April release, Swinefighter has been played more than a million times.  Older flash based game, Sock and Awe has had more than 94 million pixilated loafers land on target.  A number of games inspired by current events have been created and played on topics ranging from swine flu to Sully’s successful Flight 1549 landing on the Hudson River, and the Iraqi journalist who threw a shoe at President George W. Bush.  “Though news games may never reach the same status as popular commercial video games such as ‘Grand Theft Auto’ or ‘Halo,’ Ian Bogost (who has been studying news games for the past nine months with a grant from the Knight Foundation) remarks, “there is an opportunity for video-game developers to see the news media as a creative, interesting outlet.”  While Sock and Awe was sold for about $8K, the developers of Swinefighter decided instead to place a Red Cross donation button on the site. 


“Games like these generate buzz,” says Kate Connally, vice president of AddictingGames, an independent gaming site that has developed numerous news games.  These games are entertaining, and in some cases, also inform and educate.  Ian Bogost describes two emerging types of news games that have gained the most traction.  “Tabloid games” – quick, simple, news-driven games often designed in Flash - require some knowledge of the current event, but rarely teach the player anything about the issue.  The other big category of news games are more journalistic in nature - informative and deeper diving - such as how to balance the budget in a recession. 


The trend of using news games hasn’t taken off with many news outlets, says Eric Newton, Vice President for the Knight Foundation Journalism Program. “There hasn’t been a breakthrough in terms of a digital news game the way that the crossword puzzle was a breakthrough for the daily newspaper 100 years ago,” he says. “That hasn’t happened yet, but it will.”  To stimulate that potential, the Knight Foundation has invested in studying and developing news games.  Impact Games, based in Pittsburgh, Pa. was the winner recognized during the Knight News Games Award (developed with Games for Change for the 2009 GFC Expo) for “Play the News”— which uses a series of mini games to change news consumption from passive reading to active engagement (links to additional news game examples on the Knight Foundation blog and the Games for Change news game channel).  Recently, ImpactGames indicated its exploring the potential for projects that can leverage Play The News for teaching new forms of journalism and discussing the future of interactive journalism.  Several journalism schools have already been challenging their students to experiment with engaging users in journalism in ways they haven’t encountered. This past spring at the University of Nevada, journalism students built simple games around the theme of the environment. 

More coverage on the topic of news games here

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