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News games

By Simon Broersma. Originally published by VJ Movement. This article was republished with permission.

VJ Movement is always looking for new ways of practicing journalism. We started off with Video Journalism. Then the Cartoonists entered the network. Since then we have also branched into comics and even a hilarious animation.

Screenshot taken from the interactive documentary News Game “Inside Disaster”

For the past couple of months, we have been exploring the idea of adding another product to our little news outlet, one called the News Game. This turns out to be a great opportunity for VJ Movement. During the upcoming months we will regularly post updates about our own News game on our blog, but let me start with a small introduction.

First let me try to give a definition of a news game.  When searching for “News game” on Wikipedia, you get this:

“News games are a genre of video game defined by their rapid creation in response to current events. They can be thought of as the video game equivalent of political cartoons.”

Interesting, but we think it’s much more than that. Georgia Tech Professor Ian Bogost states in his book Newsgames – Journalism at Play, that there are 6 sorts of News games: Current Event games (the Wikipedia definition), Interactive Infographics, Documentary Games, Puzzles, Journalism Literacy games and Community Games.

Last weekend, together with Nora Paul, professor at the University of Minnesota school of Journalism and Mass Communication, VJ Movement organized a brainstorm conference on news gaming. Journalists, Game Developers and Academics from the USA, Canada, France, Denmark and The Netherlands came to Minneapolis to have lengthy discussions about news gaming and what to do with it. A lot of that information and what it led to is published here.

Maybe you know all about news gaming, but for the ones that don’t, we put together a short list of examples that you can have a look at. Here they are:

-    Inside Disaster (an interactive documentary on the Haiti earthquake)

-    Salubrious Nation (an interactive infographic type)

-    Budget Hero (explains how the US national budget is managed)

-    Play the News (Predict what is going to happen in the news)

And if you would like to read more about News games, here are some interesting blog posts/articles:

-    Video games vs. Newspaper, by Jen Gerson

-    Georgia Tech Newsgames Blog, by Ian Bogost and his team

-    Cologne gamelab Newsgame blog, by Marcus Bösch

Simon Broersma is a journalist, YouTube expert and project manager for the VJ Movement News Game.

Tags: game, journalism, news, video,

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