The Gamification of Digital Journalism

Innovation in Journalistic Storytelling

David O. Dowling

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780429664328
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

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.

1

JOURNALISM AND THE POLITICIZATION OF GAME CONTENT¹

The precipitous ascent of documentary and serious games throughout the 2010s was part of a broader renaissance in digital journalism marked by a wave of radical experimentation in interactive, highly immersive media ( Jacobson et al., 2016). Probing beneath headlines into topics of contemporary social, political, and economic consequence, publishers of journalistic narrative adopted new forms ranging from multimedia features to serial podcasts and documentaries released in full seasons. Nonfiction storytelling reached an epic scale in the years leading up to 2020 when the audience began binge-watching streaming documentaries such as Martin Scorsese’s Long Strange Trip, binge-listening to podcasts such as S-Town, and binge-reading digital longform such as Atavist’s “The Mastermind” (Dowling, 2019). Interactive graphics and data visualization borrowed heavily from the aesthetics and procedural rhetoric of video games (Bogost et al., 2010, p. 6), which left their unmistakable impression on multimedia features, documentary films, and virtual reality (VR) news experiences (Dominguez, 2017; Longhi, 2017). The digital publishing industry began to harness the powers of engagement associated with fictional games for nonfiction interactive media (Svensson, 2017, p. 2).

As interactive journalism spread across digital media during the early 2010s, innovative game producers began adopting nonfiction content with a distinct interest in bridging gaming to the real world, often with the intent of fostering civic participation and enhancing public welfare (Burak & Parker, 2017). Independent (or “indie”) video game developers free from the strictures of corporate control were the first to introduce documentary and editorial newsgames. As with podcasts, newsgames’ early primitive designs and production practices grew increasingly adept at immersing audiences in news events—and confronting them with their moral dilemmas—through novel combinations of media technology and journalism. “Since video games popularized the idea of immersion in virtual worlds,” and as VR and casual games moved into the mainstream via mobile devices, “journalism has been looking for ways to strengthen this kind of narrative content,” according to Longhi (2017, p. 16). Just as the intimacy of VR enthralled users with a sense of “being there” at events, the procedural rhetoric of newsgames made for socially efficacious content with unprecedented empathic power, particularly in simulating “how things work by constructing models that people can interact with” (Bogost et al., 2010, p. 6, emphasis in original).

Among the myriad forms of immersive media that pivoted toward complex journalistic narrative content during the first decades of the digital revolution, the serious games industry spawned newsgames, a genre distinguished by content rooted in topics of learned debate, often designed to inspire progressive social and political change. The genetic blueprint of newsgames bears the influence of the serious games ethos, one that views game content not as a form exclusively dedicated to indulgent escapist entertainment, but an entertaining means of edifying and politically empowering players. Serious games aim to have a constructive and beneficial impact on the real world by educating, training (for employee skill building, credentialing, and certification), and informing users. These objectives that drive toward civic engagement through the understanding of complex systems, however, are not without their ludic appeal, especially through dynamic gameplay, imaginative aesthetics, and powerful narrative (Clapper, 2018). Games for Change, Serious Games Interactive, Persuasive Games, and IndieCade brought digital and gaming culture—previously understood strictly as a diversion and escapist pastime—directly into the political arena (Foxman, 2015; Bogost et al., 2010).

With large corporate AAA game companies such as Electronic Arts and Bethesda focusing on violent entertainment-driven fictional content for its predominantly male audience base, indie game developers introduced gender-inclusive games based on actual events with the intent of enhancing the user’s well-being. One innovative serious game, Depression Quest, offers players multiple options for navigating the terrain of psychological depression, illustrating the limitations of mental self-care by blocking several of the paths available for progression through the game’s narrative. The game was released on Steam in 2014, and its independent developer, Zoë Quinn, soon became embroiled in a debate whereby she was falsely accused—on an ex-boyfriend’s blog—of receiving positive coverage from a journalist with whom she was having an intimate relationship. A deluge of attacks on Quinn followed, erupting into the infamous controversy known as Gamergate.

Since the original 2014 allegations linking Quinn to allegedly biased reviews, the discourse on gender and gaming has spawned one of the most notorious and vitriolic instances of online hate speech in the history of the internet. From the outset of the controversy, the supporters of #GamerGate have used Twitter as a platform through which to define and defend their cultural identity as gamers, despite insisting that their purpose was to defend the journalistic principle of objectivity and to eradicate nepotism from gaming reviews (Perreault & Voss, 2016; Braithwaite, 2016). It soon became clear, however, that Gamergate supporters’ tweets were largely unconcerned with protecting the free press from third party interests (Burgess & Matamoros-Fernandez, 2016). If ethics in journalism was not at issue, what larger cultural purposes continue to drive online discussions on gender and gaming, the public discourse of which has been marred by overt violence of death threats and harassments?

This chapter extends and refines Egenfeldt-Nielsen et al.’s (2016) explanation of the strong reactions sparked by Gamergate as “a larger transformation of games away from subculture and toward the mainstream” (179). Gaming’s movement out of the shadows of subcultural pastime into the mainstream is marked by the arrival of increasingly diverse newcomers adding to the ever-widening gender, race, and age demographic of players and creators reflected in Pew survey data (Brown, 2017). Women game developers and players have diversified the use of the medium by leveraging it as a tool for interrogating power in the form of newsgames and other nonfiction games (Washko, 2014, 2017). The rapid growth of independent game development has brought with it a heightened political awareness, giving rise to fresh critiques on the homogeneity and exclusivity of traditional gaming culture (Stuart, 2013). The antifeminist targeting of women gamers/developers that continues in the wake of Gamergate is thus significantly correlated to indie developers of a progressive bent intent on diversifying and politicizing gamespace. By their political and confrontational nature, nonfiction reality-based games therefore pose a direct threat to the notion of gameplay as a fictional world whose magic circle renders it impervious to concerns and social injustice.

Advances in Game Studies have come to an overwhelming consensus countering mid-twentieth-century game theorist Johan Huizinga’s original concept of the magic circle, undermining the assumption that “the act of game playing requires the crossing of a boundary from the ordinary world” into a space of pure fantasy, disconnected entirely from the real world and its political concerns (Calleja, 2015, p. 211; Huizinga, 1955). This apolitical paradigm of gamespace and gameplay has also been proven spurious by critics outside the academy consisting of feminist and progressive gamers. Anita Sarkeesian’s YouTube series Feminist Frequency, for example, provided extensive evidence of misogynistic content not only in the mainstream video game industry’s representation of characters, but also in gameplay, aesthetics, and narrative structure. Her work parallels that of progressive literary critics who objected to apolitical understandings of texts advanced in the 1950s by formalists behind the New Criticism, a movement that evacuated discussion of literature’s social context and political consequences. Through the defense of damaging images of women in game content, Gamergate supporters’ maintenance of an apolitical circle of gamespace form a contemporary analogue to the New Critics of the 1950s.

Anti-feminist discourse functions as a means of demarcating self-identity via boundary work, as Lamont (2000) imagines it, among gamers. On Twitter, links provide important insight into the nature of this resistance as reflected in its rhetorical methods and tactics. Previous Twitter studies have focused on the linguistic content of Twitter data via word and phrase frequency typically clustered by theme for network (Baio, 2014), sentiment (Wofford, 2014), and semantic (Pelafrone, 2016) analyses, among other analytical approaches (Burgess & Matamoros-Fernandez, 2016; Bellmore et al., 2015; Matias et al., 2015; Mortensen, 2016) and critical discourse analysis (Braithwaite, 2016). The most salient links in 1,311 tweets sent over the span of one year from November 1 to October 31, 2017, serve as a means of understanding the discourse of resistance against the diversification of video game content, players, and developers. Building on Braithwaite’s (2016) study of masculinist gamers’ rhetorical tactics used on a range of social media to “defend” against feminists and social justice warriors, discussion later in this chapter considers how linked tweets function as key textual points of reference in the discourse on gender in gaming with direct implications for the rise of newsgames and politicized game content.

The following section details how women indie game developers have impacted gaming discourse in a manner that has paved the way for nonfictional game content. Discussion then considers how the independent game development movement has laid the foundation for newsgames as a progressive innovation in digital storytelling that has advanced away from traditional first-person shooters toward gender-inclusive, nonviolent content serving the journalistic principles of informing and encouraging civic participation. Resistance to the industrial fragmentation and diversification of gaming is then examined in original Twitter data on Gamergate supporters. Findings show Gamergate support on Twitter functions as a mechanism of cultural identity anathema to the progressive ethos of newsgames, a genre built by the independent video game industry, of which women developers play a crucial role.

Women Indie Game Developers

This research takes it as axiomatic that the controversy sparking Gamergate, one of the most vicious and protracted online assaults of women in media history (Mäyrä, 2016), originally targeted female independent game developers and grew into a larger movement to drive women and indie producers, especially those associated with progressive nonfiction game content, out of mainstream gaming culture. Since 2014, the Gamergate hashtag has been utilized more than a million times on Twitter, in many cases as part of coordinated “campaigns aimed at companies whose games the movement’s proponents disagreed with or at individuals—women or minorities, in particular—who were considered to have a progressive agenda,” as Parkin (2019) describes the severing of politics from video games. The resistance to the inclusion of women soldiers in Battlefield V in 2018, for example, sparked a major backlash led by gamers on #NotMyBattlefield who insisted on their removal. In order to protect their market share, mainstream game producers have heeded their warning by avoiding political commentary, whether implicit or explicit, through their game design (Parkin, 2019).

By reflecting on current affairs and directly engaging political themes, newsgames diverge sharply from mainstream AAA games, especially through nonfictional content that can function in progressive ways advocating for marginalized populations. Quinn’s Depression Quest resonates with precisely the ethos of titles featured on Games for Change. The controversy surrounding Quinn that led to Gamergate exposes the well-documented misogynistic strain in the culture of hardcore gaming associated with hyper-masculine first-person shooters. Significantly, it also reflects how Gamergate represented resistance against women, particularly in conjunction with the rise of indie gaming and the politicization of game content associated with female game developers. Although newsgames have been understood as a genre aspiring to AAA game standards like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto, their unwillingness to conform to the business models and even technologies of massive console games has been overlooked. Indeed, most definitions of newsgames as an aspirational genre emphasize its shortcomings with respect to commercial viability, placing them in direct competition with games featuring fictional content.

But newsgames and their developers do not aspire to emulate such AAA titans as Rockstar Games (the makers of GTA and Red Dead Redemption) as a model for commercial success, particularly given the company’s brazen refusal for accountability in the depiction of women in its games (Kushner, 2012). Certainly the independently produced documentary game Never Alone did not need to compromise standards for racial and gender representation to reach its mass audience and critical acclaim, as discussed in the Introduction. What characterized newsgames in the late 2000s—they lacked a truly successful title to compete with AAA games, few were fun or entertaining, the insularity of serious newsgame designers isolated them from the game design world, and perhaps most crucially, “the ubiquity of independent games could address news subjects, but did not necessarily abide by journalistic principles”—no longer applied in the 2010s (Foxman, 2015, p. 10). Not only are these post-2010 titles...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Mainstreaming of Gaming Culture and Journalism’s Ludic Turn
• 1 Journalism and the Politicization of Game Content
• 2 News Branding Through News Experiences
• 3 Games as Advocacy Journalism
• 4 Open-World Game Narratives
• 5 Documentary Games
• 6 Social Media and Mobile Gaming
• 7 Immersive Design: VR Journalism
• Conclusion: The Ultimate Empathy Machine? Games About Refugees and Migrants
• Index