News + games, how to achieve the linkage effect of 1+1>2?

On New Year's Day 2022, the "Surging Crossword" launched by The Paper was officially launched, which is a text-related puzzle game that has attracted many users to actively participate and actively share. Crossword puzzles have a long history, first appearing in the New York World on December 21, 1913. Not long ago, the New York Times announced the acquisition of the globally popular crossword puzzle Wordle, and some people believe that the ultimate purpose of the New York Times' acquisition of such a game is to use the form of games for media self-marketing.

Under the background of deep media integration and the rapid development of digital technology, using the thinking of games to provide news products for the audience has become a new idea for the transformation and integration of major news media.

The game is the shell, the news is the core

The concept of "game news" is generally believed to have been coined by Uruguayan game designer Gonzalo Flasca in 2003 when he founded the news game website Newsgaming.com. At present, there is no consensus on the definition of "news game" in academic circles.

According to the different forms, functions, production subjects and distribution platforms, some scholars divide news games into two categories: first, serious games adapted as news events, developers are mainly game production companies and independent game producers; second, as a program modification strategy for interactive news, the producers are news media or media commissioned game companies to produce. The former focuses on the game category, while the latter focuses more on the news category.

As far as content production is concerned, news events provide a steady stream of content support for game products, and the addition of game elements has greatly changed the form of news dissemination, and the two complement each other's advantages to achieve a win-win situation.

Foreign media explore this road earlier and faster. In 2014, Al Jazeera created the interactive news game Fish theft, which tells the story of journalists investigating illegal fishing in West African countries and brings in 80% of new users. In 2015, the BBC launched a text-based adventure game, Journey to Syria, in which readers were "personally" involved in exile as Syrian refugees, at a time when the Syrian civil war was in its fourth year. During the 2016 U.S. election, CNN launched the poll prediction game Politic Prediction Market, which imitates the operation of the stock market and predicts the outcome of the campaign through the rise and fall of stocks.

Mainland China's practical exploration of news games is still in its infancy. The People's Daily, which was very popular in previous years, "Look! This is my military uniform" small application, Xinhua News Agency's "Fly over Shenzhou" project, the Communist Youth League Central Committee 'Re-walk the Long March' game, etc., are all useful explorations of news games, but at that time, these innovative ways of integrating media were not defined as "games". And "surging crossword" is not the first time that the domestic media have tested the water crossword puzzle, as early as 1999, the "Small Strong Crossword" column launched by the column edition of Southern Weekend has set off a crossword boom. Today, these traditional newspaper games are taking on new life with the blessing of digital technology.

What does Gaming + News bring?

Yu Guoming, executive dean of the School of Journalism and Communication of Beijing Normal University, once pointed out that in today's increasingly surplus communication resources, the audience standard has been established, and relationship communication, emotional communication, and scene communication have increasingly replaced one-to-many one-way communication and become the mainstream, games have great potential in building effective communication in the surplus era. In recent years, more and more media organizations have begun to try to gamify reporting, which is not only a "self-help" choice for the news industry to accelerate reconstruction, or active or passive, but also because the two forms of news and games are connected in internal mechanism and underlying logic. Its combination product, game news, innovates the news style from three aspects: transmission relationship, narrative mode, and communication effect.

1. Interactive communication. In game journalism, participants are no longer passive "audiences" who mechanically accept information in the traditional media era, but become "high-end players" who consciously choose news, participate in news, and even change the development process of news. The American scholar Paul Levenson once put forward the famous "compensatory media" theory, arguing that any kind of successor media can remedy or compensate for a certain functional defect or lack of function of the existing medium. Game news is to improve the shortcomings of traditional news one-way dissemination, maximize the enthusiasm and participation of users, and effectively drive users' active feedback and spontaneous sharing.

2. Spatialized narrative. An article in the "Beijing News Media Research" said, "'Storytelling' is the biggest intersection of the functions of media and games." News and games, which originally belonged to two dimensions, collided to build a news game. Some scholars say that the news game breaks the original linear narrative mode, through the use of various media forms and the organic integration of a variety of symbols, so that news events are no longer presented in isolation, but form an open, multi-dimensional, hierarchical, multi-space narrative form. This new narrative mode is not only the evolution trend of news dissemination in the context of all media, but also the meaning of gamified thinking.

3. Immersive experience. Jiang Xiaoli, a professor at Sichuan University, once stressed in her review of the unique media landscape of game journalism that "the immersive experience at the audience perception level is also a very important aspect. "In game news, through the creation of the environment and the setting of rules, users can be placed in the news scene in a role-playing manner and immerse themselves in the whole process of the event. This switch from the perspective of the other to the first person well awakens the user's "empathy" experience and strengthens the communication effect. Not only that, in games such as iReporter, Bad News, news tower, etc., users can also become journalists and put themselves in the shoes of the production logic behind the news.

From cognition to practice, two major risk points need to be paid attention to

News games are a major product of media convergence. However, the development of news games has not been smooth, especially in the domestic situation where the academic community is hotly discussed but the industry is cold. Specifically, there are two major risk points to pay attention to.

From a cognitive point of view, the form of entertainment of news games has raised public concerns about journalistic professionalism and journalistic ethics, such as whether the entertainment of games will dissolve the seriousness of news. Does the virtuality of the game dissolve the reality of reality? Does the subjectivity of the game dissolve the objectivity of the facts? Once "Journey to Syria" went live, it came under fire from the Daily Mail and The Sun: it was immoral to gamify news and "unbelievable" to turn humanitarian disasters into games. Liu Hailong, a professor at the School of Journalism at Chinese University, once pointed out: "We also see that the game of communication is easily alienated by various power invasions. From the participant's point of view, most of the communication games are prone to irrational psychology because they do not take on realistic responsibilities. ”

In fact, the "genetic conflict" between news and games is not irreconcilable, and the two can even achieve an ideal state of organic integration in the collision. Among them, news organizations should always adhere to the principle of transmitting real information and doing a good job of quality content, and adhere to the news bottom line in the process of developing game news. At the same time, we will strengthen the risk control of game news and avoid the flow of games that may have adverse social impacts to the market.

From the perspective of practice, there are still three challenges in the actual production process of news games: one is the imbalance between early investment and subsequent output, to some extent, it will "dissuade" the media's desire to try; second, there are few game professionals in the news media industry, making it difficult to form an effective connection between content creativity and technology landing; third, multiple blockbuster games are often short-lived, the product vitality is not long, the user retention is not high, and some people call the previously unlimited creative H5 games "tears of the times" 。

The development of the era of integrated media is constantly putting forward higher requirements for news organizations, and the introduction of Internet product thinking to do news games can become one of the trends. Some articles list the reasons why journalism needs to continue to develop product thinking from five aspects, and answer the question of "how to do it" from three dimensions: mentality, skills and experience. Of course, news games are not just about packaging news in the form of games, they are a content product in themselves, which needs to accurately grasp the needs and excitement of users and promote value co-creation.

In terms of long-term needs, can gamification become the "best way to play" the transformation choice of news media? The answer is not yet known. However, only 4 months after the launch of "Surging Crossword", the performance of the game completion rate of more than 96% may be glimpsed, news games have deep user stickiness characteristics and expected market prospects, but also be vigilant against the risks brought by excessive entertainment.

Resources:

How did Scrabble Wordle become one of the big layouts for The New York Times to tap into its 15 million subscription target |? Dewai Window", WeChat public account "Dewai No. 5", March 1, 2022, https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/Ig0wzSkpnn4yvGHLqvvxbg

PAN Yanan. News Games: Concepts, Motivations and Features[J].Journalist, 2016(09):22-28.DOI:10.16057/j.cnki.31-1171/g2.2016.09.004.

YU Guoming,YANG Yingxi. Participation, Immersion, feedback: Three Elements of Effective Communication in the Surplus Era: A Theoretical Discussion on the Game Paradigm as the Mainstream Paradigm of Future Communication[J].China Press, 2018(08):16-22.

The Digital McLuhan: A Guide to a New Era of Informatization. Beijing:Social Sciences Academic Press.]

Beijing News Media Research. When the News Meets the Game: 7 Classic Cases that Take You Back to the Scene as a Player.https://baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id=1653077651521260218&wfr=spider&for=pc,2019-12-16.

LIU Shengnan,CHEN Yuan. China Media Science and Technology, 2016(Z1):50-53.DOI:10.19483/j.cnki.11-4653/n.2016.z1.016.

Cover News. Professor Jiang Xiaoli of Sichuan University: Gamified communication represented by news games has been used as a new form of integrated communication.https://www.thecover.cn/news/731903,2018-05-04.

Love Fan. Journey to Syria: Can News Be Gamified?.https://www.ifanr.com/508672,2015-04-07.

LIU Hailong. The Theory of Mass Communication: Paradigms and Genres. Beijing:Chinese University Press.]

Author: Dong Hui, trainee assistant researcher of the People's Daily New Media Think Tank

Qu Xiaocheng, researcher of the People's Daily New Media Think Tank

Editor: Yan Shengfa | Editor-in-charge: Zhu Yuping Xia Yue

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