Tuesday, February 08, 2005

Games and news

Keyword: . While searching for a definition of shovelware specific to news organisations, I came across this curious welcome speech of a conference from 2001 entitled "Playing the News: Interactive Narrative and Games". It gives a number of useful links (many, sadly, dead) to examples of forms of online journalism, while the overview of the conference still suggests some creative ways of thinking around interactive methods of journalism.

Certainly I think the opportunities for using games within journalism have been vastly under-exploited, most likely because that sort of thinking comes from a computing paradigm, rather than the print and broadcast journalism paradigms which have dominated online newsrooms in the past decade. Even a simple quiz can engage the reader in ways that a clickable interactive fails to do, while reinforcing information and making it more memorable.

Anyway, here's some of those useful links:
"MSNBC’s Rainforest simulation : http://www.msnbc.com/news/568276.asp

These are decision making elements that get a reader involved in thinking about the implications of decisions.

The Guardian’s Budget Game:http://www.guardian.co.uk/Budget_Game

Quiz Game:

News quizzes or quizzes related to a news story – here’s the Beatles one..
http://www.cnn.com/2000/SHOWBIZ/Music/09/04/beatles/index.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/newsquiz/0,5962,362873,00.html

The Helsingen Sanomat Head Hunter game is really just a feature column on how to be effective in a job interview – made into an interactive quiz…

http://www.helsinki-hs.net/webortage/headhunter/headhunter.html

Arcade Games with a learning component

The Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinel has a whole series of things they have done… http://www.sun-sentinel.com/graphics/entertainment/ show the roach game…

Product tie-in game – done by the newspaper… our own Jesse Weisbeck did the Escape from Mars game… http://www.twincities.com/extra/promotions/mars_game.htm"

As I'm a lazy thing let me know which ones are dead and I'll put a note.

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