A game approach could definitely help, I think, but it seems to me the game should be about finding genuine, useful news within the raw material of individual reporting (from, say, Reuters), and putting that raw news into a context determined by the current state of play.

In other words, the game is not to become an energy exec, or a mayor, or hospital admin, but rather to become an editor, to become part of synthesizing a constantly-changing front page. This involves fact checking existing stories and adding solid context. One way to get points is to attract a following, to gain more readers (votes?) among the community of news editor participants. Another way to get points is to prove to the community’s satisfaction that someone else’s facts are wrong or that their story is not relevant to the current state of gameplay. By doing that, you take away and keep any positive points earned by the story’s author for that article.

Another site that has played with gaming is Minnesota Public Radio, part of their public insight model. They created a game around personal energy consumption as well as an “idea generator.” Holler at me or Jonathan Groves for background, we did a study on it.

However, I think that specific topic-based games are take too long to produce, would not see a high adoption rate due to their niche focus, and don’t allow users to quickly understand a complex problem.

Therefore, I think the gaming aspect to news must be a part of the system of delivery. A quick post of mine at future of context on the use of Topics instead of stories as the atom of news leads me to conclude that a gaming element can be introduced around how people follow topics.

Perhaps people follow Barack Obama in 2005 get 5 points, when he announces presidential candidacy he’s worth 10, 20 when he gets the nomination and as president, perhaps 40. Or… make it a business: make points worth cents.

Either way, the system reward users for being “in-the-know.” Users could also get points when the read the updates to a Topic, or assist in crowdsourcing, or post a popular comment, or share a topic.

As Howard Weaver pointed out, what’s missing from consuming news is incentive. People are incentivized to gift a virtual beer to their friends but not to participate with news. We need to replace the “hard news is eating your wheaties” metaphor with “news is just information – it’s a game to see how much you know about what you care about.” (Or something much more cleverly worded.)

The Economist tried this once. Back when oil prices were through the roof we developed a game together with Chevron called Energyville, which is still up at http://www.willyoujoinus.com/energyville/. It’s a bit like Farmville; you have to decide how much of every kind of energy source to use to power a city, balancing financial costs and environmental impacts.

Unfortunately we didn’t track how well it actually helped people understand the energy debate. I suspect it didn’t, perhaps because it focused on the wrong aspects. A better game for the time might have been one in which you play a member of OPEC and are trying to move oil prices while balancing other aspects of your national economy and security, for example. Another obvious drawback was that it wasn’t social.

Either way, up to now the problem hasn’t been merely that journalists think too narrowly about what a “story” is. Game design has required a whole separate set of skills that journalists don’t have. It’s been hard and expensive to do.

Judging from things coming out of SXSW (which I’m increasingly bummed I didn’t go to) such as the #10minarg and #anyonecancreate panels, it’s becoming easier to give journos a toolbox for game creation. However, while cutesy little cookie-cutter games and transmedia are fine for marketing purposes, to get across complex subjects like world energy markets or healthcare you need games that are

- multiplayer
- long-running
- evolve with time
- allow the injection of new conditions to reflect real-world breaking news

So I suspect the charge won’t come from journalists appropriating a bunch of game toolkits to set up mini-games on their sites, but game designers who team up with journalists to identify a few big issues that can be the next Mafia Wars, and figure out how to make them (a) simple enough for anyone to join at any point (b) absorbing enough to attract lots of people and keep them engaged over time, and (c) subtle enough to reflect the complexities of the real world.