FINAL REPORT FROM THE JOLT TEAM ON GAME AND ENGAGEMENT DESIGN

Can engagement design help engagement in journalism?

The JoLT team says yes. Here is the final report, including links to all the newsgame projects, plus a toolkit for newsrooms. And here is an executive summary of the report.

The program, funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, wanted to know:

What can game designers teach journalists about creating engaging experiences?
How can an engagement-design approach make journalism more interactive and compelling?

To explore these ideas, the JoLT team created a number of projects, while also collaborating with local and national news organizations.

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Year One Learnings

Human-centered design

Game designers excel at creating experiences with the player at the forefront. For journalism, this means creating news experiences with participants in mind, not just an audience. It means making storytelling less of a linear narrative and more of a conversation, incorporating a constellation of elements that make up a story for today’s news generation.

The game design process has other lessons for journalists. It includes a tight feedback loop: Design. Get feedback. Iterate. Improve. Failure is expected and built into the design loop. News production could make greater room for user feedback and participation.

Engagement

What makes playing a game so absorbing? Taking inspiration from game designers, the team is exploring how to design a news experience that weaves together a compelling mix of context, goals, challenges and rewards that encourages consumers’ ongoing involvement.

Experience

Interactivity and relevance make news engaging. It’s not enough to simply broadcast news to a general audience anymore.

The JoLT fellows designed an information experience to allow people to literally consume the news. At Newspark, curious passersby stopped to play a card game designed to inform them about the amount of water required to make their favorite foods. Their next meal is literally about news consumption – and creates a direct, relevant connection to the information about water consumption.

Agency

Like players in games, news users want to be able to affect their world. Not only do people want to be informed, they want to be able to do something with the information. That can be as simple as sharing an article, donating to a cause, or “winning” the dinner party with salient facts and ideas. Effective journalism can help news users feel agency and connection – and even spark them to do something.

Play

Play allows people to safely experiment in a contained world. The news production process, delivery and consumption can all benefit from a playful approach. The JoLT fellows created a game called Spark to introduce quick-thinking, out-of-the-box adaptation to ever-changing constraints. The aim is to help create an environment that encourages risk-taking and collaboration.

HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE JOLT II SUMMIT

American University Game Lab Director Lindsay Grace identifies three ways journalists can learn from game designers.

Jamin Warren, founder of Kill Screen, shares his insights on the future of news and games.

Professor Ben Stokes discusses how to use games to connect with real-world communities and encourage civic engagement.

Retha Hill, executive director of the New Media Innovation and Entrepreneurship Lab at Arizona State University, provides a case example of what happened when newsrooms integrate games into their system.

Heather Chaplin is the director of Journalism and Design at the New School. She discusses how the biggest news stories of our time are about complex systems and how games are equipped to tell stories about those systems.

Matt Thompson, Deputy Editor at the Atlantic, differentiates “play” from “games” and advocates for the use of play in telling news stories.