Journalism orientated hackathons are fast becoming a valuable way of generating new ideas and formats for digital media.

Marcus Bösch

“I always think it’s fantastic that people with different backgrounds work together,” said newsgames hackathon organizer, Marcus Bösch.

Bösch is a journalist and media trainer (he also works for DW Akademie) and is at the forefront of developing news games in Germany, where he co-founded the Good Evil games studio.

“You have a journalist and a programmer and they talk together to solve problems,” Bösch said to onMedia’s Guy Degen at the event, which ran from May 6-7, 2014.

“That’s the way we should work. That’s the only way forward. Otherwise we’ll keep on publishing articles that were made out of a Reuters feed for the next hundred years and that can’t be the future of journalism.”

The newsgames expert Tomas Rawlings was also on hand in Cologne to give advice to the hackers. He’s conscious that news editors often have a strong perception that “games equal fun or equal trivial” or the medium “can’t be used to cover a serious subject”.

Tomas Rawlings

Rawlings argues that newsgames should focus on engagement and not necessarily on being fun to play. His gaming studio Auroch Digital has developed successful newsgames that have tackled serious topics such as the civil war in Syria and climate change.

Pitching ideas and hacking

After a round of brainstorming and pitching ideas, the participants at the Newsgames Hackathon formed into six teams and got hacking.

The ideas for games were very diverse – from a smartphone application “iPay” to help you understand the costs behind products, to a “FIFA World Cup Planner” exploring the challenges preparing the football world cup, to a Flappy Bird inspired game – “Flap your Privilege” – that lets you experience how different dimensions of your identity – race, class, gender, sexual orientation, education or ability – will affect the ease or difficulty with which you fly though life.

At the end of the second day, all six teams had produced a functioning prototype of their newsgame. Among the teams, there was certainly a lot of relief for making the deadline. But there was also a sense that, at least among European “newsgamers”, they could go back to their newsrooms with new ideas for newsgame development and production workflows.

While hackathons are important, says Bösch, it’s important to get the newsroom behind the project.

“All you can do in the hackathon is produce a prototype,” he said. “If the journalists and programmers go back to their newsrooms and convince their editors to make the game for real, that’s the next step.”

So where is the emerging field of newsgames heading?

onMedia spoke to some of the newsgames hackers to find out what they learned and achieved and to get a sense of where this innovative branch of journalism might be going.

Xavier de la Vega, Journalist (Shame Gas team)

What have you learned at this newsgames hackathon?

As a journalist, I deal with facts. I’m not a game designer but what really interested me is this idea of trying to translate ideas into a real games experience. You can conceive very different games and the focus here is more on mechanics. It was very challenging for me to start from a concept, and use all the information I gathered to produce a real game using simple mechanics.

Do you have any doubts about the potential of newsgames?

No. The difficult part is to find a business model for these kind of games and also that they become accepted. Newsgames can be fun to make and fun to play, but I don’t think fun games are the ones media networks are looking for. It’s clear that media networks want news, they want information. And basically the mechanics and tone [of the game] must be focused on that.

Elena Cresci, Community Co-ordinator, Guardian (Flap your Privilege team)

What have you learned at this newsgames hackathon?

Even though I’m very interested in news games and what they can bring to news organizations I know very little about how to make them. I feel as if I’ve learned much more now. Maybe not in terms of coding but in the skills I need to get it together. It’s also shown me how important it is to have a team of people who are working together. As Tomas [Rawlings] said, you need three people: a journalist, a developer and graphic designer and I think that’s very true. I think a lot of news organizations have those people already, it’s just a matter of getting them together and taking the opportunity to make something.

As a journalist, what skills or practices do you need to work in a team that is developing a newsgame?

I think you need to have an open mind. I’ve noticed that I used to play games a lot when I was younger but I haven’t recently and I think that’s impacted me a little bit because I’ve not been thinking about playability – how would I approach this game as a player? So I think it’s important to have at least an awareness of games. And a willingness to experiment. I think a lot of organisations are very used to being stuck in their ways and the only way to change is to experiment.

Matthias Huber, Journalist, Süddeutsche Zeitung (World Cup Planner team)

What have you learned at this newsgames hackathon?

What I’ve realized here is it’s very challenging to produce a newsgame that conveys information and is also fun and keeps the player engaged. I believe that’s the main realisation for me. I think we shouldn’t make newsgames that are not fun. The player should always want to continue playing.

What are you bringing back to your newsroom from this hackathon?

That you can develop very fun newsgames in a short amount of time, and that newsgames don’t necessarily have to be a big production with 3D and animation to be fun.

Text and photographs by Guy Degen

Deutsche Welle was a media partner of the Newsgame Hackathon hosted at the Cologne Game Lab.

Newsgames need not be expensive and complicated to develop. In this post, Marcus Bösch, DW Akademie trainer and director of the Serious Game Studios the Good Evil, explains what you need to produce a small game based on a straightforward example.

“Newsgames are sometimes not much more difficult to produce, than interactive graphics,” says Sisi Wei, who works for the American non-profit news desk ProPublica. Check out her comprehensive blog post about Creating Games for Journalism.

And it’s true. A couple of months ago I developed with my game studio, the Good Evil, a small fully functioning game on the topic of Prism within just four days. It’s all about a playable political commentary, one of many possible sub-genres of newsgames.

Is this journalism?

In the past few weeks we have modified and adapted a puzzle game we programmed for Germany’s international broadcaster Deutsche Welle. The result was GI Jumble, a sort of modern sliding puzzle that allows you to rearrange the photos selected by the Global Ideas team. Though let’s press the pause button for a moment before I go into more details. Of course, one might ask: What on earth does this have to do with journalism?

A legitimate question. The puzzle takes content that already exists, in this case the photos of reporters who traveled around the world, and displays them in a new context. The game is interactive and allows users to explore the content. By rearranging the images yourself, the experience with the photograph is much more intense than by pure observation. This can serve as an ice breaker or point of introduction and lead to more thorough examination of the Global Ideas content. Apart from that it’s also fun to play with a puzzle on a computer or tablet PC . And who says journalism should not also be entertaining and fun?

So how does it work?

What do you need to produce a game like GI Jumble? You generally need a game designer who comes up with the game idea; a graphic designer, who comes up with the design of the puzzle; and then of course you still need a programmer who implements the whole thing, making sure that it technically works.

With GI Jumble we were able to fall back on a game CC play that we had already implemented for the German Archives with the support of the German Wikimedia Foundation. The mechanics of the puzzle already existed. And thanks to HTML5, it was possible to play the game both on traditional PCs and Tablet PCs with touch interface. We have published the entire code for CC play under an MIT license, free to use for Github – of course we appreciate modifications.

Flickr and the API

To transform CC Play into GI Jumble, our programmer Guido had to play around with the code a bit. Primarily we had to include the pictures of the Global Ideas photographers into the game.

We decided to use a programming interface (API) that Flickr offers. The significance of so-called API’s can not be overestimated in the age of digital journalism. Here on Read Write you can find an introductory text about this topic.

Simply put, Flickr hosts the images and with every game GI Jumble (dynamically) grabs them, mixes them, adds a caption once they are assembled and makes the end result available. The categories in the game (people, water, nature, wind, solar, biomass) are the tags of the photos used in the Flickr album.

This means: if you now add additional images to the Flickr album and tag them, GI Jumble does not have to be reprogrammed. It just grabs the new images. A sustainable solution.

In cooperation with the graphics department of the Deutsche Welle we then adjusted the puzzle visually. The inserted image gives an overview of what you have to pay attention to. The usual separate handling of content and form on the web guarantees that the puzzle can also be modified afterwards, without meddling with the mechanics of the game.

Soon, in every newsroom

GI Jumble is just a small example of a game, which can be significantly more complicated. As games enable an interactive experience and can therefore often better explain things than traditional linear media, I’m pretty sure we will see more of this in the future .

For inspiration and ideas I recommend the following list. And who knows, maybe  British newsgame designer Tomas Rawlings is right with the prediction he made recently at a conference, that in the future every newsroom will also include a game designer.

Rock Your Newsroom

This young media genre is currently developing worldwide. Brazil already has  a growing newsgame community and the trend has also spilled to Africa. It’s a newsgame that won the first sub-Saharan African Newsroom Hackathon in mid-September 2013. The prototype was finished after 48 hours. None of the three team members Loni, Fiona and Carla had ever attended a hackathon before, and they had also  never previously worked on a news app before: “The fact did we could pull together a working prototype in less than two days will rock our newsroom.”

Since 2001 Marcus Bösch has worked as a freelance editor, author and trainer for Deutsche Welle. After completing a masters degree in Game Development and Research, he founded in 2012 the game studio the Good Evil GmbH. Together with his colleague Linda Kruse, Bösch designs serious games and newsgames for cultural institutions, NGOs and media houses.

From a playable political cartoon to a simulation of Osama bin Ladens death – newsgames are embraced by the media to playfully engage the audience in important events. In other words, newsgames are games put to use in the context of journalism.

“Newsgames will not replace classical approaches to news but they can and will enhance and augment digital journalism in the 21st century,” says Marcus Bösch.

The freelance journalism trainer has led numerous workshops for DW Akademie and is the co-founder of The Good Evil game studio. DW Akademie’s Natalia Karbasova spoke with Marcus Bösch about the idea behind newsgames, best practices and the future of newsgames.

How can newsgames be helpful for media outlets?

Newsgames can provide playful and interactive experiences that help explain, clarify or strengthen journalistic arguments – whether a simulation of complex scientific issues, a playable version of the national budget or an interactive political commentary. Games are very strong when it comes to explaining systems while traditional ways of reporting are very good at telling stories. Another huge advantage is that games are truly interactive. They show their unique strength when you compare them to the so-called webdocs make when it comes to interactivity. Good games engage players, keep them busy and let them learn something.

Do newsgames have to be as elaborate as video games?

I was very critical with all the existing examples I saw until I heard the arguments of the game designer Eric Zimmerman at this year’s Games for Change festival. Zimmerman argued that we don’t look for the same kind of world-changing effects from documentary films or books, and we don’t discuss bookification or the merit of books as educational tools. He argued that video games do not deserve this kind of scrutiny, and holding them to these higher standards is ‘like saying a medical simulation for training doctors should also cure cancer’. That actually convinced me. The genre is still in the making and I applaud nearly every attempt ever taken to push things forward.

Where can you learn more about newsgames?

Florent Maurin´s List is a good starting point. Apart from that, I like Thomas Rawlings’games. Gonzalo Frasca who somewhat coined the whole concept should be on the list as well. And then there’s Wired´s Cutthroat Capitalism, a gamelike economic analysis of the Somali pirate business model.

There’s also a game Could you be a medallist by The Guardian, in which anyone can compare their performance in four Olympic disciplines with that of top athletes of different years. You could also check Moral Kombat, the Obama vs Romney debate game by the Huffington Post and a fun interactive article Just One More Game by the New York Times.

For those interested, I would recommend the book Newsgames. Journalism at Play.

What’s going on in the international newsgames community?

As far as I can say, Germany is a blind spot when it comes to newsgames. I do not know of any German newsgames that have been developed in the last years and I don’t know of any media outlets really digging into it.

Maybe this will all change after several events this year with the RTL Summer School focusing on the topic, a newsgame-panel on the Gamescom and this year’s Scoopcamp.

Internationally, the situation is quite different. Different US and UK media outlets have been trying out the concept for years. There was a huge Hackathon at the New York Times headquarters in April and you have developers like Game The News in the UK. There is also a strong Brazilian newsgames community and the newspaper Le Monde in France has accomplished a newsgame, to name a few.

What knowledge and technical skills does a media outlet need to develop newsgames?

Many modern media outlets bring together programmers and members of the editorial team. To accomplish a game, you need a game designer who develops the idea, a programmer who makes things work technically and a designer who makes things look good. When it comes to newsgames, an editor and a game designer should work on the concept together in order to choose suitable game mechanics.

What are the main components a game should posess in order to be popular with the public?

Is journalism supposed to be popular? In my opinion, a good newsgame like a great piece of traditional journalism should provide you with new insights, a learning and a crucial experience. The major goal of a newsgame is not necessarily to attract millions of players. Even though a fitting game mechanic smartly implemented that supports intrinsic motivation via meaning, mastery and autonomy can help.

What are typical mistakes which occur while producing newsgames?

The most important lesson is: Not everything is a game nor can it be squeezed into the concept of a game. Another common mistake is to underestimate the effect of a suitable game mechanic. The mechanic is the core carrier of meaning. Apart from that it is very easy to get lost in the ever-nerv-wrecking triangle of cost, time and quality. If your game copes with actual news it should not take months to finish it.

Does the development of new devices like Google Glass bring new perspective to newsgames?

I am convinced that everything is or will be mobile pretty soon depending on the place on earth where you stand. I do not know if Google Glass can really catch up to the hype there is right now. There have already been attempts to use Google Glass for newsgames – even though these are very early ideas. Mobile and or wearable devices bring great opportunities for gaming in general and I’m very curious to see who will succeed embracing these new chances. Next to wearable devices sensors, drones provide even more ways for adding game mechanics to ordinary things like, let’s say, jogging.

What is in your opinion the future of newsgame?

Right now the usage of games spreads outside the bounds of the traditional games industry. Games and simulations are already used for training, education and preparation for future wars while the buzzword gamification startles advertisers and businessmen. It sounds strange to me that journalism of all things should remain one of the few spots that is not touched by games at all.

While adopting new and crucial rules and ways of doing journalism in the 21st century media outlets should embrace games in order to be capable of providing meaningful and interactive experiences. I‘m sure that we will see more trial and error in order to experience stunning new ways of journalism pretty soon.