News meets games

The most exciting part of the second day of the conference DNA 2008 was about news and games. Serious gaming offers great possibilities to look at news in a complete different way. The user can virtually be placed in a complex situation in the world and learn about the backgrounds and dilemmas. Increasingly games and real news are combined, which offers a great user experience. Another interesting part of the program was about news and social networks.

The discussion about news and games started with a few very interesting presentations. Mikkel Lucas Overby, commercial director of Serious Games Interactive, started with neutralizing the widespread idea that gaming is for kids, especially boys. The average age of a gamer is 33 years old and 38% of the gamers is female. Serious Games Interactive is a company that creates games that go further than entertainment. It produces for the private and educational market. Overby showed the demo of the ‘Palestine game’ from the serie ‘Global Conflicts’:

In a 3D-environment you can play the role of a journalist. Your actions influence the level on which you are trusted by the different parties. In this way you can experience how it is to be like in this specific situation and what the consequences of your actions may be. Overby predicts a huge development of Alternate Reality Games (ARG), which mix the real and virtual world and are build with existing techniques. These type of games are relatively inexpensive and have a short time to market.

Documentary meets game
The second presentation was also quite inspiring. The Dutch tv-company VPRO makes a series of documentaries with the title ‘Tegenlicht’. Director Shuchen Tan explained that the team works with themes as a basis for the documentaries. One of the actual themes is the future of energy. The complex geo-political battle around this subject is hard to tell in a lineair story. The reason that Tegenlicht wants to explore gaming is the opportunity to present the story in an interactive way and offer experience based learning. The Dutch company Submarine developed ‘Energy Wars, the game’. The game is based on the research for the documentary and uses material from the documentary and the archive of Tegenlicht. The story of the game is that in 2020 the world is threatened bij the Third World War due to an energy-crisis. The player goes back to 2008 and has 12 years to prevent the war. During the game he can follow three different strategies. It’s an online 2D-game and single player only, but attractive cause real tv-material is used.

Shoot headlines
Catherine Captain, vice president of marketing of msnbc.com, presents a quite different approach to news and games. Msnbc.com developed an online game called the NewsBreaker. During the game headlines are literally dropped. It’s hard to believe that this has anything to do with serious consumption of news, but Captain says the click through-ratio is quite high. Quite hilarious is the same game as an interactive game in a cinema. I think it’s nice for a buzz, but not a relevant development. Watch the human joysticks in this video on YouTube:

Play the news
Really impressive was the presentation of Eric Brown, CEO of ImpactGames. His company is developing the game ‘Play the news’, which offers a juicy interactive layer round a real news-headline. A player can collect the basic information that he needs to understand the situation better, from geographical maps to points of view from different relevant organizations. The game combines that with real news headlines about the subjects. The game is not yet available, but watch this interview on Fox News about the previous game Peacemaker:

All these examples show that games offer a great opportunity to explain more about very complex situations all over the world. Not only for kids, but for everyone who wants to browse news and backgrounds in a complete different and engaging way.

News and social networks
Earlier that day the subject of a paneldiscussion was news and social networks. Again it’s not a subject only concerning kids, because the average age in Second Life is 32 years and most users of the Dutch social network Hyves are women between 20 and 30 years old. Rowan Barnett of Bild T-Online is editor in chief of The AvaStar, a newspaper that covers everything that happens in Second Life. The content is completely user generated by avatars, but professionaly edited in the real world. Untill now it’s a weekly edition in pdf. Soon it will be relaunched as a blog, that can be published in more languages. The concept can also be re-used for other virtual worlds. Barnett emphasises the fact that Second Life must be seen as a testcase and just shows the beginning of virtual worlds. He thinks in the future there will be a tighter connection between the real life identity and the virtual identity. Escapism, as is seen in Second Life a lot so far, will decrease. The use of virtual worlds wil explode in education and entertainment. News companies must prepare to meet their end consumers in a 3D-environment.

News portals based on behavior
The question is if a 3D-environment is necessary for a social network. The Dutch social network Hyves became very popular without it. Yme Bosma, manager business development & partnerships, told that Hyves is thinking about news portals. You can make interesting combinations if you know which news items are popular and who the users are. As an end user you can see in a news portal for example what interests people:

• of your age
• in your neighbourhood
• with common interests
• etc.

Different views on this topic
However this was an interesting subject, it was to broad for one paneldiscussion. My conclusion is that there are a few different developments concerning news and social networks and each topic is worth to be discussed on its own next year:

• communities round websites of newspapers, broadcasters or other publishers
• personalized and hyper local news in social networks
• presence of traditional media in Second Life and other virtual worlds
• news coverage of what happens in virtual worlds

Too much …
It’s impossible to cover the whole conference in just two articles. I chose the parts of the program that inspired me the most personally. But please leave a reaction on this article if you know other blogs or websites that covered this conference.