Abstract
If you don’t consider yourself a “gamer,” you might not see yourself reaching for David O. Dowling’s book on The Gamification of Digital Journalism. But if you’ve ever read your news on a smart phone, you probably played a newsgame whether you were aware of it or not. I encourage all journalism researchers and educators to overcome any preconceptions to learn more about the astonishing recent newsgame projects that engage users in entirely novel ways.
Dowling, an associate professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa, provides a thoroughly researched overview of the last 10 years of game development in journalism. A decade after the seminal Newsgames: Journalism at Play (2010) by Ian Bogost, Simon Ferrari, and Bobby Schweizer, the book surveys how the field has changed, moving beyond augmented digital journalism, such as the New York Times’ renowned Snow Fall, to innovative “serious” games like Cloud Chaser and immersive virtual reality content like Use of Force. Relatively free of gamer jargon, the book examines how “games function as journalism” (p. 2). The core of this case is placed in the middle chapters of the book. Chapter 2, titled “News Branding Through News Experiences,” probes the financial viability of newsgames. While Dowling puts a decidedly positive spin on the potential for cross-promotion and audience tracking, the rest of the book’s examples show a different picture. Most successful game projects, even if initiated by independent developers, are connected to funding from foundations, humanitarian organizations, and universities. Only major news brands, such as the New York Times, Al Jazeera, and European public broadcasters, seem to have the money, time, and innovative drive to hire game developers. Despite being ground-breaking, therefore, many newsgames will remain “loss leader[s] designed to drive online traffic to the monetizing website” (p. 56) of a news organization.
In Chapter 3 (“Games as Advocacy Journalism”), Dowling makes the convincing case that encoding a clear message or even a donation button in a game does not mean giving up on traditional news principles such as objectivity. Instead, by employing in-depth journalistic strategies, such as interviews and background reporting, producers of newsgames construct an intensified veracity that, similar to so-called solutions journalism, can center around human empathy. Dowlings’s previous research on slow journalism and digital longform storytelling guides his endorsement of the complex video game projects in Chapter 4, titled “Open-World Game Narratives.” Intricate set-ups such as in Walden: A Game and We Are Chicago took years to produce and were based on painstaking research. To him, they are an important “alternative to and critique of mainstream media produced on a manic-twitter-driven news cycle” (p. 87). Chapter 5 (“Documentary Games”) extends this argument by explaining how many games fulfill the journalistic functions of civic education and public awareness, often by integrating voices of populations on the margins, such as the poor or immigrants.
In the next two chapters, Dowling evaluates games from the small screen of a smart phone to all-immersive virtual realities. Both areas have benefited tremendously from rapid technological advances that have made game development and distribution much faster and sustainable. Chapter 6 (“Social Media and Mobile Gaming”) highlights the possibilites of attracting younger audiences to journalism and keeping older and more diverse audiences engaged in a news brand. One common way of doing this is through networked games that allow users to connect while gaming and sharing scores. Here, the author misses a chance to pinpoint the detrimental impact of the networked “gamification of citizenship” (p. 141) because he uses the Chinese crowd-sourced credit ratings system Sesame Credit as an example for “political citizenship and civic participation” (p. 141), which obscures its role as a surveillance tool of an authoritarian regime.
Especially interesting is Chapter 7, titled “Immersive Design: VR Journalism.” Here, Dowling describes a variety of recent endeavors, especially the pioneering virtual reality projects of Nonny de la Peña, such as Project Syria, that immersed users in the horrific conditions of a war zone. Dowling vividly explains how these games can become “empathy machines,” because “VR journalism is not merely a bodily, affective medium, but one that engages critical analysis at a much more sophisticated level than previous forms have allowed” (p. 156). In the conclusion, Dowling adds to the debate about the capacity of newsgames to increase users’ compassion by extending previous studies on newsgames about refugees and immigration to recent examples such as Razor Wire.
The first chapter that draws on earlier research by the author on #Gamergate is slightly disconnected from the rest. “Journalism and the Politicization of Game Content” seems to focus on gender discrimination in the game industry. Dowling ultimately explains how misogyny in the game industry has led many women to leave the testosterone-driven, violent worlds of commercial gaming for independent development of games with a social purpose. This is an interesting argument, but firsthand interviews with female developers besides Twitter feeds would have strengthened this case.
Throughout the book, Dowling touches on central dichotomies in debates surrounding the gamification of news, such as trivialization versus political engagement, objectivity versus verisimilitude, speed and timeliness versus immersive reflection, gameplay and fun versus serious content, and algorithmic surveillance versus valuable user research. The book ends somewhat abruptly, however. It leaves the reader wishing for a more detailed final engagement from the author with these paradoxes by clearly taking a stand on the benefits versus the problems of journalistic gamification now and in the future.
