Karthika Muthukumaraswamy looks at how games have been used in online journalism.

BlackBerrys, iPods and Kindles are not enough anymore. Let’s add a joystick to the expanding repertoire of tools available to news consumers.

Gaming is often overlooked as a tool for disseminating news. Online games are attempting to explain the economy through the politics of oil, educate users on disaster readiness in the context of Hurricane Katrina and, perhaps more in line with traditional video games, some are exploring the various military operations implemented in the Iraq war. In a strange likeness to fantasy sports, one game allowed people to draft their own cabinet picks for Obama’s then-new administration.

Nick Diakopoulos, a researcher at the Georgia Tech Journalism and Games Project, gives one compelling reason for the media to turn to online games: they offer a format that would wean away from the current emphasis on unusual and inopportune events, focusing instead on more process-oriented journalism. How many times do you hear about a specific incident or event that killed troops or civilians in Iraq, without any knowledge whatsoever of the military operation that caused it?

Interpretive reporting

Another specific application of games is in the particular genre of investigative journalism called “interpretive” reporting. Framing it in the context of traditional interactive news stories, Adam Rice of the Games Project explains how online gaming could take these interactions a few steps further.

In 2005, The New York Times published “Class Matters,” an interactive and highly elaborate infographic detailing financial and social classes in America. The story came to the conclusion that financial classes are surprisingly stagnant in the US, often through several generations.

Rice convincingly envisions this exercise in the format of an online game with an avatar that can toggle between various parameters such as income, education, and occupation to determine his place in society.

If I were to learn the horrifying truth that I am destined to remain in the same financial class as the one I was born into, I might as well have some fun doing it!

This sort of gaming may help inspire the interest of general readers in more serious subjects, and also allow them to determine the stories’ relevance to their own lives.

Educative gaming

Games such as Ars Regendi and Our Courts, produced by Games for Change, on the other hand, are purely educative, providing users a glimpse into the workings of legislative and legal systems respectively.

Other games, including Global Conflicts: Palestine and Latin America allow gamers to understand and interpret complex issues by planting them in the region of interest as virtual scribes with pen and paper.

These exercises take users through a series of real-life events, including bombs, explosions, and personal narratives of people present on scene.

The idea is to allow the reader to be part of the story rather than merely a passive spectator, according to Serious Games Interactive, the Danish company that developed them.

However, games such as these may run the risk of taking the “personal narrative” angle to a whole new level, thus making news one-dimensional and person-centric based on their narrative.

But as Mark Luckie reasons, not every news story can fit into the game format. Nonetheless, the ones that do can garner the kind of interest than no amount of text and pictures probably would.

Relevance and preaching

Diakopoulos points out that, perhaps, games may not be the ideal format for so-called serious journalism. Instead, what if games were used for news items that were more relevant to people in their daily lives, such as, health and financial information?

For instance, Consumer Consequences teaches users about sustainable living, and this animated video produced by the University of Utah educates people on the effects of drugs on the brain.

Educating youth about HIV and AIDS appears to be another useful application of videogame technology since it targets the right demographic while offering useful information.

One of the arguments against online games is that many of them tend to preach. Consumer Consequences has been accused of imposing its environmental views on people. But one might argue that no game is trying to coerce a viewer into doing anything against his will, and moreover, how different is this from the subjectivity of opinion pieces in the mainstream media?

On the other hand, some games allow people to be proactive and take action for causes they care about. For instance, the Darfur video game offers the audience ways to volunteer help, either by sending a message to their local representative or raising awareness in their communities.

Simon Ferrari rightly questions the relevance of some online games in journalism. Is an exercise testing your ability to pass through a virtual security checkpoint really of much journalistic value?

More importantly, could such a game begin to counter the depth of investigative reporting that went into Jeffrey Goldberg’s account of lax security checks in last November’s issue of The Atlantic?

As much as a political game like Ars Regendi may be based on real data and realistic estimations of demographics and budgets, how much are you going to learn about the actual world by creating a fictional nation state, forming alliances, and keeping your virtual populations happy?

Also, could such games be trivializing the grave problems in the real world out there? “PeaceMaker challenges you to succeed as a leader where others have failed,” states a blurb on the home page of this online game, urging users to try and bring peace to the Middle East.

Darfur is Dying attempts to give gamers a glimpse into the life of a civilian in the troubled African region. Users pick a Darfurian avatar and forage for food and water while dodging military attacks.

While this might give an unwitting individual some idea of living conditions in Darfur, could it possibly compare with detailed investigative reports from the region, or the powerful videos here of real Darfurian refugees speaking out to the world?

Not an either-or

The point to consider here is that the two processes do not have to be mutually exclusive, and may even be complementary. Just a couple of years ago, we were wondering if the blogosphere was trivializing journalism; now, most of us, including traditional journalists, are willing to accept the fact that the two can not only live in harmony but also play off of each other.

Similarly, online games could help break down complex topics, and stimulate audience interest in the more mundane ones.

While the significance and relevance of news games is important, so is their format of delivery. MSNBC, one of the few mainstream news sites to try out this concept, has made the gross error of making the game itself unrelated to news content.

In NewsBreaker and NewsBlaster, a user tries to “clear as many bricks or bubbles” as possible while collecting news headlines that have little to do with the game itself. The problem with this approach is that such news is not only easier obtained by surfing the home page, but no more entertaining.

Sites such as Newseum and the New York Times News Quiz use trivia games to engage readers.

SexyPolitics makes it slightly more interesting by offering a virtual striptease for correct answers; however, it’s been observed that users tend to either avoid the striptease altogether to focus on the quiz, or ignore the information on account of the entertainment value.

In order to interest readers and keep them interested, news organizations should come up with ways to incorporate news in video game format without extricating the two.

Nora Paul of MediaShift aptly summarizes the challenges in harnessing the power of gaming technology to disseminate information: keeping gamers happy, while inviting non-gamers into the fold, and imparting useful information without trivializing issues of grave consequence.

The news industry might have its work cut out for it, if it should decide to take this path, but the potential advantages in luring readers, and keeping them may be huge.

Karthika Muthukumaraswamy on how crowdsourcing experiments in journalism need to learn from their commercial counterparts – and how the end results could bring financial rewards for everyone.

The crowd has done a great deal for journalism: it has counted the number of SUVs on the streets of New York City, determined Bill Clinton’s financial impact on Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and offered valuable suggestions to transform an impoverished Ugandan village.

Ever since journalism jumped on the crowdsourcing bandwagon following innovative business models in T-shirt designing and problem solving, it has been baffled by the intensity of crowd response. Consequently, the media’s implementation of it has lacked the selection process that is essential to use crowdsourcing to its fullest potential.

There are only so many T-shirts that Threadless can make and sell; there are only so many solutions to Innocentive’s complex problems; and there are only so many photographs that iStockphoto consumers will purchase.

But when the News-Press in Southwest Florida turned to its citizens for help with investigating the rising costs of local public utilities, much of the voluminous response – amounting to 6,500 pieces of user-generated stories – was published in six weeks following the investigation.

The difference lies in the ultimate goal. A company that aims to create a product is merely looking for the best idea to create one, and one that is looking to solve a problem is looking for the best solution. Journalism, on the other hand, while seeking the best stories, is also hoping to mobilize the maximum number of civilians and fulfill the ideals of democracy.

Stimulating citizen participation is, and should, in fact be, an important goal of crowdsourced journalism.

However, when it comes at the price of quality, as any cursory glance at citizen journalism sites would reveal, it not only compromises the media’s role in society, but also belittles the effectiveness of civilian engagement.

Not surprisingly, there is now an increasing desire for more reliable information on the Web, as seen from the popularity of sites such as BigThink and Mahalo, which rely on expert and professional sources rather than random, large groups of people.

The aim of crowdsourcing is to effectively enhance the quality of journalism because of crowd contributions, not despite them. And that is why distilling the best ideas, and thereby their utilization, becomes important.

Selecting for the top contributions and contributors is not new to citizen journalism. Establishing a community of dynamic civilians that a news organization can tap into on a regular basis is an important objective for most crowdsourced journalism projects.

The citizen journalists who established their credibility through productive efforts in Off the Bus have been largely retained to help report on the parent news site, the Huffington Post.

The investigative journalism site, Propublica, hopes to build a similar community of citizen journalists through its recently announced pro-am project.

The News-Press’s Team Watchdog went one step further and implemented a rigorous screening process that involved resumes and interviews to select twenty citizen volunteers from the Fort Myers community.

While such organization is essential for the success of open-source projects, news entities should be careful so as not to replicate the top-down hierarchy that still prevails in conventional media. This could defy the tenets of decentralization and independence that are essential to James Surowiecki’s concept of crowd wisdom.

It also ends up reinforcing the digital, intellectual, and economic divide that crowdsourcing already perpetuates.

The pharmaceutical company, Innocentive, has used a less conventional approach to seek out experts. Its website posts open calls to solve complex chemical problems to its large global community. While many of the 160,000 registered members of Innocentive are from highly specialized fields with advanced degrees (over a third have doctorates), almost anyone can register and take a crack at a problem.

Little surprise, then, that the company has turned up some unlikely problem-solvers in the form of patent attorneys and college students. Hence, real-world degrees and professional experience may not be the defining parameters for expertise, a finding that is reinforced by research from Harvard University.

The open-source technical support site, Experts-exchange.com has the luxury of using a more democratic approach to source “experts” from the crowd. The best solutions to technical problems are voted on by users, and the higher a contributor’s rating, the higher his authority and credibility in the community.

While the idea of allowing communities to choose their own experts would be desirable to citizen journalism, this form of user rating does not appear to work in more subjective areas.

While quantifiable answers to technical support questions are easier to rate, crowd wisdom is less reliable in judging more creative fields such as art and journalism. We all know that sensationalism would sooner get a Digg story on the home page or make an Internet video go viral than high-quality journalism would.

Hence, it would probably be in the best interest of news organizations to make these determinations at the editorial level.

In addition to improving the quality of content, such a strategy would promote better submissions from users. Crowdsourcing ventures like iStockphoto and Innocentive have shown that providng rewards – in the form of fame or bounty – works. As Jeff Howe, who coined the very term that all the fuss is about, has learned, community standing and recognition might be the key motivators in crowdsourced operations.

If you are one among thousands of people and don’t get recognition for your particular effort, there is little motivation for you to come back and participate.

If the more deserving contributors are acknowledged, and given special access privileges (such as being able to post content without moderation, for instance), it would encourage them to contribute more, and urge other contributors to compete at a higher level.

The unique, creditable, and more attractive content that would result from such moderation will eventually lead to higher site traffic, increased number of unique visitors, and hence, more advertising revenue. This might legitimize charging for content, thus allowing greater profits for news organizations, and possibly payment of individual contributors.

With contributors specifically chosen for the merit of their submissions, news organizations could finally explore the possibility of compensating the crowd for the product it creates. The opportunity to make money has been shown to be the most popular reason to participate in crowdsourcing projects.

Three years ago, when crowdsourcing first made a splash in the world of business and journalism, its democratic, freewheeling ideal was intriguing in all its novelty. But now, critics – and contributors themselves – have begun to question the legitimacy of a concept that puts people to work for little or no monetary gain while holding complete ownership over the product. “Is crowdsourcing evil?” asks Howe in Wired this week, detailing a backlash that is brewing in the design community.

It may be argued that the weeding out of contributors goes against the grain of grassroots citizen journalism. However, it is important to remember that news organizations are also entities that offer a service to people, and it behooves them to perform this service well.

In the field of business and innovation, companies are implementing a division of labor – specialized tasks are sourced to “experts,” while more general assignments are sourced to crowds. It is tempting to speculate that such a practice would work well for journalism.

Seeking ideas for stories from general readers, as well as involving them in the debate and discussion would fulfill the core purposes of journalism. On the other hand, the knowledge and skills of more prolific contributors could be utilized for specialized reporting. This would ensure the dissemination of quality content while still utilizing crowd diversity.