In their 2004 textbook, Behind the Message: Information Strategies for Communicators, Kathleen Hansen and Nora Paul write, “Informal sources include observations about audiences, messages, and the environment in which the communicator operates, as well as networks of supervisors, colleages, clients, neighbors, and friends the communicator deals with every day.”

We would posit that news games (or other forms of interactive multimedia) could function as a valuable addition to the journalist’s toolbelt of information gathering capabilities if they were properly intrumented to gather observations of user behavior. Case in point is American Public Media’s Budget Game, a complex simulation asking users to manage the US federal budget by selecting different policy options ranging from taxation to defense and the environment. In the process of play, the game elicits a set of policy priorities from the user, leading to an understanding of the depth, complexity, and tradeoffs of remaining true to your ideological beliefs while also maintaining a realistic air. After decisions are made, the budget is simulated out to 2028  and you get a sense for the impacts of your decisions over time. You can also see how many other people played the same sets of decisions as you did and if you input some basic demographic data you can even start comparing your decisions to others.

The implications of the APM Budget Game as a journalistic tool, an informal sources, are interesting. On the backend, we can imagine a journalist looking at the aggregate decision data taken from players of the game and looking for trends or correlations between sets of decisions. Do 80% of players decide to roll back Bush’s tax breaks? Are those same players in a middle income tax bracket? Also, what is the ordering of the decisions made in the game? Perhaps this could lead to some insights into how players view the importance of some of the issues at stake. Interesting trend or correlation? The journalist can capitalize on it and write a follow-up story.

It’s well known that online journalism operations (e.g. the NY Times) have analytics departments that do data-mining on pages to understand both demographics and how users flow through news pages. But what about an interactives-analytics group that data-mines on the logged behavioral response to games and other interactive graphics? This type of mentality could also lead to different types of game designs since the goal would be both the user experience as well as the “exhaust”, the data that could be collected, from that user experience. How to design such an interactive experience that also produces something interesting for the reseacher / journalist?

Clearly games as informal sources are not going to replace other forms of sources for journalists. Interviews of scholars or reliance on institutional reports produce different types of insights compared to the observation of online behavior. But this could be yet another way to probe at the audience and understand what is most relevant to them.

I started by reviewing “The Sociology of News” written by Michael Schudon, a sociologist at UCSD. If you haven’t read this book I would recommend it, not only for its concise definitions of terms like “news” and “journalism,” but also for its in depth description of the American culture of journalism.

Schudson claims that one of the distortions in the news that arises out of its culture is that it is “event-centered, action centered, and person-centered.” Event emphasis, for better or worse, is a characteristic I think most of us would agree predominates the news. Here’s where games can provide something more: process-oriented journalism. For instance, how does the process of the electoral college work? The news industry has often failed to provided process-oriented reporting, but games are perfectly suited to process explication. At the same time, Schudson writes, “When things are going well there seems less of a reason for a news story. The news instinct is triggered by things going badly.” Is process just boring? And if so, how can games make process more engaging for consumers? Perhaps the unusual and the “bad” news needs to be incorporated into process games.

On the other hand, perhaps what people want to know from the news isn’t process and that’s why it’s not prevalent. The brutal truth is that a majority of the useful information in the news consists of things like movie listings, restaurant reviews, weather forecasts, and local sales advertisements. This extends to “news you can use,” like reports about your health and financial investments. These are the topics and types of information that are “important” to people on a daily basis, for which they need a guide.  There’s a whole interesting story to tell here about the history of news and its evolution. Politics didn’t really enter into the news equation until the rise of democracies. The News was appropriated by those seeking democracy in the 18th century, and in the course of time journalism has maintained its rhetoric as the machinery that makes democracy work. But perhaps the bias that “serious” journalism needs to be about politics or public policy is unfounded and was socially constructed in a distant time. All I’m saying here is that games have a chance to go back to basics and give people what they want: the information they (really) need presented in a compelling format.

But whether or not journalists will accept games into their repertoire for telling stories is questionable. Technical and literacy issues aside, there is cultural conflict between journalism and games: News has a “prestige” aura around it. The prestige of the news organization legitimates certain forms of knowledge and amplifies stories. It provides a certification of importance. Just think back to the time when you made “the news” and were in the local paper. Somehow that paper had conferred on you an air of importance. Games may lack this prestige value because of their association with frivolity, playfulness, and general unproductivity. To break this cultural standoff would take leading news organizations accepting games into their news culture and framing them with the same aura of prestige conferred on other media.

The final point I want to make here builds off of Schudon’s observation that oftentimes a journalist’s aim in telling a story is astonishment and moral outrage rather than any deep understanding; the so called “Holy Shit!” stories that make milk come out of your nose at the breakfast table. This may also be an area where games can excel. Sure, images and videos can shock you, but what about a game that puts the player in an uncomfortable situation where their own actions shock them. I’m reminded of the PETA parody of Cooking Mama, where the player had to do all sorts of inhumane things to a Tukey in order to put Thanksgiving dinner on the table. If attention getting is part of the news culture it seems like a no-brainer that games can do this every bit as well as other media, maybe even better, albeit with perhaps more of a time investment on the part of the player.

In Ian’s prior post on transparency and games he mentions three types of transparency: transparency of influence, transparency of construction, and transparency of reference. Cutting across these facets of transparency I’d like to add the transparency of mechanics which is particularly applicable to any consumer-facing journalistic software, of which games are one instance. To get a better understanding of (1) what the transparency of mechanics involves in journalistic software and (2) how mechanics are currently communication in software I analyzed a number of examples of serious games and info graphics including: SimCity 4, Democracy 2, Oil God, The Garbage Game, Energyville, Stop Disasters Game, The Chevron Energy Generator, Better to Buy or Rent, and Boston.com’s 2008 what ifs. In this post I will mainly address the definitions and in future posts I will consider how the model of the transparency of mechanics presented here has been and can be reified in interfaces.

What I mean when I say “mechanics” is essentially the internal and external state of elements and relationships between elements of a computer program, including the values or attributes and categorizations of elements in the software with respect to their circumstances (e.g. time, place, etc.). A state within a game is the instantaneous value of all elements and relationships between elements. For example, in Sim City the state of the game at any one time slice is the set of all values (e.g. low, med, high) of all attributes (e.g. pollution, education, fire protection etc.) for all games objects (e.g. power plants, residential areas etc.) including how those objects are interacting and influencing each other at that moment.

Transparency of mechanics can be broken out into different facets including:

• State. What are the attributes and relationships of game elements?
  • The specific WHY of state: a precise explanation for an element’s attribute.
    • This gets at the notion of what the relationships are between elements and what their valence and effect on each other is. For instance, what attributes at the current time-slice contributed to the attribute of the object of interest?
  • The general WHY of state: a generic explanation for an element’s attribute
    • What are the general attributes which affect a given attribute of interest, i.e. what are the relationships and weights to other entities? How do you know the strength and directionality of those relationships?
• Computation of State (How). How are changes of state computed? How does probability factor into the computation? What is the method of inference or equation governing state change?
• Explanation for State Change (Why). What was the trigger, event, or decision that affected a state change?
• Assumptions and Limitations of the Model. How is the model grounded and where does it fail to accurately portray the phenomenon of interest?

Being fully transparent about all mechanics in a game may turn out to be a daunting and in fact unproductive enterprise. This is because of the granularity of transparency that would need to be supported to show the attributes and relationships between all game elements at all time-slices. Do users really need to know about every little state change? The answer is clearly no, but the job is then up to the journalist / programmer to make decisions about which aspects of the model should be most saliently transparent in the final presentation. Another question to ponder here is whether too much transparency in games can ruin the fun of it? And if perhaps by explicating too much you undermine the medium’s abilities to get people to comprehend models via interaction?

I played The Gotham Gazette Garbage Game and sent 1,897,872 tons of refuse across 698,093 miles.

I wanted to pick at a point that bothered me a bit: the tension between relevancy and serendipity. Relevancy on the one hand calls for a user centric model which takes into account how interesting a particular recommendation is for a particular user. Relevancy means that the recommendations made are in fact meaningful and perhaps “useful” or at least appreciated by the user. On the other hand the virtue of serendipity is espoused as something to strive for. The value judgement is that people shouldn’t be constrained to things they already know or are familiar with, but should also be exposed to things outside of their comfort zone. And music aside (especially in an information domain like politics) I think serendipity IS something major to strive for. But doesn’t this compete with relevancy for attention? A personalized / recommended news page that includes “serendipitous” results risks presenting results to the user that are in fact not relevant at all. I would have appreciated a more earest discussion of the tradeoffs between these factors.

There are various methods that commercial systems are using to make music recommendations. The two big ones discussed in this tutorial were last.fm and pandora. Pandora relies on an “army” of paid specialists who listen to each indexed some and rate it based on 400 attributes on a 10 point scale. This clearly cannot scale as there is simply too much labor involved in the process, but the result is impressive. Another tack on the problem is to produce these annotations using non-experts, something I’ve thought about in my design of games like PhotoPlay and AudioPuzzler. Some folks at UCSD have designed a social game for Facebook called HerdIt to try to collect affective music data in the process of people playing the game. The hope is that this data can inform machine algorithms and eventually produce better recommendation systems.

It’s useful to draw a distinction between data and information here, data being raw sensor readings or direct observations and information being additional context and interpretation based on data. There’s a difference in what needs to be done in terms of transparency of data (which the Time did magnificently for the interactive polling piece) and transparency of information. This is because there is a layer of contextualization and interpretation that also needs to be explicated in order to be transparent about information. This touches on issues of individual and organizational biases since interpretation itself is influenced by these outside sources. Moreover interpretation can be something encoded into mathematical equations that produce information (derived values) from the actual raw data. Consider the mean of all polls for each candidate. This is a derived value, albeit one that most people understand readily, but nonetheless which takes an interpretive stance that a mean of polling data collected under different circumstances is meaningful. As we move from simple means to more complexity, a data driven model is really nothing more than a series of complex mathematical manipulations which interpret the data into a manageable form of information.

Here’s the crux: to be transparent about information (interpretation from data), journalists need a way to be express interpretations or manipulations, mathematical though they may be, in a way that is easily understood. This has direct bearing on games for journalism since the models on which games interpret the world will be important to explicate to consumers in the spirit of transparency. The problem alas is that math is inpenetrable to many. Imagine the Times providing a 3rd link for transparency, one which shows a nasty equation on top of which a simulation is built. This is important, because even though many people won’t take the time to understand it, the people that take the time to will be able to verify or understand the model. But what about the other people? They need Usable Transparency. I like to think that a simulation game like SimCity follows the principle of usable transparency – you don’t need to understand the simulation model to be able to make decisions in the game. The manual describes in prose what to do to alleviate trash problems, create more jobs, or reduce rush hour traffic jams. I think this is a useful paradigm that would serve journalists well in thinking about transparency as it relates to games. The collection of the data is important, check. The data itself is important, check. But the mathematical model which drives a simulation is important too. I would argue for a prose description of that model which itself is footnoted with grounding equations.

Storytelling is one way to take information and make it interesting, relevant, and engaging to an audience. A way to make the significant matter to people. A way to raise awareness for a deeper issue by telling a good story. Another approach is to take raw data or information and to make it engaging through interaction. Games, information visualization, and other interactive data driven applications fit into this latter area. In this sense, the journalism of awareness can fully embrace new media as a vector for raising awareness for issues in the news, even if this new media falls short of that gold standard of journalism.

Here are some examples of what I mean by the Journalism of Awareness:

Online news quizzes of the sort found on facebook, for one, serve to raise awareness for news information. I think the quiz mechanic gets lambasted undeservingly for being “too simple” or “not interactive.” It’s raising awareness for news information without getting deep. That’s OK. If you get something wrong, you were still exposed to the quiz question and have a chance to go back afterwards and read the original news item if you care to. The downside is, if you’re not interested in news to begin with chances are you won’t go out of your way to try and complete a news quiz. The other downside is that someone has to sit there and write the questions and answers for these news quizzes: there’s a non-zero authoring cost.

Information visualization of the sort featured on Digg Labs is also a form of the journalism of awareness. These visualizations are dynamic and packed with information, but certainly don’t help you connect any dots. They’re there to provide an entry point to the information space, something that looks fun and visual to draw you in with enough of a snippet to get you interested in digging in. The upside here is that no authoring is necessary; Digg grabs the headline and first few sentences of the story as a summary automatically. There are LOTS of examples of calm, “ambient” visualizations which leave information scent in an environment to raise awareness.

Perhaps most promising for the journalism of awareness are those interactive games or applications that remediate already authored news content. This is because this opens up new avenues for engaging consumers and raising awareness for news using existing content. So for example we have the games featured on MSNBC’s NewsWare Site. While simple instantiations of classic arcade games, NewsBlaster and NewsBreaker use RSS news feeds to exposed the player of the game to pertinent headlines in the course of play. Another example of this is my own game, Audio Puzzler, a puzzle game which is played with short (~1 min) video snippets found online. The game is actually content agnostic, but when fed with news content such as video podcasts, it exposes people to the entire news video snippet in the course of solving the puzzle. These types of applications have the added benefit of engaging people who might not have otherwise been exposed to the information. This is in comparison to the quiz or info viz examples which presuppose an initial interest by the user. Perhaps in the course of playing, awareness is raised and questions spawned. That can help feed the awareness instinct and is perhaps a first step in getting people to actively engage the news.