The potential is great, but figuring out how to be taken seriously in newsrooms stifles news games’ progress
By Lucia Palmer
Originally published in 2012, CU-Boulder’s The Digital News Test Kitchen
Executive Summary
In the changing news media environment, experimentation with innovative media and platforms is essential. For this reason, the Digital News Test Kitchen at the University of Colorado Boulder has developed a research interest in the intersection of digital (online and mobile) games and journalism as a potential method of both engaging and attracting readers to a news organization.
Starting in the spring semester of 2011, the Digital News Test Kitchen partnered with CUIndependent.com, the university’s student-run news website, and Prediculous.com, a Boulder-based start-up that developed an online predict-the-news game, to investigate the potential benefits of incorporating a news game into the content of a campus news provider. In the fall of 2011, we also collaborated with the Colorado Daily, a student-oriented commercial print newspaper and website, experimenting with the Prediculous predict-the-news game. This report explores the challenges of these experiments, and the potential of news games and prediction markets for journalists, media providers and news consumers as a whole.
Some of the main research findings and lessons that this report offers include:
A (non-scientific) campus survey that reveals most students find their news online, while a small minority visit the CUIndependent (despite most expressing an interest in their content). Additionally, survey participants expressed an interest in playing news games through an online news site. This suggests a need in the CUIndependent for re-envisioning its marketing approach, perhaps including innovative platforms such as news games to gain visibility and user engagement.
Incorporating news games into the daily workflow of a news staff faces significant obstacles. Journalists and editors are often already loaded up with responsibilities in a busy newsroom, so tasks outside of their normal expectations may be burdensome and thus neglected. Journalists may also view news games as frivolous pursuits or cheap marketing gimmicks, and dismiss news games’ potential value because of ethical concerns.
If news games are to become successful elements of a news organization’s content, they must be fully embraced by the entire staff. Despite the difficulty in achieving that, experimenting with news game can be a worthwhile pursuit. If created with journalistic intent, news games have great potential for user engagement and increased news literacy.
Prediction markets represent interesting potential for predict-the-news games. Research has shown that event prediction markets (where participants are asked to bet on a set of possible outcomes) tend to be extremely accurate under certain circumstances, and greatly surpass the outcomes of deliberation and polling. Our research partner Prediculous.com has the qualities necessary to create accurate news predictions, and so far has experienced encouraging accuracy rates.
A number of other prediction markets are appearing online, which cover a variety of topics (sports, law, world events, etc.). This indicates an interest in prediction games across audiences and a possible latent use for the games as a journalistic tool.
Background: Why Games Matter
As more and more people turn to the web and mobile devices for news consumption, newspapers face ever-declining readership, circulation and ad revenue. According to the Newspaper Association of America, the trends in print newspaper readership in the U.S. have been on a steady decline over the past 15 years. In 1998, American daily papers reached close to 60 percent of their total target population, versus in 2011 when print-edition consumption had dropped to just under 40 percent. Newspapers across the country continue to shut down or lay off significant numbers of employees. Paper Cuts (a.k.a, newspaperlayoffs.com), a blog devoted to recording these events, showed for the year 2010 nearly 3,000 layoffs at U.S. newspapers; the previous year, there were more than 14,000 layoffs and buyouts nationwide. At the end of 2011, newspaper layoffs were approaching 3,800, according to Paper Cuts. (Those numbers cover all jobs at newspapers, not just journalists.)
The State of the News Media 2011 report (produced by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism) showed grim results across multiple media platforms. Since 2006, print newspapers have suffered from a 48% drop in advertising revenue. According to NAA figures for 2011, newspaper ad revenue slipped by 9.5% and 8.9% in the first two quarters of the year, then fell by 10.8% in Q3. For local television news, viewership is steadily declining in all time slots (morning, early evening, and late night). Both network and cable news recently have experienced downturns, as well.
One of the only hopeful figures for print news media are online revenues. Although digital ad revenues experienced small drops during the peak of the U.S. recession in 2008 and 2009, the numbers have begun to rally. This is in contrast to the large and continued decline in print ad revenues. According to Harvard University’s Nieman Journalism Lab, newspaper revenues dropped 28 percent in Q3 of 2009 despite the upturn in the economy. At the same time, digital newspaper revenue in 2009 turned with the economy, and was up 15 percent by Q4. For 2011, according to the NAA, newspapers’ digital revenue for the first nine months of the year climbed 8.3 percent.
As further evidence of the promise of online media, the State of the Media 2011 report indicates that radio has experienced an increase in audience size of those listening to online streaming broadcasts. Youtube, social networks, and online videos also have experienced tremendous increases in audiences and participation. The precarious situation of the newspaper business, many media analysts and experts argue, has little to do with economic climate, and much to do with the changing nature of the media landscape.
Currently, a large amount of media research and innovation is directed toward adapting journalism to digital media platforms to ensure its viability in the future. Web-based and mobile games have presented a very different opportunity. Ian Bogost, author of “Newsgames: Journalism at Play,” claims that a large problem with online news is that it is a mere replication of traditional forms (written stories, videos, and audio). Online games, however, are different in that they are native to computers and the Internet. Bogost writes that “Games display text, images, sounds, and video, but they also do much more: Games simulate how things work by constructing models that people can interact with.” Games allow the creator to work with journalistic values and goals in a new format which allows a player to experience an event rather than just read about it.
Games are typically thought of as simulative and role-play based, but news games can take many forms, from puzzles to sophisticated participative info-graphics, to the topic of this research paper, prediction markets. While player-based web games allow the user to experience a situation through simulation, prediction games are socially based and the interaction with the actual news events is innately different.
News games probably do not present a complete answer to news organizations’ revenue woes, but they can become a valuable additional revenue stream for publishers seeking to survive and prosper in a digital-first world.
Prediculous: A Social Predict-the-News Game
Our research partner Prediculous is a start-up based in Niwot, Colo., which has developed an online game to allow players to predict the news in a virtual setting that incorporates social networking and community competition. Unlike most web games, the points a player earns and his/her success or failure depends directly on the participation of fellow players and the real-time unfolding of events.
Prediculous, created by CEO Taylor McLemore in 2010, asks its players to guess the outcome of progressing news events and stories. In order to play, a user must sign up using a Facebook account, which allows the site to access a person’s Facebook “wall” and create a Prediculous player profile. Upon signing up, the player automatically receives 50,000 points (which correspond in no way to monetary value in order to avoid any resemblance to gambling) that they use to wager on news questions in the categories of world events, sports, and entertainment. There is no minimum to the points that may be wagered and the maximum is limited to the amount of points a player possesses, although Prediculous automatically fills in a bet of 5,000 points that can be altered.
Each time a player places a bet on sports (which must be exhaustive of the actual possible outcomes), the odds are recalculated, and the potential pay-out or loss of points changes. Although this resembles certain forms of sports gambling, the odds and pay-outs/losses actually are calculated according to an algorithm similar to those found in financial-prediction markets on Wall Street. The players can post their predictions on Facebook and compete with their friends in an effort to entice players to frequent the site and place bets often.
Prediculous has worked with various online partners, ranging from snow forecasts for skiers and snowboarders (ColoradoPowderForecast.com) to a sports blog (The Whiskey Brothers). The Digital News Test Kitchen also collaborated with Prediculous via a partnership with the University of Colorado Boulder’s student-run news website, the CU Independent, in the hope of learning if a continuing predict-the-news online game could affect readership and audience engagement.
During the spring semester of 2011, the Prediculous team and Test Kitchen researchers worked with the CU Independent to incorporate the game into the news site by directly infusing prediction questions into news coverage. The relationship seemed to be a logical fit, since the CU Independent is strictly an online news source with small readership, and Prediculous is a new company which is still developing itself with a desire for feedback. Both the start-up company and the news organization would stand to benefit from a successful experiment of pairing social gaming and campus news.
CU Independent staff were to write predict-the-news questions and insert them into articles, while Prediculous provided a stand-alone page with multiple CU Independent questions. Jumping from the CUI site to the game was accomplished by clicking on a widget embedded into an article with a relevant question, which took the reader to the stand-alone page. Once there, it was possible to return to the news site by clicking on the CUI logo banner at the top of the page.
We gathered data from both Prediculous and the CU Independent during the course of this experiment which measured pageviews, demographics, popularity of certain stories, reader/player interests, and prediction-accuracy rates. In addition, a voluntary online survey was conducted over the course of a month to gauge the need and potential for news games such as Prediculous on college campuses. In that survey of 140 respondents at CU-Boulder, about 20% said they definitely would play an online predict-the-news game, and another 53% reported that they might try it out.
Test Kitchen researchers wanted to discover how playing a predict-the-news game could influence news-consumption behavior and attitudes of online readers and players. The research questions were:
- Can news gamification increase readership in college students?
- Will readers who also play Prediculous be encouraged to follow progressing events and more fully comprehend the issues?
- Does the competition and social element of Prediculous affect information retention?
- In general, are players of news games more likely to become active and engaged news consumers?
The hope for this experiment was that by infusing competitive gameplay with campus news, we might broaden the CU Independent’s audience and make the experience of news consumption more rewarding. … This proved to be more challenging than envisioned.
The Challenges of Incorporating Games into News
According to Ian Bogost, author of “Newsgames: Journalism At Play,” a major problem for traditional newspapers and other legacy news providers in transitioning to online and mobile news platforms is that effort is unwisely focused on adapting content from existing media platforms of print, video, and radio for new digital platforms, rather than putting the emphasis on finding and developing new forms of content appropriate and best suited for digital platforms.
Online and mobile media have tremendous potential for new and better ways of engaging users in journalistic pursuits. It’s just difficult to determine if untested platforms and methods are worth the expenditure of time and resources.
News games could better attract and engage readers than the typical news website is able to do.
News games such as Prediculous may prove to be a bad gamble for an organization that invests wholly in the project for several reasons, from exhaustion of resources to negative audience reception. However, a survey of students on the University of Colorado Boulder campus — conducted as part of this research project — suggests that there is at the very least interest within the campus community in the idea of a predict-the-news game.
The majority of respondents expressed at least moderate interest in the idea of incorporating a prediction game in the news coverage of their favorite online news source; 24 percent reported no interest whatsoever. The respondents who indicated interest in a news game reported that they would be more likely to play on a news website versus on a social network site (e.g., Facebook) or on a portable digital device. 75 percent said they were most likely to play a predict-the-news game about CU/campus news.
These results show the potential for creating a solid player base for the CU Independent and Prediculous if well-executed and -marketed.
This does not imply that a predict-the-news game would solve the woes of online news providers, but it could provide a different and interesting news platform for its readers, and could better attract and engage readers than the typical news website is able to do.
In his book, Bogost describes the vast potential of various forms of “newsgames” (a phrase coined by game-creator Gonzalo Frasca and used by Bogost to describe the juncture of digital games and journalism). Bogost writes:
“Community bloggers and big city newspaper publishers may not agree on the best format for news, but they do agree that digital media will play an important role in its future. Yet, most of the discourse about the way news and computers go together has focused on translations of existing approaches to journalism for the Web.”1
Bogost argues that this is a poor a strategy because it doesn’t take into account the unique benefits and drawbacks of the Internet. News content for digital platforms should be adapted and created with purposeful design and innovation to distinguish news websites and mobile sites or apps from content produced for traditional media platforms, to ensure their quality and success. According to Bogost, “When platforms don’t work, they advance into the foreground, where we can question, revise, or abandon them.”2
Games have potential as a new journalistic platform because of their adaptability as digital media. Bogost argues that video games thrive in the digital realm and are not force-fits or literal reproductions of already existing news media. ut journalists need to be open-minded to the notion, which may seem foreign to many, that games can be a legitimate and engaging form for presenting news.
News Games Can (Should?) Be a News Platform
“Newsgames: Journalism at Play” author Ian Bogost believes that news games may become invaluable tools to supplement or even replace existing platforms. However, they can only succeed if fully adopted, and accepted by editors and publishers, as a valid and workable journalistic form. A news game should be treated as an article or editorial in itself, Bogost believes; news games are doomed to failure if they are used merely as marketing gimmicks or temporary pageview grabbers.
If dealt with as viable and worthwhile forms of journalism, news games have the potential to fulfill some of the essential duties and intentions of hard journalism. Just like print, video, and audio, games can inform citizens and enable individuals to make knowledgeable decisions.3 The computational nature of video, online, and mobile games enables news games to model events, narratives, and behaviors that give players an engaged understanding of certain news topics and developments.4
An interesting example of a news game enhancing journalism is Wired magazine’s article and accompanying game, “Cutthroat Capitalism,” described by Bogost in “Newsgames.” The article explains the phenomenon and economics of ocean piracy in the Gulf of Aden with detail and depth, while the online game simulates piracy as a system.5 The player acting as a pirate takes captives and negotiates ransoms so that the mindset and rationality of a person who resorts to piracy can be better understood. The detail and complexity of the article are sacrificed in the game in favor of playability, but the game also fills in the void of human experience and connection to the phenomenon that the article is unable to convey. The combination of the article and game resulted in a fun, interactive, and more complete account of a complex and ongoing world event.6
For game creators, current-event games are akin to articles and columns, and demonstrate the adult nature and seriousness that an online and/or mobile game can possess. They are brief and to the point, and communicate newsworthy information.7
The disadvantage of current-event games is the time required to design them, making it difficult for news games to cover breaking news and short events in the fast news cycle that is a fact of digital news publishing. News games are therefore faced with the dilemma of expediency versus quality in the process of game creation.8
To be successful, news games must remain relevant and timely while producing worthwhile content. Predict-the-news games have an advantage, because the game is on-going, easily updated, and covers various issues.
The crossword puzzle has long been an essential part of most newspapers; could a predict-the-news game be as essential for news websites?
As discovered in a survey on college students conducted as part of this research project, there are objections or skepticism about the feasibility of success for a predict-the-news game, mostly focusing on the seriousness of such a pursuit and doubt about its potential popularity. It may be difficult to see a game, something traditionally relegated to child or adolescent activity or leisure, as a valuable pursuit.
Similar objections were raised during the rise of the crossword puzzle in the 1920s, called a “sinful waste” by the New York Times.9 But crosswords puzzles have stood the test of time and are now connoted with intelligence and strengthening one’s mind and knowledge, largely because of the level of challenge of the puzzles in daily papers such as the Times.10
The crossword puzzle has long been an essential part of most newspapers. Could a predict-the-news game be as essential for news websites? Perhaps.
News organizations also should consider the potential financial benefit of incorporating various types of news games into their coverage and content. Pogo.com, the leading online games site in the U.S., according to Marketingcharts.com, experiences a monthly average of 6 million visitors [Source: Quantcast]. Of those visitors, 76% are considered “addicts,” a statistic that bodes well for news sites which may want to use online games for marketing purposes or to attract and retain regular readers.
According to VentureBeat.com, a website dedicated to monitoring innovation and investment opportunities, online and mobile games are a quickly growing and profitable industry. Online and mobile games now account for a third of all game software sold, and the leaders in the industry boast 100%-plus growth in revenue each year.
There is considerable promise for games in the growing market of mobile-phone apps and social networks. Venture Beat reports that game apps sold through Apple’s iTunes Store brought in $500 million in revenue in 2009.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Angry Birds, a wildly popular game app, generated $2.35 million in paid downloads in the six months after its launch in December 2009. According to marketing executive Peter Vesterbecka, the game app passed 100 million downloads as of March 2011.
Another wildly popular online game genre is fantasy sports. According to Forbes magazine, fantasy sports is a $1 billion per year industry. Fantasy sports, like Prediculous, are games in which wins and losses are based on real-world events: the outcomes of sports events and the performance of athletes.
Forbes reports that the success of fantasy sports has encouraged the creation of other prediction-market platforms which designate points and scores according to predictions in a variety of news topics ranging from entertainment to politics. The Hollywood Stock Exchange, for example, allows its players to trade and buy options based on the performance of actors, directors, and films. Like Prediculous, Hollywood Stock Exchange is based on financial models and is social in nature.
A significant challenge in the coupling of journalism and news games is the task of creating and coding the games, requiring skills that may seem daunting to a professional journalist or a news organization which lacks adequate technical talent on staff. Bogost hopes that the future will bring “computational journalists” who are highly literate in the computer sciences and also possess the ethics and talents required of today’s journalists.
News Games and the Wisdom of Crowds
Online predict-the-news game Prediculous taps into an exciting aspect of the Internet: the ability to amalgamate local knowledge into large bodies of knowledge.
Social prediction games such as Prediculous and wikis such as Wikipedia demonstrate that collective intelligence can lead to innovative and enlightening outcomes greater than their original structure.11 In Prediculous, a community of individuals scattered around the world use their knowledge and opinion of a news event to predict the outcome.
According to James Surowiecki, in his book “The Wisdom of Crowds,” the players of Prediculous have the capacity to make extremely accurate predictions if there is a diversity of opinion, independence, decentralization, and aggregation of information. Prediculous CEO Taylor McLemore says that predictions on his site have been largely correct, and therefore the group of players may possess the qualities required for smart predictions.
In his book, Infotopia, Cass Sunstein highlights the potential of the Internet as an information aggregator through prediction markets. The Internet allows for the facile gathering of views and collaborations between millions of people, but this aggregation does not guarantee accuracy. Sunstein suggests a prediction market as a method of extracting useful information from large and diverse groups of individuals. A prediction market uses prices to signal the best information and separate it from insecure or biased guesses. Theoretically, the mechanism of price bypasses deliberation, and reveals a person’s confidence and expertise about an answer, because a rational person wouldn’t place a large wager on an answer if he/she were uncertain about its validity.
Groups do not have to be made up of highly intelligent individuals to make good decisions and predictions.
Important in this equation for both Sunstein and Surowiecki is the diversity of the group. For a prediction market to work, it requires the independent judgments of individuals with varied beliefs, knowledge, and tastes. Surprisingly, groups do not have to be made up of highly intelligent individuals in order to make good decisions and predictions. Most individuals don’t have a complete understanding of a situation or possess all the necessary information to make an informed decision.
Instead of intelligent and knowledgeable members, a “wise crowd” requires a diversity of opinion, independence of opinion from other group members, decentralized organization, and a means of collecting opinions.12 Prediculous has the potential of providing a decentralized means of collecting independent information that could qualify as a wise crowd when it comes to predicting news outcomes.
No matter the depth or breadth of knowledge an individual possesses, all choices and predictions contain both valuable information and inaccuracies. If enough of these flawed decisions amass, the gaps in knowledge are filled in and mistakes are discarded so that the smartest option triumphs. This includes deciding what will happen in the future, so that a crowd’s predictions have the potential of accurately projecting what has yet to occur.13 Even if a significant number of members are more likely to be wrong, the majority vote still can produce a correct answer if the group is large enough.
Sunstein explains this phenomenon mathematically, using the Condorcet Jury Theorem. Assuming that a question is binary (two possible answers, one right and one wrong), if an individual has no prior knowledge on the subject, he/she will have a 50% chance of guessing right. Using simple arithmetic, as the number of individuals in the group increases so does the probability of the group reaching a correct answer, as long as the individuals have at least a 50% chance.
Single-minded groups tend to make huge errors; reinforcement of already-entrenched beliefs leads to overconfidence and extremism
For predictions to be accurate, there must be a varied and exhaustive number of options that can be sorted into wise and poor decisions. The sorting of options requires a diversity of perspectives and backgrounds so that the flaws in each choice can be seen from different angles.14
If crowds are too similar, they experience a phenomenon known as “groupthink” in which the group becomes insulated and convinced that its decision, no matter how flawed, is correct. Remaining independent and diverse is important because it allows for new knowledge and information rather than dwelling on the same specific knowledge that all the members share.15
There is a danger, however, that both Surowiecki and Sunstein acknowledge: People tend to sort themselves into like-minded groups, which is especially true with the plethora of niche information resources available on the Internet. This is what Sunstein calls an “information cocoon,” where an individual hears only that which will be pleasing or ego-bolstering. Single-minded groups tend to make huge errors; reinforcement of already-entrenched beliefs leads to overconfidence and extremism. Nevertheless, they argue that if well-executed, crowd-sourcing and prediction markets have great potential in their ability to extract local knowledge.
Online social-prediction networks similar to Prediculous have successfully predicted outcomes across a range of topics. Research shows that sports gambling markets fare comparatively well, especially with horserace betting. The Iowa Electronic Markets (IEM) is an online market that allows participants to bet on the outcomes of upcoming political elections; it typically has more accurate results than national polls. In entertainment, the Hollywood Stock Exchange (HSX), mentioned elsewhere in this report, is an online market that places bets on the performance of actors, filmmakers, and movies, and has been more accurate with its predictions for the Academy Award winners than a poll of the Academy’s voting members.16
According to Sunstein, these social prediction markets demonstrate that even when monetary gain is not a motivator (as in financial markets), competition and reputation are effective instigators for predictions.
Decentralized crowd-sourcing models can provide greater good than entertainment. Surowiecki gives the example of the 2003 effort by the World Health Organization (WHO) to discover the SARS virus and find its cause. The WHO asked research laboratories from 11 countries to participate in a massive, mostly online collaboration in which the labs shared their work and focused their future research based on the collection of knowledge. organization used a decentralized model, the collaboration was faster, more effective, and more accurate than any of the single laboratories could have been on their own, which resulted in discovering the virus in just a month.17
Prediction markets also can be used in businesses to help forecast important events. Google has used markets in the past to predict company issues such as product launch dates. In 2005, Google employees were given virtual money and asked to bet on various potential outcomes. As an incentive, the virtual money then could be redeemed for raffle tickets, so that the more virtual money an employee earned, the more likely he/she would be to win a prize. The predictions proved accurate and were helpful to Google executives in clarifying doubts.18
Prediction markets thus can be seen as an intriguing method of utilizing crowd-sourcing to forecast the outcome of news events, and news games or “gamification” of news represent an appropriate way to put prediction markets to use in the name of informing the public.
Recommendations: Helping Predict-the-News Games Take Off
As part of this research project, we conducted a non-scientific online survey of 140 students on the University of Colorado Boulder campus, asking about their news habits and how enthusiastic (or not) they would feel about a predict-the-news game being offered by their favorite online campus news source. About three-quarters of respondents said that they either would try out such a game if they encountered it on a favorite news site, or might try it.
The survey results included some interesting write-in answers that might encourage online-news users to play a predict-the-news game:
- Allow a news site’s users to create topics and questions for the game, to make the experience more collaborative and participative. Additional benefits for a news site’s editors would be to better identify issues that are important to the community, and provide an avenue for feedback and discussion. (Prediculous, our commercial partner in this research report, has begun accepting player suggestions for game questions.)
- Support the creation of gamer profiles for predict-the-news players, to enable competing against friends. (Prediculous allows players to compete against friends via Facebook and compare scores; this could be expanded to other social media services and game-native profiles.)
- Extend the virtual predict-the-news gaming community into physical life. Obviously, this is limited to news games designed for a specific city or metro area, but the idea of something as simple as players meeting at a local coffee shop or turning the prediction game into a trivia-night at a local pub seemed to resonate.
- Do cross-media marketing, such as publishing in a news site’s accompanying print edition (or broadcasting on a TV news program) the top scorers (i.e., those best at predicting news outcomes).
- Have mobile versions of the game, such as iPhone or Android app versions that make playing possible any time an individual might have a few minutes to kill and his/her mobile phone is the only device on hand.
Rewards for doing the best job of predicting news outcomes obviously are important. Prediculous focuses on social rewards and the satisfaction of beating friends playing the same game. The site includes lists of top scorers, and “gamification” techniques such as using graphical badges earned by top scorers, plus a “Top Dawg” designation. But our college-student survey indicated that earning physical prizes for predicting well holds significantly more appeal.
A serious issue with predict-the-news games is whether to make the questions and issues covered entertaining and trivial, or more serious. After all, one goal of predict-the-news games is to increase news awareness and literacy. Because it’s a “game” that we’re talking about, there can be a tendency for news organizations to assume that readers will only play games about sports or entertainment news. ColoradoDaily.com, as noted earlier in this report, currently incorporates Prediculous questions into its Sport section.
Perhaps this perception is wrong. Wrote one respondent in our CU-Boulder survey:
“It would have to carefully balance the line of serious and fun, because if it didn’t involve news more serious than ‘Will Lindsay Lohan end up back in jail?’ I wouldn’t be interested. But on the other hand, it seems weird to make a game of trying to predict what is going to happen in Cote d’Ivoire, for example.”
Finding the right balance is key, and of course this depends on the nature of the news site’s breadth or narrowness of coverage. Prediculous addresses this by providing numerous categories of prediction questions, from lighter entertainment topics (reality television is a popular topic) and sports, to world news (such as political financial debates).
Prediculous’ experience with news-outlet partners has tended to focus on entertainment and sports, however; editors appear to need convincing of the benefit of incorporating “serious” news into the predict-the-news game.
An interesting tidbit from Prediculous CEO Taylor McLemore is that his company’s game is significantly more popular with men than women. This could be a result of sports news being a popular prediction topic. The company also has, as a result, formed partnerships with media outlets that target a male audience, such as Heavy.com, a magazine and website that includes coverage of pursuits such as Ultimate Fighting.
This leads to another recommendation: Predict-the-news games can be well suited for niche-news enterprises, where an audience is by definition enthusiastic and/or knowledgeable about the topic covered, and thus may be more likely to engage in prediction gaming. An example of this is FantasySCOTUS, a game based on predicting outcomes of cases heard by the U.S. Supreme Court.
- Bogost, I, S. Ferrari, & B. Schweizer. (2010) Newsgames: Journalism at Play. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, p. 5. ↩︎
- Ibid., p. 6 ↩︎
- Ibid, p. 10 ↩︎
- Ibid, p. 71 ↩︎
- Ibid, p. 2 ↩︎
- Ibid, p. 2–5 ↩︎
- Ibid, p. 13 ↩︎
- Ibid, p. 22 ↩︎
- Ibid, p. 86 ↩︎
- Ibid, p. 88 ↩︎
- Ibid, p. 132 ↩︎
- Sunstein, C.R. (2006) Infotopia: How many minds produce knowledge. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, Inc. p. 54 ↩︎
- Ibid, p. 10–11 ↩︎
- Ibid, p. 43 ↩︎
- Ibid, p. 41 ↩︎
- Ibid, p. 16–19 ↩︎
- Surowiecki, J. (2004) The wisdom of crowds: Why the many are smarter than the few and how collective wisdom shapes business, economies, societies, and nations. New York, NY: Doubleday. p. 20 ↩︎
- Ibid, p. 114–115 ↩︎
Lucia Palmer 
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