Games and Learning

“Hairnet Hero” hits the App Store and Google Play with an eye towards new news consumers.

Learning games attract all sorts of producers – formal educational publishers, indie startups, gaming giants, news organizations. That last one may seem odd, but the California-based Center for Investigative Reporting doesn’t think so.

Their first full-scale game, “Hairnet Hero,” is set to hit the App store and Google Play with the goal of teaching kids about nutrition in and out of school.

“Really the idea is to target parents in the sense that they should care what their kids are experiencing and they (the kids) may want to get the news in a coloring book or a video game rather than a gigantic news story,” Meghann Farnsworth, senior manager for distribution and engagement at CIR, said. “We know people consume media differently.”

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The game is built on a series of investigations, some already done and others planned for next year, that explore the healthiness of school food available to students in California schools.

But it is also built upon a new way of thinking about distribution and audience for a different kind of news organization. CIR does not have a traditional outlet like a newspaper or magazine to regularly disseminate their reporting and so the northern California operation has often created unique partnerships to find and build audience.

“Hairnet Hero” is the result of one of those partnerships – the TechRaking conference.  These conferences bring together technologists, journalists and others to tackle a given issue – this game stemmed from a partnership with game developer and conference organizer IGN – and offers the news group new partners for given products.

At that IGN event, developers and journalists created the idea for the game that would teach third graders about how easy or difficult it was to avoid too much sugar, fat or cholesterol in a regular school lunch using the actual menu of the school.

The game “follows Lula, a long-suffering nutritional director, as she attempts to give students at her school a healthy, balanced lunch,” wrote Marie McIntosh, news engagement specialist at CIR. “The principal, teachers and kids are all on her case about the cost, nutrition and taste of her lunches, and the consequences of serving unbalanced meals to her students can be dire.”

Building a Youth Audience

An investigative news organization launching a lunch line game may seem like a bit of a long shot, but if you think so you probably have not heard of “Ready to Rumble.” See, CIR has been here before and has seen success in targeting their content to kids who would have a hard time spelling investigative.

Based on an earlier investigation into the earthquake safety of school buildings in California, CIR produced and distributed some 100,000 coloring books that taught kids what to do during an earthquake. They also created a new site – the Junior Watchdogs – as a home for the books, videos and other material developed for young kids.

But that meant the news organization would have to grapple with how to distribute news and information-based products into schools in California and elsewhere and, according to Farnsworth, they knew they would not be alone.

“There are lots of resources out there targeting kids,” she said. “We’ve been really working on what is our angle into this?”

The result was a series of finger puppet videos, the coloring books and now “Hairnet Hero.”

Farnsworth admits that the Junior Watchdogs and CIR’s youth outreach efforts remain a work in progress and has taught her group the need to map out a strategy before diving into the kids-oriented products.

“The one lesson we learned was we were not quite ready to figure out exactly how much we should be producing of that (youth-oriented reporting),” she said, adding she would recommend “thinking up front about what your goal is, what your audience is – is this a national audience you are trying to reach? Is it s local audience? … and then create products out of that.”

Gaming the News

CIR is not alone in developing news-based games for kids and adults. Minnesota Public Radio made a huge splash with an adult-focused game called “Budget Hero” that challenged people to balance the federal budget and investigative outfit ProPublica created a game about health infrastructure called “Heartsavers.”

In each of these cases, the news organization experimenting with games were at their core experimental operations – news organizations with a history of creativity and a marketing need to find new audience rather than rely on existing readers or viewers.

But regardless of their rationale for developing a game, these journalists argue with the advent of more intense data reporting, the gap between game and news is narrowing.

“Making a newsgame isn’t that much different than making an interactive graphic, and the technology doesn’t have to be very different from what we already use,” Sisi Wei of ProPublica wrote in one recent piece about creating news games.

Wei goes on to offer four tips for those considering creating news-based games:

1. Make your game fun.

When you’re designing and testing the game mechanics, ask yourself if playing your game is actually fun, no strings (or learning) attached. No matter what it is you’re trying to teach the player, or guide them to experience, if the mechanics aren’t fun, or if the content isn’t compelling, they won’t finish playing. Or, they’ll play once, tell no one, and never return.

 

2. Your game must have an objective.

Without an objective for players to accomplish, a newsgame is really just an interactive graphic. Games with no goal, and even more so those with no message, can easily make players feel bored and aimless, which will only cause them to leave the page, or quit your game.

 

3. The result of the game should not be predetermined.

A player’s actions should influence his or her fate in the game. If regardless of her choices, a player will always meet the objective, or reach the same ending, then the game won’t be challenging or meaningful. With real (or even semi-real) stakes in the game, players will be actively engaged.

 

4. Give people a reason to play again.

Games should invite players to play again — whether they want to improve their score, encounter harder challenges, or discover something new. If “content is king” in journalism, replayability is king in gaming.