Newsgames, collaboration and constraints: An interview with NPR’s Brian Boyer
Brian Boyer, Visuals Editor at NPR, built the game “Inskeep’s Quest” at a 2013 Editors Lab hosted by The New York Times (named for NPR host Steve Inskeep). The prototype used NPR archive audio clips and challenged the reader to quickly guess which year each clip was from using context clues. The newsgame itself was never developed beyond the prototype stage after the hackathon, but the tool went on to find a new home at NPR Music as “Drum Fill Friday” on All Songs Considered. (See an example of Drum Fill Friday.) The quiz invites well-known drummers to share their favourite drum fills and quiz the users on them. In the following interview, we discussed Brian’s Editors Lab experience, NPR’s collaborative formats and what he thinks really drives newsroom innovation.
I played Inskeep’s Quest a couple times. I think it’s a fantastic idea. Could you tell me more about the conception of this project?
At that point we had already been talking to the NPR music team about quizzes that they do, one of which being a similar conception called Drum Fill Friday where they play a drum fill and you have to choose what drummer played it. So you’d be like, “Oh, that’s obviously Neil Peart from Rush” or whatever and you click buttons. So we were thinking about retooling their quizzes and games. We were like okay, this is something we can run with.
The trick was how to make it actually fun and playable. I’d say our overall theory of newsgames is that, if it’s a quiz, it needs to tell you about yourself. It cannot be merely used as a teaching device. Let’s say you present someone with a question and several answers and you don’t have any way of knowing what the answer would be, that’s a stupid quiz. But being able to tell you, how much do you really know about the Beatles, that’s a quiz about the Beatles but it’s telling you how much you really know. Which is different than just learning about that band or learning about a subject. So anyways I think it experiment-wise, I think it was a fun thing to put together.
“I’d say our overall theory of newsgames is that, if it’s a quiz, it needs to tell you about yourself. It cannot be merely used as a teaching device.”
There was a lot of stuff we ended up doing about quizzes and games that have been related to our work. I think some of the interfaces and ideas pollinated elsewhere. But that website hasn’t changed since we left the hackathon.
And what was your role within the team? Were you the developer?
Well, instigator? My background is software development. Christopher Groskopf who was on the team, I believe he was a developer, and Alyson Hurt she was the designer who develops. So the three of us coded and designed it together. You can’t easily compartmentalise our roles on the team.
It sounds like your team already collaborates across different technical and editorial roles. Do you guys do any internal hackathons at NPR?
Not hackathons per se. NPR has a quarterly event they call Serendipity Day. It’s pretty great, some of our team participates in it. They call it a “day” but it’s really like two and a half days. It’s really not structured, which is fine. It started in our product group. And they have a really structured process so this is intentionally unstructured to try to get some freedom from the structured process. It’s an opportunity for people who don’t normally work together to pitch an idea and think it through. So some people make things. Some people read a book. Some people work on a process, or something they’ve had on the back burner. Last time around someone prototyped a podcast. Other people prototyped software for a new device. It’s pretty wide open. The interesting stuff comes out of when cross-functional teams form and figure something out. But it’s pretty free form. That said, I think a lot of good ideas emerge from it.
What has come out of these Serendipity Days?
A lot of interesting product ideas. There’s a product at NPR called NPR One which is our listening thing. That was originally a Serendipity Day pitch that became The Infinite Player, which was online for a while. Then the Infinite Player project became NPR One. That’s probably one of the big ones, but folks on the team were working on those ideas before. But it was being given the opportunity to think about it. I’ve written a lot about product pitches, most of which haven’t gone anywhere. But if someone read a book and learned something, they’re probably better at their job now.
What about outside of hackathons? What formats produce innovation?
That’s a hard question. If had to answer broadly, I’d say constraints, parameters, a set of really specific rules to work within. And that’s where having a theme, like games or something, can be useful. Because that forces a bunch of people that maybe haven’t thought of doing this sort of thing to distil their thinking into a specific format or construct to it. In general, instead of saying to a team, “Hey make a video,” I’d rather say, you need to make a video that’s going to be awesome on Facebook. And what does that mean? Well, if it’s awesome on Facebook, at least the current fad will tell us that it needs to be of an appropriate length, which is probably shorter rather than longer. It needs to work without headphones on, because most people looking at their feed don’t have their headphones in, don’t have the sound on. So that means it probably needs to be subtitled. Now if it’s subtitled, it probably needs to move at a certain pace because people read faster than they speak. Now I’ve got this set of rules, and I’ve got a story to tell, so pick any sort of parameters like that. I think that’s where people are most creative. Especially when you get a group of people working within these set parameters.
Constraints are good: “Putting people in tighter boxes and making them feel a little uncomfortable with how tight the box is.”
When you say parameters, could you replace that with “problem”?
Yeah, problem or constraint, that’s the most precise word. It’s having a story to tell, for example the gaming aspect, it was a decent parameter. But if I was going to design one today, I might say it’s got to be a game, and it’s got to be good on mobile devices and it has to use sound. Because those are the constraints that we put on ourselves. So as you set up events like this, I might consider putting people in tighter boxes and making them feel a little uncomfortable with how tight the box is.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
