NewsGamer’s Journey: From Idea to Prototype and Beyond
Part I.
The Reckoning
It was a balmy August morning in Budapest, when my good friend and former colleague, Tamas Kenessey and I went for a run on Margaret Island. Our apartments in the 13th District are practically next to each other so we got into the habit of catching up over a morning run whenever I traveled home from Washington, DC where I lived at the time.
The year was 2017, a few months after the election of Donald Trump and a bit more than a year after the Brexit vote. Both Tamas and I spent most of our careers in public policy, so the conversation naturally turned towards the threat of populism. We were both aghast by the turn of events and were discussing how can we — as global, European, Hungarian citizens — respond to the challenge.
At around the 3rd kilometer an old idea of mine popped into my head. I grew up playing computer games with special regard to strategy classics, such as Civilization and SimCity, and to this day credit these games with incredibly useful insights into the world of real-life policymaking. Could games be part of the answer in the fight against populism and for a better informed electorate?
For a few years already I had been exploring this idea on and off through multiple conversations in the US and in Europe. I was thinking more along the lines of a fully fledged PC game, with a highly complex AI modeling real life policy interactions, along the lines of existing games such as Democracy. Yet it became clear that — in addition to the prohibitive costs associated with game development — such an approach would also entail limitations as far as its scalability and wide enough societal impact is concerned.
Tamas and I started talking about a much more simplified format to reach a wider audience beyond the hardcore PC strategy gaming community. We wanted it to be easily accessible, with low barriers of entry. We wanted the topics to be highly adaptable to the needs of communities. And we wanted it to link to existing communication channels to maximize impact.
So we thought: what does virtually everyone do every day in some shape or form? Read the news. It is impossible not to, especially in this day and age.
Yet, despite digitization the way most people consume news has not changed that much over the past decades. It is still a fundamentally passive experience. The audience absorbs the information presented to them in progressively shinier and glitzier ways. But they do not, cannot act. The decisions are not theirs. That breeds tremendous amounts of frustration and alienation.
The idea of NewsGamer was born: an application that would enable the reader to be the hero (or the villain) of news stories. That would give the option to learn about the dilemmas of real-life policymakers, to choose between various policy options, and of course to face the consequences.
The concept of newsgaming was out there for a while, and many in journalism believe that newsgaming has tremendous untapped potential. One of the most successful ones was FT’s Uber Game that came out about the same time of our run, and in many ways served as an inspiration for our project. Games help us better understand, analyze, and even influence our complex world. Newsgaming — through immersion and interactivity — empowers news consumers and imbues them by a sense of agency and urgency.
Yet while gamified versions of the news were already being employed by many newsrooms, the majority took a lot time to develop and resource-intensive to build. Newsrooms are required to bring in external assets and could only react to the headlines with considerable delay due to long lead times in game development.
How could we help? By creating a dedicated tool to allow journalists to more easily develop newsgames that impress and challenge readers.
In Tamas, I could not have found a more ideal co-founder. He and I worked together in the European Parliament for a number of years. With a deep policy background and journalism experience (he wrote for Eurologus, a blog on Hungary’s largest online news portal on European Union affairs for years), he decided a few years ago to pivot towards coding and web design: the perfect combo for our newsgaming project.
Part II.
The Grant
Now that we knew what we wanted to develop, we needed funding. We were incredibly lucky to come across a tremendous opportunity very early on. Google has been funding digital media innovation projects through its Paris based Digital News Initiative Fund for a few years already, and the next grant cycle applications deadline was early October. We scrambled to put together our package. We were interviewed in mid-November and got the good news in early December: our project has been selected for prototype funding.
From January to September, we have worked on the prototype development frantically. After the initial brainstorming sessions about product features, design, game mechanics and the like, Tamas did all the hard work by translating our ideas into hard code.
It was not an easy process as we tried to preserve the balance between originality and familiarity, between fast learning curves and enduringly engaging gameplay, and most important of all, between complexity and flexibility. We wanted to develop a product that is highly adjustable but easy to use.
Perhaps the toughest decision was to go with a fundamentally text based game mechanics. We made that call precisely to allow journalists to quickly and easily develop interactive stories on their own — with the intention of coming up with more complex game modes later on.
We dedicated late September and October to prototype testing, mainly focusing on family, friends and colleagues, but using an anonymized survey to ensure impartiality. The feedback was encouraging. There were of course glitches in the system and the product was far from complete, but the direction was good.
We had also gathered a fantastic and truly international advisory board to help us navigate the complex web of challenges ahead.
At the Games for Change Festival in New York in June, 2018, we met the brilliant Frenchman Florent Maurin, who developed multiple newsgames to great success. He has been an invaluable source of advice ever since.
Dave Anthony, the legendary lead developer of Call of Duty games, whom I knew from my days at the Atlantic Council agreed to come on board during the Fall of 2018, giving us a tremendous boost.
Jan Roessner, CEO and Co-Founder of video game company Arcade Distillery and Co-Founder at mTw Gaming Inc has launched multiple social impact games on a broad range of platforms. His expertise and network is a great asset.
John T. Watts, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security who has created the Emergent Futures Lab to develop new insights into future threats by combining experimental approaches and non-traditional perspectives and has deep experience in wargaming served as an inspiration early on and continues to provide superb advice.
Last but not least, Bernát Ivancsics, a fellow Hungarian whom I met through friends in New York joined the team. Bernát is an experienced business and data journalist, currently doing his PhD at the Columbia Journalism School, focusing on the emergent trends of computational journalism. He has been crucial in better understanding the media landscape and positioning NewsGamer.
Part III.
The Launch
The Google grant was not only useful from a monetary perspective. The DNI Fund served as a great early validation of our idea and opened a lot of doors ever since.
We launched our prototype at Google DNI’s annual festival in Paris in November, where only a select few of the DNI funded projects get an invitation. We were among the privileged ones to be present. Google DNI also kindly supported a great profile on NewsGamer in the Financial Times in March 2019.
Part IV.
Phase II.
Since the prototype’s launch, we have had hundreds of conversations with journalist, media industry executives and experts, and academics, receiving an overwhelmingly positive reaction to our prototype. Our project was also selected to be part of Columbia University’s startup accelerator, Almaworks in January.
In the next 6 months, as we enter into the second phase of development, we will work hard on building in the tremendous ideas to take our prototype to the next level and turn it into a viable product. We are planning to do so in partnership with future users, as we strongly prefer to refine and test our concepts before we go to market to ensure quick and smooth adoption and maximum scalability and — most importantly — to avoid its misuse.
Our second phase focuses on two main goals, which we will would conduct in close collaboration with media partners.
1. Test and refine game design:
- improve game mechanics with the ability to embed multimedia content including videos, animations, maps, and infographics;
- develop a sophisticated and engaging reward system;
- improve the web service and editor interface that enables the creation of engaging interactive stories;
- develop the white-labeling and smooth embedding capabilities;
- develop multi-lingual support (German, French, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Danish, Hungarian);
- develop aggregated data collection and visualization capabilities, enabling newsgames to double as a sophisticated survey tool, while fully respecting the data privacy of individual users;
- develop more trial scenarios in partnership with think tanks and journalism schools;
- conceptualize additional, non text-based game modes;
- explore ways to boost user engagement and user generated content, participatory/citizen journalism;
2. Prepare for full product launch;
- refine and finalize the business model and product pricing;
- develop social media integration capabilities to lay the groundwork for viral growth;
- develop marketing and sales strategy and lay the groundwork for full market launch;
We strongly believe that putting newsreaders in the shoes of influential figures and handing them the reigns will prove to be an effective learning tool that is badly needed to fight the siren voices of populism. Offering a versatile and interactive way to tell stories from multiple perspectives, NewsGamer provides newsrooms with a tool that aids in both readers’ awareness of a topic, and deepens their understanding of the decisions surrounding it.
Stay tuned as we continue our journey!
