For politically playful news orgs, the 2012 election means social interactivity

NiemanJournalismLab reporting:
Wanna make your own over-the-top Bobby Newport-style political attack ad?
PBS NewsHour is on it. This week it launched Ad Libs 2012, an interactive feature that has you pick quotes and photos from your own Facebook profile and cobbles them together in an attack ad against yourself.
The idea is to engage voters by highlighting some of the oldest campaign-ad tricks in the book: Roiling storm clouds, ominous voiceovers, out-of-context quotes, and so on. As you build your campaign ad, PBS NewsHour features links to various historical ads, pointing out tactics used to denote negativity. Check it out:
...
Plenty of other organizations have found ways to use Facebook for election-related games. Over the summer, MTV launched Fantasy Election ’12, in which players pick teams of presidential and congressional candidates who get points for honesty, polling well, and social media engagement. Honolulu Civil Beat created its own civics-oriented Facebook game, Our Hawaiian Spring, with a goal to encourage voter turnout in Hawaii, where it’s the lowest in the country. (Disclosure: I’m a contributing reporter at Civil Beat, where I used to work full time.)
After the vice presidential debate last night, The Guardian introduced a feature called “Spin It!” which is kind of like a politically-themed digital version of magnetic poetry. It lets you select words from Joe Biden and Paul Ryan quotes to form misleading sentences.
Politically oriented or not, the team over at BuzzFeed often finds ways to interact with readers. Recent example: Make Your Own Paul Ryan Photoshoot. That project skews goofy where other news organizations go a bit wonkier, but the idea is the same: Bring people together to play in the election space.
http://www.niemanlab.org/2012/10/for-politically-playful-news-orgs-the-2012-election-means-social-interactivity/

Condé Nast’s Fashion Hazard Challenges What Games Should Look Like for Girls

the daily buzz reporting:
Condé Nast, the publisher behind top fashion magazines like Vogue, has launched its first mobile game on the iPhone with a new take on gaming for girls.

The game, called Fashion Hazard, challenges players to walk down catwalks in New York, London, Paris and Milan. But unlike other girly games that mostly focus on playing dress-up, this game requires players to swipe, tilt and tap their phones to collect coins while also dodging random obstacles in the way.
Objects often include hissing snakes, old-school stereos or other models. And if walking in stilettos wasn’t difficult enough, the players also occasionally get splashed with paint, obscuring their vision (maybe they were wearing fur?).
Juliana Stock, Condé Nast’s senior director of business and product development for its interactive product group, said she got the idea watching her 11-year-old daughter enjoying action games, “and yet, when we started to look at action and adventure with her interests in mind, which are girly, we didn’t find any.”
http://allthingsd.com/20120815/conde-nasts-first-mobile-game-challenges-what-they-should-be-like-for-girls/?utm_source=Daily+Buzz+from+eMedia+Vitals&utm_campaign=4138d53523-_nl_DB_08-16-2012&utm_medium=email

May 7, 2012, 3:11 p.m. Super Mario Wallpaper Super Mario, cub reporter: Jesse Schell on what the game industry could teach the news industry

NiemanJournalismLab reporting: 
Take a look at the video game industry, and it’s hard not to think of journalism.
Both built themselves up by controlling their distribution platforms — whether that meant a game console or a newspaper’s printing press — in ways that made competition difficult, maintained pricing power, and generated lots of profits. And both are now being disrupted by “good enough” new competitors that use more open development platforms (the web, the modern app store), run on carry-everywhere mobile devices, and are much, much cheaper. What The Huffington Post is to your local daily, 99-cent Angry Birds or free-to-start Farmville is to the $59 Playstation console game.
Just as the Internet has fundamentally disrupted how we think about journalism, it has deeply rattled the video game industry. We aren’t just seeing a dramatic change to how games are played — on a platform like Facebook rather than on a single-function console like Nintendo, for example — we’re seeing a shift in who is making games in the first place. Sound familiar?
To start to think about the parallels, I caught up with Jesse Schell, CEO and creative director of Schell Games, who teaches at Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center...
http://www.niemanlab.org/2012/05/super-mario-cub-reporter-jesse-schell-on-what-the-game-industry-could-teach-the-news-industry/?utm_source=Daily+Lab+email+list&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=38f5f51029-DAILY_EMAIL

For its 2012 elections coverage, MTV swaps out citizen journalism for gamification

NiemanJournalismLab reporting:
Nearly 17 million Americans have reached voting age in the four years since the last presidential election cycle. This year’s pool of youth voters includes 46 million people in the United States, according to the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. But the youth vote is notoriously elusive.
Even in 2008, when young people turned out in huge numbers and the under-30 vote tipped the scales for Barack Obama in some key swing states, youth turnout still clocked in below the record-high of 55.4 percent in 1972. In the 2010 midterms, turnout among young voters dipped slightly below where it was in 2006. There’s also a significant education gap — 26 percentage points in 2008 — that shows college students vote in much higher numbers than young people not enrolled in college.
Surveyed about why they opt out of voting, eligible youth consistently say that they aren’t interested in politics. Other common explanations for staying away from the ballot box: Being too busy, turned off by political vitriol, or just forgetful.
Taking cues from fantasy football, MTV is partnering with a group of news organizations on a game they hope will engage youth with elective politics. The network has long experimented with ways to engage young voters, but this year it’s trading citizen journalism — in 2008, MTV picked one correspondent in each state and D.C. to cover the presidential race — for a gamification approach to elections coverage.
“Millennials are increasingly viewing life through a game lens, even just [using] #winning or #fail,” Jason Rzepka, MTV’s vice president of public affairs, told me. “Game vernacular has become a part of youth vernacular. By putting that competitive layer on top of it — a lot of people are inherently competitive, so if the path to winning is being informed, there could be a really great civic benefit.”
MTV is using a $250,000 Knight Foundation grant to launch a beta version of Fantasy Election ’12 this summer, with a formal public launch on Sept. 1. Here’s how the game works: Players and their friends sign up to compete against one another in a league. Each player drafts a 12-person team made up of Congressional and presidential candidates. When the candidates on your virtual team do well in real life, you get points. If the candidates on your team are faltering, you have the opportunity to trade them. The game emphasizes mobile — players using smartphones can check stats from their phones, receive push notifications about candidate performance, and check into various campaign-related events from anywhere...
http://www.niemanlab.org/2012/05/for-its-2012-elections-coverage-mtv-swaps-out-citizen-journalism-for-gamification/?utm_source=Daily+Lab+email+list&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=b603bac331-DAILY_EMAIL