Many media organizations are developing strategies for “serious games”. For example, bracketology (the process of predicting the field of the NCAA Basketball Tournament) is spreading into social networking sites and beyond March Madness.
For instance, CBS Sports did a great Facebook application for its NCAA bracket. Also, Washingtonpost.com recently did a bracket game about “Lost” TV series characters.
And last week the politics staff at Congressional Quarterly published a bracket game to help John McCain pick his VP running mate: (Full disclosure: I’m employed by CQ, which in turn is owned by the Poynter Institute.)
The Knight Foundation is supporting a lot of gaming experimentation. In 2007, two $250,000 Knight News Challenge grants were awarded to:
- Gotham Gazette to develop “games to inform and engage players about key issues confronting New York City.”
- Nora Paul and Kathleen Hansen at the University of Minnesota J-school for Playing the News, “news simulation environment that lets citizens play through a complex, evolving news story through interaction with the newsmakers.”
Also, as Tidbits previously reported, UC-Berkeley professor Paul Grabowicz received a $60,000 Knight News Challenge grant to to fund the development of an online video game, Remembering 7th Street, that recreates Oakland’s jazz and blues club scene from the 1940s and 50s.
There’s some evidence that tapping into people’s gaming instinct makes repeat site visits more likely. However, it seems to me that the most effective “serious games” are the ones that exist in a social network such as Facebook rather than on a destination site.
So here’s a question: If you can get 100,000 people to play your game in a Facebook application, how many of them can you get to come to your site? Or is that even necessary?
