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Diversity of Journalisms. Proceedings of ECREA/CICOM Conference, Pamplona, 4-5 July 2011
Mobile telephony has been a significant transformative impact on the consumption of
leisure, in the management of individual identity and even in channeling social
responses.
In this context, it arises the newsgames, news-based games that make up a new way
to transmit information in an area little explored by Journalism. This new format allows
greater interactivity with the content, while reporting as well as entertain. Media
companies and media groups have begun to identify in this format new business
opportunities and start developing specific information products in these constraints.
From this relationship between newsgames and mobility, this study aims to find
common elements to the concepts of Journalism and Mobile Newsgames, so as to
allow a theoretical approach between their characteristics and practices. This approach
will be taken from the literature review of various authors of the area and will focus
primarily on three important aspects: the mobile infotainment, the culture of mobility as
a criterion for newsworthiness and ludic-información as a new model of production and
distribution of news on Internet.
From the analysis of these parameters, it will be proposed practices that bring their
properties into a new product press: the newsgames adapted for the mobile
environment.
Newsgames as journalistic format
According to Deda and Zagalo (2010), the newsgames are games based on journalistic
facts that constitute a new way of transmitting an event embedded in the field of
gaming. This tool intends to use playable platforms for journalism, more specifically, to
show certain aspects of news reporting that should create awareness at the time of
being known by readers. (Gutierrez, 2010)
The expressive potential of this tool is to join a game to a narrative, giving the sense of
creating a player, which connotes a strategy created to attract gamers to the world of
journalism and strengthening the link between video games and the media. The news
is seen as the thread of the plot of the game and requires a more active stance of the
player-reader.
According to Seabra (2009), the information in the narratives of the games is not
always explicit and clear, like a newspaper headline, or a descriptive manner, but has a
more appealing appearance, and that "the more involved person is with the
information, the easier it will be to remember it"(Seabra, 2009).
Although the concept of Newsgames has appeared recently, this adaptation of the
availability of information content in a rich sensory way was originated almost a century
ago, when the researcher Jon Burton said "the medias have a long tradition of offering
its readers puzzles and games like crosswords that first appeared in the New York
World Newspaper in 1913” (Burton, 2005, apud Lima Jr, 2008).
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