Game the System: Make following the news fun
March 22nd, 2010Gaming is a part of the new method of spreading information. As Jesse Schell (Prof. Carnie Mellon) points out at DICE 2010 , gaming is intrinsic to human nature, and it’s easy to see how it could be incorporated into everything that we do.
That includes journalism utilizing gaming psychology in delivery. If we grant that we should be using Topics instead of stories as the atom of news, its easy to see how a gaming element can be introduced around how people follow topics.
An example
A person follows the Topic Barack Obama in 2005 to earn 5 points. When Obama announces presidential candidacy he’s worth 10, 20 when he gets the nomination and as president, perhaps 40. Or… make it a business: points are worth cents.
Either way, the system rewards users for being “in-the-know.” Users could also get points when the read the updates to a Topic, or assist in crowdsourcing, or post a popular comment, or share a topic.
It’s about incentive
As Howard Weaver pointed out , what’s missing from consuming news is incentive. People are incentivized to gift a virtual beer to their friends but not to participate with news. We need to replace the “hard news is eating your wheaties” metaphor with “news is just information – it’s a game to see how much you know about what you care about.” (Or something much more cleverly worded.)
This post adapted from my comment at jliattu.net .
Interesting point. That’s what they also do with the geo-location services such as Gowalla and Fourquare. They make them more playful by letting people unlocking badges and being mayor of places. Not sure if that’s the key to their success, though.
Another aspect of making following news more attractive would be embracing the fact that most people like statistics and ratings about themselves. Like the followers count in Twitter.
Your example with counting points embraces this aspect, too.
So it’s maybe a mix of gaming and statistics.