Gamification in journalism - a research project
My roles
Skills & methods
Project summary
News media struggle to engage young people in their content. How can we tell stories in new ways that increase the users engagement and motivation?
This research project was my master thesis. The purpose of the project was to examine how game elements in journalism influence young users’ motivation, engagement, knowledge and positive mood.
The results show that having game design elements in a news story will cause users to feel more engaged in the news story and feel like they acquired more knowledge about the subject.
Awards
My thesis received Den Fynske Bladfond`s award for the best thesis of the year in 2018.
Process
To answer the research questions I conducted a survey-experiment. Two groups of participants were randomly assigned to read a digital news story on climate change with or without game elements.
Based on theory on gamification and playfulness I designed and integrated the game elements in the gamified story. I tested the gamifed story on selected users before the experiment to make sure the game elements were sucessfully integrated in the story.
This is an overview of the game elements I used:
Both groups of paricipants read the same story about climate change. The digital story without game elements was created as a traditional looking news article.
The gamified story was created as an interactive article. In the beginning of the article a polar-bear reseacher gives the reader a mission: To investigate why polar bears have harsh conditions. During the story the reader solves different missions. On of the missions is to feed a polar bear with different kind of food using drag and drop. See example below:
In another section in the story the reader can chat with different characters in the story by selecting different questions.
After the participants read either the story with or without game elements they were asked to fill out a questionaire about what they remember from the article and their motivation, engagement and mood.
The survey experiment showed that having game design elements in a news story will cause users to feel more engaged in the news story and feel like they acquired more knowledge about the subject.