Gamification of news for media sites continues to be successful. Norkon’s Fantasy Funds, for example, allowed a reputable financial news outlet to attract up to 24,000 players, significantly increasing readership and subscribers. Also, WAN-IFRA is contributing to playing with news thanks to the NewsArcade project.
“Gamification occurs when a task or topic is transformed … into a game activity to encourage interaction and participation, … and to break down complex topics to make them more understandable or digestible.” The challenge for financial news media is to reach new and younger audiences while bridging the financial literacy gap. Experiences like Fantasy Funds, based on real stock market data and played alongside current financial news, allow users to gain a risk-free portfolio management experience, better understand financial information and ultimately develop real-world investments. confidence to perform.
The bottom line, says The Telegraph’s Product Director Mathias Douchet, is that there is overwhelming financial information online, but the only real way to learn to trade is to do it. With a gamified approach, players can try their hand at it while getting used to the specialized content provided by the news media alongside the game. Increased literacy leads to more stickiness for the news website and ultimately new readers and subscribers.
Fantasy Funds attracted the attention of WAN-IFRA several years ago. it was showcased at Newsroom Summit 2021 and again last month at Digital Media Europe, where Norway’s leading business newspaper, Dagens Naeringsliv, presented its impressive results with a game experience.
Capturing and retaining the attention of young audiences is a challenge for the entire news media industry, and gamification is one of the most promising answers. According to February 2023 statistics, the global gamification market is valued at almost US$12 billion, with 70% of global companies in 2000 using game-based learning to improve employee engagement, productivity and profitability. The industry is projected to grow at an annual rate of 27.4% over the next few years; 14 percent of that growth will be in the education sector.
Indeed, more and more news publishers are experimenting with serious gaming, and are likely to do so in the future. For all these reasons, WAN-IFRA started a few months ago to work in a consortium of publishers who are developing a serious game thanks to EU funding, with the aim of improving news literacy and creating new connections for the news industry with potential audiences far away. .
The game will allow players to experience the process of journalism through current news and real sources, facts and photos. Thus, the user will have the power to create an interactive news story, gain insight into journalism and better understand the responsibilities involved.
News publishers will be provided with a tool that will be easy to adapt to their own websites even in the presence of paywalls, and will be designed to be easy to integrate into the workflow of their newsrooms. To find out, the consortium prepared a detailed report on user demands, which includes the views of several journalists and publishers, as well as findings on GenZ’s news consumption habits.
Prototype testing will begin in June through experiments with various target audiences, with the first phase of proper testing expected this coming fall. In the meantime, interested parties can sign up for the NewsArcade newsletter, follow the LinkedIn channel, and write to newsarcade.playthenews@gmail.com if they want to get involved in testing a minimum viable project that is available on it. road
News Arcade – Seriously Play the News is co-funded by the European Education and Culture Executive Agency as part of Creative Europe- Media (project 101060250), has a two-year
duration (September 2022-August 2024) and includes eight partners out of five
European countries.