On April 4, I was interviewed by TCNJ students Melissa Radzimski and Amanda Reddington, hosts of the WTSR-FM radio show, “Discourse” on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement and other issues related to Internet freedom and intellectual property rights. It was a wide-ranging conversation that included tome discussion of the history of the Internet. I appreciated the host’s invitation and enjoyed the conversation. We’d all love to hear your thoughts.
On teaching game design in a journalism class, Part 4: Newsgames as literary journalism
In the last blog entry on my newsgames class, I reported on my students’ remix of my intentionally buggy, incomplete Food Stamps game. That exercise served multiple purposes:
- It provided an accessible example of the challenges of conceiving a newsgame, and for defining requirements for such a game as journalism and as a game.
- Splitting the students into groups focused on specific aspects of the game (story, media, gameplay) afforded an opportunity to reinforce and extend ideas in their texts through collaboration and peer teaching.
- It provided a natural segue into guiding students into the development of their own games.
One of the first challenges of getting students thinking about the requirements for their own game projects is that I found no literature on how one actually reports and organizes information for a newsgame, not to mention the ethical standards that ought to apply. Game designers are accustomed to thinking conceptually not literally, so they take liberties that potentially violate the canon of journalism ethics. This has led to some interesting discussions with colleagues. For example, in 2008, my computer science colleagues and I were planning the Interactive Journalism Institute for Middle Schoolers, one of my colleagues had one of our research assistants build a Scratch game that offered a crude representation of the issue of global warming. In the game, clicking on the aerosol raises the earth temperature until the planet explodes:
I expressed concern about the scientific inaccuracy of the game, and we had an extended discussion about how literal the game needed to be. Interestingly, the project generated nearly 700 views and dozens of comments and remixes, including a debate about global warming. In addition, both this researcher and another student colleague built a number of interesting prototypes, including this game about campus cafeteria food options:
With this experience and my magazine writing background in mind, I opted to teach the students to think of the reporting and storytelling aspects of the game as a kind of linear, multi-threaded literary journalism. Literary journalism combines the factual reporting of journalism with much of the artistic freedom of literature.
Reporting
We reviewed the reporting process of collecting data from secondary sources and primary sources, interviewing, and organizing information in cluster diagrams. I had them give me abstracts and annotated source lists, as I would in a magazine writing class. Because we lost the first two weeks of classes due to Hurricane Irene, this process was somewhat truncated, but we did spend some time on interviewing and vetting sources. We also spent a lot of time on copyright, ethics, libel and defamation rules. We also talked about the fact that narrative newsgames are often built on a degree of fictionalization and the creation of composite characters – practices that would be considered unethical in literary journalism.
We talked about ways of mapping story structure to game mechanics. And we talked a lot about new journalism with its emphasis on scene-by-scene construction, changing points of view, dialogue and experimentation in narrative structure. We did close readings of Gay Talese, Susan Orlean and Jimmy Breslin.
We talked about strategies for fulfilling or confounding audience expectations in order to create suspense and engagement. I used clips from the 80s TV show, Moonlighting, which does this brilliantly:
Parodying Dr. Seuss:
Taking an irreverent approach to a classic, also breaking the fourth wall:
As we brainstormed about their game ideas, Moonlighting also helped me introduce them to genres that might be suitable for the storytelling for their games, but with which they were unfamiliar. For example, I suggested that the conventions of film noir might be worth exploring for one group’s game about the workings of Ponzi schemes.
With the students’ permission, I soon hope to share some examples of the ways in which they applied these ideas to their games.
On teaching game design in a journalism class, part 3
UPDATE: December 6, 2011. Obviously, I wrote the post below several weeks ago. An end-of semester update coming soon.
We are now just past midterms this semester, and I can share the work done by the News Games class to remix the Food Stamp Game. As I have described in the two previous posts in this series, I created a very rudimentary, glitchy, incomplete game in Scratch designed to simulate the experience of shopping on a 
food stamp budget. My idea was to have the students critique the game and remix it both as a game and as journalism. The image at left is a screen shot of the flash-based prototype they created. We had less time to work on this project than I had anticipated because Hurricane Irene and our Labor Day schedule forced a late start to the semester. Still, students reported that they found the experience valuable, both as an introduction to the course, and as a way of building community.
In addition to their contributions to the game, students wrote reflective essays critiquing their work as journalism and as a game.
The focus of their effort was on enhancing the storyline, as well as improving the esthetics and the gameplay. With more time, they wanted to create more player profiles (a single parent with children, an unemployed adult, a retiree, etc.) to illustrate varied scenarios under which people acquire Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. They also would have make hotspots out of more of the items, and they would have added a corner store or bodega to the shopping options.
From here, the students moved toward developing their individual game projects, which have turned out to be quite varied. In thinking through how I expected them to incorporate journalism into the game design and development process, I adapted my approach to teaching students to do long-form magazine writing. I will elaborate on this in my next post.
Live blog, NABJ blogging panel
I took these notes at the NABJ convention in Philadelphia in early August. Although I never got a chance to refine them, the notes will be useful for the Social Media class I will be teaching next semester.
Topic: What makes a multimedia blog successful?
Dan Farber -Great content. – the same things that make for great journalism
Neal Scarborough -Before you worry about multimedia as a blogger, decide who you are as a blogger, where your audience is or what they want.
Clay Cane – Find your style, your tone, and what you are passionate writing about. He started with a personal blog and was discovered by BET because he built a strong following. “It really is being your own brand, and selling yourself.”
Sarah Bernard, Deputy Director of Digital Strategy, the White House: Use your blog to cover undeserved stories. Be consistent.
Question: How do you drive traffic?
Clay Cane collects email subscriptions, sends out blasts when he has big news. Example: he posted an interview with Janet Jackson to his site and sent out masse emails. Some major news sites picked it up and linked to him.
Farber: learn about SEO
Moderator Markette Smith: Shows Alexa.com. She is collecting questions via twitter at #nabjbloggingandbeyond. Question: can we attract advertising?
Cane: He got started with Blogads.com. Notes that advertising market has changed.
Scarborough: “Blogging has really opened up.” Bites that Richard Branson has a blog.
Question: Publisher of a niche blog for lawyers wants to know how to make more money.
Moderator Smith tries to go back to how to make money.
More later: running out of power and this room is short on outlets.
Teaching HTML and CSS via translation
One of my major teaching responsibilities at The College of New Jersey is a course called, Writing for Interactive Multimedia. For the last 15 years, we have been using that course as a way to introduce our journalism students to basic coding in html and, more recently, css. Initially a course for the journalism and professional writing major, it has also been required for Interactive Multimedia majors since 2003. There are dual challenges in this arrangement, as well as opportunities. One of the challenges is that students come to the class with varied levels of interest in, and affinity for coding. On the other hand, having students with different levels of proficiency creates opportunities for peer mentoring and collaboration in the classroom.
Also, I posit that a systematic and disciplined approach to studying html and css can be helpful for students who might have gaps in their understanding because they are largely self-taught. Finally, because coding is in a constant state of evolution, it is important to establish a culture of continual learning and experimentation – something that might be familiar to students of computing and interactive media, but which tends to be novel for journalism majors.
These are lofty ideals, but are often challenging in practice. In the past, I have taught html through demonstration, having students follow me and practice their initial coding in the class. I have tried a number of online tutorials and physical textbooks. I have spent lots of time assisting students in labs as they practiced coding, and have had more experienced students work with novice students. Currently, I’m using Virginial DeBolt’s Mastering Integrated HTML and CSS.) This approach works well enough to get students to learn some rudimentary skills, but it has not created the kind of cultural change or deep understanding that I was trying to establish.
This semester, I tried something new – I am focusing on html and css as languages that can be translated into English, and vice-versa. Here are some exercises I have created to teach and reinforce fundamental concepts. This is a work in progress, but students tell me that they enjoy these exercises and find them helpful.
1. A conversation in English and HTML
After my students had been introduced to html through readings and class discussion, I suggested to them that we have an oral conversation in which I posed as a web browser and they were the web designer. I told them to initiate a web page. One of the students said, “html.”
I said, ” I am being asked to display a webpage. I expect I will get some information about it soon.”
A student said, “head.”
I said, “This is the header. I will know learn the special rules I need to know to display this page.”
A student said, “title…”
We went on like this until we had described a page with links, text and images. There was a lot of laughter in the process. Then we practiced scripting pages.
2. Translating English to HTML and CSS
I wrote the following sentences on the board and asked the students to pair up to turn the sentences into HTML and CSS:
- This is the beginning of my webpage.
- The title of my page is “My resume.”
- In my page, the headlines will be in the font Verdana.
- In my page, the body type will be in the font Georgia.
- The background color of my page will be 255 255 204
- The content that will be displayed on my page begins here.
- This page is linked to my homepage.
- The content to be displayed ends here.
- This is the end of my web page.
After working on this for 10-15 minutes, I called volunteers up to ask them to write the appropriate lines of html and css.
3. Commenting out HTML and CSS
A conversation with my computer science colleagues Miroslav Martinovic and Monisha Pulimood led me to the idea of having students use commenting on their webpages. Essentially, I am beginning to tell them to write out what they are trying to do each line of HTML and CSS as they script. The purpose of this is similar to the purpose of commenting on code generally – so that students can have a record for themselves or other coders of what they were trying to do. I anticipate that this will help me and peer tutors or collaborators be more effective in helping them as well.
I am working on some other exercises, including kinesthetic approaches to teaching about concepts such as relative and absolute links. I have also approached a colleaguein our World Languages and Cultures department about ways in which this might be developed into a more formal system of instruction. If anyone knows of others who are teaching this way, I’m interested in their results.
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