What Can Computer Games Teach Journalists?

Jan Schaffer: Let me introduce our headline speaker today. Glenn Thomas is a co-founder, he’s a director of Smashing Ideas, Inc. It’s a Seattle company he formed in ’96 to create interactive media for the Web, for TV, for electronic devices.

Most of the time he’s doing this for advertising or consumer brand companies, places like Kraft or Post Cereals, Nickelodeon, Ford. He did the Coca-Cola interactive Olympic torch relay map, a Madonna interactive music video.

We came across Glenn after one of our funded projects, done by The Herald in Everett, Washington, sought his help. He helped them create a clickable map to report on a waterfront redevelopment project that allowed readers, news consumers, to move icons around and vote with their mouse on their preferences. Next, he created a growth and sprawl map for the Myrtle Beach Sun News.

Now mind you, Glenn is not a journalist. He doesn’t read newspapers. He doesn’t have time for TV. But he would self-describe himself as a voracious consumer of news, mostly online. And I think to me he represents two trends that we’ve seen in our work at the Pew Center. One is sort of the well-documented capacity to access news and information anywhere, any time.

I think the second is an emerging trend that we see for people to engage in the process, not so much of consuming a final story, as it is a process of building, co-authoring, co-producing their own story, their own internal narrative. It’s a different exercise. They’re building and assembling these stories from components of news and information that they get a little on radio, they scan the newspaper headlines. They may have CNN on in the background. They e-mail people, they use the Web, they interact with information, they watch Jay Leno at night. And through all of these components, they’re building what they feel, constructing what they feel to be the truth about their community, the truth about their world.

They can ask a question if they need to clarify information. They can go to other links of they need more elaboration. They can figure out places where they can do something about a problem if they want to. I think, to me, this has very interesting potential for journalists.

So the question that I suggest that rises out of this is, if people are composing their own stories from different component parts, should we, as journalism educators, be helping students deliver interesting and compelling components, rather than a well-crafted, finished product? Should the emphasis be on components and connections rather than craftsmanship? So I’ll just let that question out there to linger in your brain. For Glenn, I think one of these interesting components falls into the gaming arena, computer games. He is an expert on Flash. He has authored the book Flash Studio Secrets.

And today I really ask him to try to address another question for us, which is, namely, what can computer games teach journalists? So Glenn, have at it. Thank you.

Glenn Thomas: I speak quite frequently at technology conferences and I have to tell you that this is a slightly different conference. In technology conferences, in the elevators going up and down the hotel, people are trying to figure out where the wireless hot spots are. In this conference last night, as I was going up and down in the elevator after dinner, a woman came up to me and asked me a survey question: Had I had any problems with my room after checking in? As Jan said, I’m not a journalist. I did not go to journalism school. I have never worked in a newsroom. I have no real connection with your industry, other than the fact that we’ve done this project and I’ve had the pleasure of being involved in some of the journalism education efforts through the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, as well as the API in Virginia,

I guess. I am, however, completely a consumer of news. When Jan says I’m voracious, what she’s referring to is last night at dinner, when we were talking, and I said I don’t get a daily newspaper. On a daily or weekly basis I review The New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate, Salon, The Guardian in Britain, MSNBC, CNN. And that has to do with both my job and home, where I have broadband. I’m always on; I’m always connected. So I do have, I think, strong opinions about the news. I have strong opinions about interactive, and I hope to share them with you today.

What’s Games Got to Do with It?

So first, what I want to go over today is what’s games got to do with it? What can games do for you as journalists, as educators? In order to do that, I want to set a context. A context of what is interactive? What’s an interactive story? What’s a game experience? And then, how can we move on with that and actually do something with it? This is a big question. What is interactive? I’m going to kind of go against media theory here and hopefully not get run out of the room. Media theory has it that interactive is hyperlinks on a page. Well, most of you in the back probably can’t read the little caption there, but the graphic here is of Counterstrike, a PC game where people online shoot each other and can talk to each other.

“I’d like you to think of interactive as interactions between humans and technology and interactions between people… when humans interact with technology and get an opportunity to change and respond and have feedback.” -Glenn Thomas

My point is, is Counterstrike more interactive than NewYorkTimes.com? Is this interactive? Links on a page. My contention is that it’s perhaps part of the continuum of interactive, but the least important part. How is this different than a good index? How is this different than a good table of contents?

For the course of this talk, I’d like you to think of interactive as interactions between humans and technology and interactions between people. For me, that’s the important part of interactive. It’s when humans interact with technology and get an opportunity to change and respond and have feedback. And interactive, when technology allows people to interact with each other, have change and feedback and response. So that’s the definition I’d like everybody to think about as I move forward, because if we think of interactive as just hyperlinks on a page, this talk won’t make much sense to anybody.

So what’s an interactive story? In the last year, I’ve done a few symposiums, and it’s gone back and forth over what’s an interactive story. Here is the standard experience for an interactive story. There’s going to be a timeline with the history of everything. Perhaps we’ll get some quotes from people that have a little bit more depth to it, have multiple facets to the story. What it is is a lot of depth of information. So you can click through and find out that the Transportation Bill of 1954 did such-and-such, and then the Transportation Bill of 1978 did such-and-such. I would say that that just overwhelms people, and that it often does not get to the heart of the story. It does not help people understand. And it’s not really interactive.

Depth of information is not interactivity to me. So, I have a warning from the three little pigs, because I’m going to tell you how perhaps the three little pigs might be done as an interactive story currently. First, of course, we have to have the timeline of building materials. Obviously, we have straw, brick, mud and through the eras back to the Egyptians, they’re used different ways. Now that wolf was a bad guy, so we better have some links out to how bad things happening in your childhood make you a bad person and you need therapy. Of course, you have the lazy pig. So we’ll need some links out to laziness research, perhaps some quotes from the teachers about the lazy pig, how he was lazy in elementary school.

Now what I’m trying to get at is the fact that the three little pigs is a good story. It’s a good story because it’s about the industrious pig who helps out his lazy brothers when there’s an evil wolf. With that interactive story I’ve just told you, it’s no longer a good story. The depth of information has completely overwhelmed the narrative of the story. So the point is that interactive story, depth of information, isn’t the right thing to do all the time. You have to choose your story, and you have to apply the right tools to a story, just as you would as journalists in any other story choice.

So I say, take that warning from the three little pigs, and move beyond depth of information in a story like that to make interactive. Make it mean interactive. What about the three little pigs is fascinating? Well, perhaps it’s the response of the community to the wolf being captured. The wolf is obviously a predator. We’ll allow the community to make that interaction. So this goes into games because games, I would posit, are at the extreme end of interaction. There is always a response to your action and things change, whether from the technology or from the people you’re playing it.

Journalists – and as I’ve done this over the past year at symposiums – often have a difficult time thinking why we would even consider using games to tell the news? A game, as the definition says at the top, is an activity providing entertainment or amusement, a pastime. Well that’s certainly not the news. We’re telling people the truth, the facts, the details. That’s not a game. And then when you think about the words that are used to describe games by people, games are an exploration. You’re in control. There’s feedback, competition perhaps. They’re addictive. Online, they might perhaps be viral. They’re challenging. Those aren’t words that journalists use about the news.

And games, as anybody who has grown up playing them can say, board games or computer games that you play with others are perhaps about sharing, collaborating, laughing. They’re about enjoyment, having fun. These are not things that journalists or perhaps other people define as the news. And games can become a tool, another tool in your arsenal to tell a story better.

Why Should Journalists Use Games?

Before we get into that I’m going to ask the question: Why journalists? Why should journalists use games? Why should journalists use interactive to tell these stories? The caption, for the people in the back, this is a picture of an X-Box and the caption says, “Do you really think X-Box is really going to do it right? Who is going to use this tool correctly?”

Well, obviously, the people in this room if they understand that it is a tool and can teach your students or bring it back to the newsroom, you’re the people who can use it to help make some stories more understandable. Why is that? Because you have the ability, the understanding, and you have an audience. You have a local, regional, or national community of an audience that is able to use a game-type news experience. And you’re able to use your current audience to move them to the interactive medium to do that. You can package things together.

“Games can become a tool, another tool in your arsenal to tell a story better.” -Glenn Thomas

So first, I would like to share briefly The (Everett) Herald project and describe what the goal was. Everett is a small town north of Seattle that was a former Navy base, and it still has a naval influence, but it has been cut back. They had the opportunity to redevelop a large part of their waterfront, both on the sound and along the river there. So they were able to get a Pew grant to do a civic journalism project which combined interactive with reporting, video, photography.

The goal was to get community input on how this redevelopment project could move forward. So this is the interactive part of it. The goal was to show these four different areas and allow residents to take icons – this would be sailboat rentals, a park – and move them into the area and collect data about what people in a blue sky world would like to have in their town. It was quite successful for them and is somewhat of a simulation experience for that town.

So this is a game-type experience that allowed people to provide their thoughts, hopes and desires in a way that they couldn’t otherwise do. Would a survey have accomplished this in a better way? Where you just ask the question, “Do you want a park?” I don’t think so. I think this visual display of information allows people to better display what they want. And this is a first step. It’s not a final step.

And so let’s, based on that, consider the possibilities for games. My contention is that citizens of this country have a very difficult time wading through the amount of information that it takes to understand some complex situations and make good decisions because, quite frankly, people don’t have time to read special sections about – I’m from Seattle, so I’ll use a personal example. We don’t have time to wade through a special section about the transportation crisis. The Northwest is grid locked. And we’re going to be grid locked for the next 10 to 20 years most likely, because we can’t move forward on anything. One year the citizens of our state vote to put $6 or $60 billion to fixing it. The next year they vote to take away the funding for it.

We have the initiative process in the West, so we do get some fun results. People are making those decisions because they don’t have all the information they need. And they’re not going to read 70 pages to understand that. We could think of taking a transportation simulation game in which we took the best data that’s out there of the results of different choices, in the same way that you would do it in a story, and let people play around with it themselves. Let them explore what their choices are going to do. If they vote to have no funding for transportation, then the results are fairly obvious, and they’re fairly agreed upon that we will have worse traffic in the next 10 years, and Washington will continue to lose businesses. And, as any of you can imagine what that means, tax receipts go down, so on, and so on, and so on.

So here’s a way that’s both interesting, fun and challenging for people to explore a very complex and difficult story and understand better how the decisions that are made affect the outcome. So any of those complex situations, where there are difficult choices to be made, and there are cause and effect, are wonderful stories to think about using a game, because most people just aren’t going to read through all the detailed information.

My brother-in-law is a state legislator in Washington and he always promises to me that he’ll bring home the briefing books for the transportation committee he’s on. And then he tells me they’re about 2,000 pages long. I said, well, that’s what the journalists are for, get it down to two pages, and then people don’t even want to read the two pages.

“[Everett’s clickable map] is a game-type experience that allowed people to provide their thoughts, hopes and desires in a way that they couldn’t otherwise do.” -Glenn Thomas

So I wanted to put that out there as an idea of how a game experience can be used to explain a story better. There are obviously other sorts of games that can be used to explain complex situations. Anything where somebody is doing something in the first person. I don’t understand a heart surgeon’s work, and yet I might be interested in taking sort of a game experience where I act like a heart surgeon and find out what that is like. Obviously, we have an enormous number of heart attacks in this country. It’s an interesting story, but I don’t understand what goes into people surviving them or the choices that doctors give to patients.

In terms of just information recall and things like that, you can do quizzes and brain teasers, story areas where these sort of things will work well. Commerce – it’s complex. It’s difficult. Things like a tax calculator are done in New Hampshire. Or any sort of commerce game that shows people the results of their choices. It’s certainly going to be more successful than a long, dry story about business that most citizens won’t wade through. They just don’t have the time or the interest.

So you can start considering all these different story areas and there are going to be ones that are right for games. And then the other point to make about games and the possibilities is that the access to them is expanding, not just on the web where broadband is picking up very rapidly now, it’s finally turning the corner. And broadband changes the way people use the online world dramatically. They use it much more for information, much more for going to sites. E-mail use continues at the same rate, but it becomes a smaller percentage of what people do online. So broadband means more usage and more usage for rich media-like games.

And then you move on beyond the Web, things like devices.  I think Jan likes having me at stuff because I bring out all the toys. This is a Nokia phone that has a PDA on it, and it can run the Everett Waterfront Project if we redesign the interface. But that’s the sort of possibility in the future, when everybody has a phone like this, or the Pocket PC 2002 phone, that’s always connected, they’re going to get their information not just through the Web but through devices.

And then there are the game consoles, which more and more kids growing up are using to do things beyond games. E-mail, web access. They might not have computers five or 10 years from now. Kids might consider their game console a computer. Well then, obviously, a game to get them information makes even more sense. And then other kinds of devices, like cameras. These will be connected, and your audience can send you pictures immediately.

The Five Steps to Interactive Success

So those are the kind of possibilities that I want to put in front of you. And then I want to talk about what I call the five steps to interactive success. As educators, I thought you would like five good solid points.

The first step, and the most important one, is choose the proper story, realize where interactive is appropriate, realize where it can make a difference. As we go through this, I’m going to talk about what the Everett Waterfront Project could be and should be in the future. It’s a first step. It’s not the final end-all, be-all of interactive success, but I think it was a proper story. It was a story that allowed citizen input on a difficult subject that people had strong opinions about. And the visual display of information allowed people to make better decisions. Create. This is the one that I believe is a change in mindset. And people will have to think a bit differently. It’s not a finished story; it’s a story framework. How do you build a framework within which your audience helps develop the story? Will journalists accept that as a challenge? Will they accept that as part of their job? I do not know, but in order for interactive to truly be a success, there has to be an understanding that it is not a finished project, that it’s a framework, that you’re not telling your audience, but you’re engaging your audience. This is not something that the Everett Waterfront Project was fully able to do. It partially was, with the interactive map, but it could have gone further with more input from citizens, more ability for citizens to talk to each other. That’s the third point, input. Let the audience become part of the coverage. The Everett Waterfront Project did this well on a newspaper level, because they went out and they interviewed citizens in that area and they put that input in the newspaper. And yet online, isn’t it much simpler to let people give you their feedback at the point of the interactive experience? Isn’t it easier to let them e-mail you, fill out a form, let you know what they think of it, give you advice on how to make it better?

“The Everett Waterfront Project… was a story that allowed citizen input on a difficult subject that people had strong opinions about.” -Glenn Thomas

Please take your e-mail off if you’re not going to respond to me. As a point of difference, I e-mailed the editor-in-chief at Slate about an interactive project that they did. And it took him a while, but within a week he had responded. He put his e-mail, he made a point to get back to stuff. If you allow input, you have to give feedback. And that’s the next one, feedback. Use the feedback from the audience. If your community gets involved and says that something should change, that there are better ways of doing it, gives you advice, if possible use it. If there are differences of opinion that come out because of it, use it. This is an area where the Everett Waterfront Project fell short; we weren’t able to make changes. We gave people the icons. We set the debate for them about what the waterfront could become. We didn’t allow them to come back and say but hey, wait a second, what I really want is to put in a big nuclear power plant on the corner there. Not that people might have wanted to do that, but they weren’t able to come back and make changes to that interactive experience, which I think is good journalism. Because people might have felt very strongly about some kind of redevelopment that we hadn’t thought of or The (Everett) Herald hadn’t thought of.

And the last point is engage. Let the audience engage with each other. Build a framework, within which your community can speak with each other around your story and around the paper. Journalists biggest asset is their audience. They can help you. They can build interest in your story. They can tell other people about it. They can give you information about what’s working and what’s not. It’s enormously powerful to let people speak with each other, not only on a community and civic level, but also for your own story.

“It’s not a finished story; it’s a story framework… In order for interactive to truly be a success, there has to be an understanding that it is not a finished project, that it’s a framework, that you’re not telling your audience, but you’re engaging your audience.” -Glenn Thomas

I can’t think of everything, every possible angle to a story if you sat down and said come up with a great story about a certain topic. But if there were 1,000 people talking to each other, there would be new themes that came out and new aspects that were important. For the people in the back who can’t read the caption here, this is the Sims Online, and this is a very successful interactive gaming experience where you follow your Sims characters in an online world. The caption is, “They talk to us, we don’t have to listen, do we?”

If interactive, if the most important thing about interactive really is interaction between people and interactions between people and technology, interactions between your community, interactions between your community and your newspaper or station or whatever it might be, and interactions between the people and whatever interactive media you’ve put out there. If that’s truly the case, if it’s that interaction that matters, then you have to listen and you have to respond. Last but not least, the golden rule from my perspective is it’s a game. Make it fun.

We spend a lot of our time at our company making games, probably 50 percent of what we do. And you know what? If it’s not fun, if it’s not challenging, people won’t play it. So this is a new tool for you. Just get caught up in the excitement of it, get caught up in the interaction, get caught up in everything that you can do with it, but don’t lose sight of the fact that it needs to be fun.

Questions & Answers Thomas: I would be happy to take questions.

Question: Are you able to go in at all to show me the Olympic torch map [inaudible]

Thomas: I don’t have access to that.

Question: I know the Everett Project [inaudible]. One of the things that people in this civic community have talked about for a long time is the idea of deliberation, which involves choices and tradeoffs. And you addressed that in your talk, as well, where you couldn’t take it to the feedback and engagement level. But my question is: Do you see, in the [inaudible] online gaming to be developed in the Everett project, do you see being able to incorporate those kinds of choices and tradeoffs that you mentioned in a way that’s reasonable and I guess economical? So I guess the first question is can you imagine it? And the second is how might you implement it? And a corollary to that is: Do you see this technology being something that people can actually start using within journalism within the next two to five years?

Thomas: The first question is with the Everett Waterfront Project, the aspects of interaction that we didn’t really have the opportunity to add to it, whether I think it’s possible – one. And two, whether it’s economically feasible.

“It’s enormously powerful to let people speak with each other, not only on a community and civic level, but also for your own story.” -Glenn Thomas

Absolutely I believe it’s possible. In fact, I think some of the better interactive journalism projects that I’ve seen have involved the community more strongly in the digital space. So whether it’s discussion boards or messaging or speaking back with the journalists, it’s definitely possible. And things like discussion boards aren’t expensive to make by any means. In terms of the Everett Waterfront Project, I think what it would have taken truly would have been a phase one and a phase two, where the phase one was blue sky, about what can anybody imagine, with a bit more integration of the audience in that they could say, “Hey, what about this icon or that icon? I want to put something different there.” And that then would have had an ability to create all that data, create a generalized map, and perhaps some specific ones based on the data of what people really liked, put them back out to the community, and then do a phase two based on that, saying here are what the tradeoffs are. Here’s what that would cost the community. Here’s what we would have to give up, whether it’s raising taxes or all those kinds of questions. And then let people perhaps remake the map based on those more difficult choices, which are economic and quality of living choices. The Everett project was always meant to be just blue sky. And I think truly to bring it all together, it would have been important to do a phase two for that community.

Question: Could that be done in real-time?

Thomas: Real-time in what way?

Question: In the sense of I put a part here, and I get immediate feedback based on all the other choices? That if you want a park here that means you can’t have your aquarium next door.

Thomas: Exactly. Yes, it could be done that way. It is difficult, obviously, and that’s where the journalism part is crucial. What are those tradeoffs? What are those costs and benefits? And what does it mean if we want an aquarium, and it’s going to cost us $15 million? What does that mean to our community of 100,000 people that’s slightly depressed economically? And the second question that was asked, is this technology feasible to use in the next two to four years in the newsroom? There are half a million Flash developers in the world. It’s probably the number one multimedia technology. And as you hire people, I think more and more people will have used it. It’s not so complex, I mean there are lots of very good people out there. We’re in a situation where, for us, it’s probably not economically feasible for us to do this full-time, but it’s something that we enjoy doing. But I think so. Was it economically feasible to print color pictures in newspapers when it started? Things will come down in cost.

Question: I’m intrigued by your idea of incorporating games, and I’m also [inaudible]. For those of us who are teaching [inaudible] the technological [inaudible] incorporating some of these ideas in a less technological way. [inaudible].

Thomas: So the question is how to apply these principles with technology that perhaps is more understandable or easy to use at this point. When we create games, you start out with an idea. And you put it out, you write it up. And then you’ll create a game logic. And really, in teaching, you could go just to the game logic and you don’t have to do the execution. So game logic for some kind of cause and effect game, for example, my gridlock game of the Northwest, would be the information that it would take to define that cause and effect. If the state of Washington decides to raise $100 billion and create a mass transit system and more freeways, what does that mean? If they don’t, what does that mean? And you can put together that game logic without having any kind of technological expertise. So you can do that as an exercise. Where it’s perhaps not complete is that once you actually make the game you realize you’ve made some errors in the game logic and you have to go back and revise a little bit. But it’s certainly a first step, and I think a good one.

Question: Your Everett project, in part, I think serves as an example to lay the groundwork for [inaudible]. Civic journalism certainly…[tape ends.]

Question: …getting community feedback on a potential project or on a project. I see a potential real problem. The web knows no geopolitical boundaries. What is to prevent, if we are using media properties to foster community discussion, what is to prevent disenfranchised Kosovars from overloading what happens in Everett, Washington?

Thomas: That’s a very good question. Did everybody pick that up in the room? Is everybody in the back okay?

“None of the interactive projects that I’ve seen have been set up to take advertising. This is foolish.” -Glenn Thomas

That’s a good question because the Everett Waterfront Project was a Macromedia site of the day for a day or two. And so they did end up getting some skewing from people around the world who saw it. I think there are many different ways to deal with that and none of them are that difficult. It’s not impossible to just ask people to register and, as the online world changes and free content goes away, people are going to get used to registering and perhaps paying local newspapers might end up changing so that the online activities like this would be available to subscribers or people in the community. Sure, perhaps disenfranchised Kosovars would go through and register a fake address in that city, but I think the percentage of people who would do that is small. And if you really wanted to make sure it was just from that community, then technologically you could figure out IP addresses and where people might likely be from. That would be the way we would probably recommend dealing with it. Does that answer the question?

Question: Yes. IP addresses, I think, are awfully squishy because my SBC global.net broadband access gives me a pretty squishy IP address. I don’t know.

Thomas: You should go to the global IP address map and see if it nails you right every time. I’ve been surprised.

Question: I’d like to make a comment and then a question. I’m less worried about a vote as I am about getting good ideas. And if someone from Kosovo – Kosova is the more politically correct name – wants to take the game and offer a good idea, why not? Can you comment a little bit more on budgets? In New York we have some experience. Mike Moss imprinted a hunk of the city budget into Sim City, licensed the end of Climaxis some years ago. For instance, we’ve got some Java script, fill-in-the-blank stuff and totalers and things like that. So obviously, the debate on what to do with the World Trade Center site will be a natural and the newspapers certainly are doing a lot of feedback mechanism. But when we approach people with the idea of a Sim City-type thing, where right now legally they’re supposed to put back 11 million square foot of office space and about a million square foot of retail. The planners know that it would be wise not to do that, it would be wise to put a mixed residential, but the rules of the game don’t allow it because the legally [inaudible] they’re supposed to put in, the mayor is out changing the rules of the game. So what all the editors of the paper said was we’ll wait until they change the rules of the game before we even think of investing in building something around Sim City. Basically, most of the good examples we see around the country are funded by someone else. Yours was funded by Pew, Mike’s was funded by the city university system. The newspapers, frankly, are el cheapo. You’ve had some experience now, is there any way to drive the costs down closer to a normal story or convince them that it’s worth more than a normal story? Make it more routine than cheap? With all due respect, Flash isn’t all that expensive, but still…

Thomas: It’s the human costs involved in creating something like this. I would say that there are a few different aspects to that question. One is that currently newsrooms don’t have people with the expertise so they have to outsource it, and that’s always going to be much more expensive. So as newsrooms change, and there is more expertise internally, I think you’ll see more of this happen. The second thing is that newspapers survive on advertising. None of the interactive projects that I’ve seen have been set up to take advertising. This is foolish. I really believe that. If people are spending so much time with these projects, why isn’t there advertising within them? Why isn’t there some kind of ad all the time at the bottom of this? If somebody’s spending half an hour with this, why aren’t the newspapers implementing advertising? Is it a sales problem? Is it a technology problem? Whatever it might be, find a way to pay for it? If there’s always just a straight loss on the books, of course they’re not going to get done. We deal with companies that have bottom lines. They’re being paid for because they’re marketing, they’re advertising. If you’re an online site and you’re a newspaper, CNN or whatever it might be, and you count on advertising, then if you make something you had better integrate advertising into it. And that’s becoming more possible, certainly with Flash. It was a little bit more difficult in the past. The current version, it’s quite simple. But there’s a fundamental disconnect for me with most interactive projects like this and the advertising sale side of organizations. Why can’t there be this special sponsorship, whatever it might be? Great opportunity. The organization has to see that somebody’s spending a lot of time with this sort of media, and then I think it becomes an easier sell when the advertising is integrated. Because how many people spend half an hour with the newspaper every day, or even once a day, or once a week? This is a great opportunity that nobody is taking. And once that happens and there’s a way to pay for it, then I think the budgets change. That would be, I think, the most important thing to me.

Question: [inaudible]. The other thing is, I’m worried about the democratic process. An essential problem with this kind of game playing, I like the idea of [inaudible], but it’s essentially a volunteer kind of sample [inaudible]. And newspapers tend to write headlines based upon those inaccurate, unscientific polls. I think there are many cases [inaudible]. I guess I would urge some caution that there be a social science component to gathering this information so that it doesn’t have an impact on public policy.

“The decision to make is, as a journalist, are you trying to reach everybody in your community or just the thoughtful, best educated people with the most time on their hands and the most interest in difficult-to-read stories… my response to that is you’re missing, as journalists, a huge part of the population.” -Glenn Thomas

The other thing is do we really want people who are [inaudible] and playing games and entertaining themselves driving that [inaudible] rather than people who are [inaudible]?

Thomas: I think your first two points are well taken. Your last point is condescending to the audience. And if you are willing, as a journalist, to cut out a large part of your audience, then that’s a choice you can make.

Question: I’m not suggesting that. I’m suggesting [inaudible] public policy [inaudible].

Thomas: Perhaps there are people whose voices aren’t heard now who would be attracted to this who are being left out of the debate. It doesn’t mean that you can’t have thoughtful articles in a newspaper. It means that this may be more attractive to an audience that, as a journalist, you’re not reaching now. And so the decision to make is, as a journalist, are you trying to reach everybody in your community or just the thoughtful, best educated people with the most time on their hands and the most interest in difficult-to-read stories. I mean, my response to that is you’re missing, as journalists, a huge part of the population. Flat out, there are people who won’t read about these. There are lots of people I know who have not just good ideas but are interested in the gridlock problem in Washington. They will never read a newspaper article about it. They’re never going to do it, and yet they’re stuck in traffic every day and want a solution and see no way to do it other than going to the ballot box every year and voting for a different initiative that promises them things that, quite frankly, are often lies. Question: I was curious if you’ve given much thought to how we handle perhaps exposing [inaudible] and I’m not sure, frankly, that we’re already [inaudible]. And I know, in my case, I always want to separate that. I expose people to avocations and I teach them the basics, but I’m mainly there to teach journalism. I’m curious, perhaps it’s the idea of you talking about the game logic. Do people do story boards, scripts? Do they talk to you, a person like myself who says, “Hey, I’ve got an idea, maybe we can do this?” How does that process work? Thomas: I think the way to do it is to take out the technology equation completely, other than describing it. And then it becomes a matter of the game logic and the writing and the scripts and figuring out the cause and effect in the same way that in a story there’s going to be cause and effect described and cause and effect from different points of view. I don’t think any of that changes. It’s a different presentation. It’s a different way of thinking, though I’m not telling a somewhat linear story. It’s here are the different choices that can be made in that kind of game. Other kinds of things that are just – whether it’s informational quizzes or things like that, it’s story boards and the writing and things like that.

Question: The answer you gave just a moment ago, you seemed to be talking about a generational shift. Younger people, newspaper readership seems to be on the decline. In public radio we find that our listenership is increasingly – the age of it is increasingly going up. What I’m wondering about is what do you think about the possibility that a younger population might apply a different standard to journalistic problems? We’ve grown up in the environment of basically high stakes journalism. It’s got to be right, names have to be spelled correctly, you’ve got to stand behind the product. And that is the standard that most people live by in our newspaper, radio, television. Do you think that the generational shift, people that are younger might apply different, lower standards that would allow them to accept a game with the model behind it and say, “We don’t take it as truth. We’re not going to hold you accountable.” I see a potential there.

Question: When you were hired initially to do this, do you act in a consulting capacity? Do you say, “Okay, what is it you’d like to have your readers engage in on the Web?” And then you say, “Well actually, perhaps you might want to use video with Flash, perhaps you might want to have a logging section and encourage interaction and feedback in other ways. Do you actually consult and suggest many different ways multimedia might be used to accomplish the goal the paper wants? I know that you’re a Flash expert, so would you recommend it be in Flash? Because Flash is capable of so much, there’s many different ways to do some of these interactivities and still achieve what the paper is going for. Can you just comment on the suggestions, consulting?

Thomas: Absolutely. We consult with any client we have based on the experiences we’ve done, we’ve gone through. We’ve done some webcasting journalism-type projects and some dynamic information stuff that’s all very applicable to journalism. We try and come up with the best possible solution for a set of goals. Flash, we’re very good at it but it’s not always the right tool to use to implement. We always look at what’s the goal, and if it works well. If it’s the best choice, then we use it. We tend to use it because it creates very small file sizes and most people have it. So it usually makes the most sense.

Question: Have you considered the metaphor from electronic games to the concept of games in general? We have this problem, you’ve spoken of broadband and the great things of having broadband. We know broadband penetration isn’t going to pass 50 percent for eight to 10 years. By the same token, in maximizing participation, we have this game metaphor that can be so valuable if we can use some low-tech interactivity, whether it’s through the telephone. But in the work you’ve done, have you been able to stretch the metaphor beyond well, we’ve got to be computer-based, we’ve got to be Flash or a browser? Where are you in that respect?

Thomas: We’ve done stuff for PDAs and phones and those kind of things, but this is even probably further out being broadly used by your audience than broadband.

Question: Trying to go more inclusive, rather than exclusive.

Thomas: We don’t do works outside of the digital area, so I’m sure that you could. It just hasn’t been something that I’ve thought anything about. But there’s always something that would work, whether it’s calling into different phone numbers as an experience, or whatever it might be.

Question: You said that the Seattle gridlock was likely to be [inaudible]?

Thomas: They said that it would take the light rail anywhere from eight to 15 years to get built, and it’s been nothing but setbacks the last year, so it might never get built.

Question: So we had the question about these things are so expensive to build. You have a story that you know for a fact is going to be in the news for eight to 15 years, maybe even longer. If you can build an effective application that you can link to every time you have a story on this puppy for the next eight to 15 years, that sounds like pretty cheap journalism.

Thomas: I’d agree with you. I’m not an accountant though, so… I mean, that is one way to look at those. It’s about choosing the right story. If this is more expensive to do, and it certainly can be, then what’s a story that is long-term? Okay, I can throw out some right away. Education in America. I think there’s some sort of cause and effect to understand there. The last time I checked that story has been in the news for the last 30 years. The environment, global warming, that story is not going away. I’d love to do a little simulation where the water starts rising on New York City. [Laughter.]

Thomas: I love New York, but you know, it’s going away if it’s true. You can’t build enough dikes. Any other questions? I know people have panels to get to.

Schaffer: Thank you very much. [Applause.]  I know Glenn’s concern about gridlock in Seattle is not an isolation. He just had lunch with the new media editor at The (Everett) Herald to talk about what are the possibilities here. I think that as we launch into the next area of journalism, building community capacity to solve issues, I think this is an arena that certainly we’re interested in exploring further. And in part of that exploration, we’re very interested in pairing newsrooms with university computer science departments to help build some of the capacity for customizing some of the software. So stay tuned, I’ll let you know how it works. And thank you very much for coming today. [Applause.]