Serious game examples from newsrooms: Budget Hero, HeartSaver and more

Sisi Wei, a news applications developer at ProPublica, wrote Creating Games for Journalism, published by ProPublica on July 11, 2013 and co-published with Source. Her argument is that simulation games create a mock reality close enough to the real thing for players to feel its pressures, and that this gives journalists a way to generate understanding through emotional involvement.

The essay also points out that many people who would never call themselves gamers already play on phones and on Facebook, so the audience is familiar with the medium. It cites Sweatshop, a simulation of a sweatshop manager's choices, and a New Yorker writer's account of how her attention to the on-screen child worker faded as she played.

The three serious game examples in the essay come from three kinds of publisher: a public media organization, a national newspaper and an investigative nonprofit newsroom.

Budget Hero was published by American Public Media in 2008. Players build a federal budget meant to stay balanced over the next thirty years, and each policy choice comes with arguments for and against it drawn from reporting, data and modeling.

Gauging Your Distraction, from The New York Times, asks players to drive and text at once. They move between six lanes as directed while sending correctly spelled messages, and at the end they see how their reaction time compares with averages. The essay credits Gabriel Dance, Tom Jackson and Aron Pilhofer.

HeartSaver is ProPublica's own experiment. Players drag heart attack patients on a map of New York City to the nearest hospital, and hospitals carry different heart attack care ratings. Al Shaw, Sisi Wei and Amanda Zamora built it in two days for the April 2013 GEN Editors' Lab Hackathon, and its page states plainly that it is not a definitive study of how distance from a hospital affects survival.

The ProPublica essay still loads at its original address. The HeartSaver page also loads and invites readers to play, with a short how-to-play guide that explains dragging patients to hospitals.

The old Budget Hero address under American Public Media now forwards to the publisher's home page, so the game itself could not be confirmed. Gauging Your Distraction was not confirmed either. Of the serious game examples in the essay, HeartSaver is the one with a page that is online and offers the game.