Fantasy News

Play the News is an interesting offering for those interested in new ways to deliver and interact with the news. Self-described as "fantasy sports meets the evening news," the site aims to be a social community of news forecasters.

Each player begins at Level 1 and works his way up in the community by predicting the outcomes of real life news stories featured on the site. Each story is delivered in a short flash "game" where the player is given an introduction to the story, accompanying details, and descriptions of major players involved. After the player has explored the story, he is given a chance to vote on both what he thinks should happen and what he thinks will actually happen. The game offers advisors in making these decisions and in some of the games, the player may make decisions from multiple perspectives.


After a player makes her decisions, she is shown how her answers compare to the community at large. I would consider this flash portion more of an informative poll than a game in and of itself. Instead, the game occurs at the community level where players compete to accurately predict the news

Veteran game developer Scott Peters covered Play the News on his blog, comparing it to more sophisticated advocacy games of the past. In his discussion, he makes an interesting suggestion as to how crowd sourcing could be further implemented:
 

Where “Play The News” would have been a better title, I think, would have been to (a) actually have content creators postulate the impact of the solutions visitors choose, and most importantly, (b) throw open the content creation tools to everyone. If you really want to embrace “the social networking thing”, than you have to have the users bring the focus of the discussion, rather than being an essentially inactive audience.

It's interesting that Peters refers to this site as a "title," making it more akin to a static game product that is done at some point than a website that evolves and changes over time. However, his thoughts on crowd sourcing for developing the stories and decisions themselves is an interesting one.

My first thought, however, was that the crowd would be really bad at this. Most people seem to create terrible polls with redundant or incomplete options and people have a hard time not including their biases. From a gaming perspective, there would definitely need to be good checks and balances to prevent players from gaming the system by creating their own content.

Over time, crowd sourcing could be an effective way to diffuse the unavoidable agenda setting nature of Play the News. While Play the News offers a great variety of stories already, their method of delivery limits their choices in the news they deliver. The site doesn't tell the player what to think, but it does tell the player what to think about. Creating a system that allowed the crowd to assist in creating the content could greatly increase the number of stories offered.