The Gamification of Digital Journalism: Innovation in Journalistic Storytelling

This book examines the brief yet accelerated evolution of newsgames, a genre that has emerged from puzzles, quizzes, and interactives augmenting digital journalism into full-fledged immersive video games from open-world designs to virtual reality experiences.

Critics have raised questions about the credibility and ethics of transforming serious news stories of political consequence into entertainment media, and the risks of trivializing grave and catastrophic events into mere games. Dowling explores both the negatives of newsgames, and how the use of entertainment media forms and their narrative methods mainly associated with fiction can add new and potentially more powerful meaning to news than traditional formats allow. The book also explores how industrial and cultural shifts in the digital publishing industry have enabled newsgames to evolve in a manner that strengthens certain core principles of journalism, particularly advocacy on behalf of marginalized and oppressed groups.

Cutting-edge and thoughtful, The Gamification of Digital Journalism is a must-read for scholars, researchers, and practitioners interested in multimedia journalism and immersive storytelling.

David O. Dowling is an associate professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa. The author of nine books on publishing networks and industries, his works on digital culture, technology, and the economics of media production has appeared in journals such as Convergence, Digital Journalism, Digital Humanities Quarterly, Games and Culture, Journalism & Communication Monographs, and Literary Journalism Studies.