Producing newsgames beyond boundaries: Journalists,game developers,and the news business

Abstract

Creating successful newsgames requires effective boundary work between journalists and game developers. Both groups come to the job with different professional vocabularies, technical know-how, and work cultures. Our goal was to understand how they approach these challenges as they create a product that satisfies their professional expectations and the demands of media organizations and audiences. This article presents the results of semistructured expert interviews with pioneers in German newsgame production. We found that effective newsgame creation entailed complex coordination efforts. However, expected clashes between the different professional cultures did not occur. Conflicts were eased by a general agreement on news as a public service and by emphasizing nonhierarchical decision-making in teams. Our interviews detail the economic and technical obstacles that have resulted in newsgames not making major inroads. The decline of newsgames was related to the development of other digital media forms that matched journalistic conventions more closely. These findings led us to extend the model of journalistic boundary work to a more interactional concept that highlights the contributions of both sides while acknowledging the obstacles of operating in a larger media system.