A Gamified News Application for Mobile Devices: An Approach that Turns Digital News Readers into Players of a Social Net

Gamification is a well known approach nowadays for achieving the ultimate goal of motivating loyalty with a brand and engaging users with given tasks in a variety of fields. However, attempts made to use gamification techniques in news industry have given

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Faculty of Communication and Media Studies, University of Athens, Athens, Greece {katerinasot,mourlas}@media.uoa.gr

Abstract. Gamification is a well known approach nowadays for achieving the ultimate goal of motivating loyalty with a brand and engaging users with given tasks in a variety of fields. However, attempts made to use gamification techniques in news industry have given poor results, pointing to the conclusion that jour‐ nalism may not an open field for gamification to thrive. At the same time changes in news consumption across the globe show a rapid rise of news audiences accessing stories through their mobile devices, while social media play a huge role in distribution of online news. This paper examines the combination of these three trends, gamification, smartphones and social media in a promising and possibly successful way. Keywords: Gamification · Game design · Digital media · Journalism · Mobile news reader · Social interaction

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Introduction

Gamification according to recent academic publications can be a powerful human moti‐ vator and has already being utilized in domains that collect user-generated content such as mobile social reporting and citizen sensing [4, 9, 31] with remarkable outcome. Gamification is a promising mechanism to motivate people to use an application more often [28] and derive fun from their activity [3, 10, 12, 31, 32]. Digitalization, which results from rising penetration of smartphones and tablets on news consumption, along with the social media networks providing readers access to digital news throughout the day, offers space for a platform that combines news and social media. A vast majority of the readers instead of going directly to stories via a brand’s homepage, uses a side door like Facebook or Twitter. As news industry becomes more dependent on different distribution platforms to find audiences over time, business strategies are forced to change. A promising approach is that of Gamification. We propose an alternative approach on gamifying digital news, by adjusting the effective principles of game design to a news ecosystem, consisted of social media friends.

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 A. De Gloria and R. Veltkamp (Eds.): GALA 2015, LNCS 9599, pp. 480–493, 2016. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-40216-1_53

A Gamified News Application for Mobile Devices

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Journalism in Digital Age

Current Trends in Digital News. A key focus for the news industry over the past years has been trying to reach a wider audience, especially in younger demographics, subscribing to content, but there has been limited success. According to recent reports [19, 20, 33] smartphones are the main devices for accessing digital news, causing a significant impact on consumption formats, while Facebook plays a dominant role in finding, discussing and sharing the news. The same report underlines the fact that even though 70 % of smartphone users have a news appli‐ cation installed on their phone, only a third uses it to read articles in a given week [20]. For that reason news companies have

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