Journalism Studies

ISSN: 1461-670X (Print) 1469-9699 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjos20

Are Newsgames Better Journalism?

Christoph Plewe & Elfriede Fürsich

To cite this article: Christoph Plewe & Elfriede Fürsich (2017): Are Newsgames Better
Journalism?, Journalism Studies, DOI: 10.1080/1461670X.2017.1351884

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 ARE NEWSGAMES BETTER JOURNALISM?
Empathy, information and representation in
games on refugees and migrants

Christoph Plewe and Elfriede Fürsich

This study interrogates if newsgames are meaningful supplements to already existing forms of jour-
nalism. Using the case of refugee and migrant issues, this study examines how the newsgames The
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Refugee Challenge, Against all Odds and The Migrant Trail convey information about migration
in interactive game-play, and how migrants and their situation are represented in these games. The
games are discussed in relation to empathy, objectivity, complexity and the representation of
distant suffering. The overarching question is how newsgames compare to traditional journalism
when it comes to helping audiences understand political events of global concern and power asym-
metries between “Others” and “us.” We find that these newsgames especially enhanced journalism
when they cleverly employed game logics to generate experiential engagement with the existential
crisis of involuntary dislocation. Nevertheless, the games did not use their game capabilities to the
fullest, which would have entailed opening up a discourse that allows for contradictory life worlds
and different perspectives of and by Others in context.

KEYWORDS digital journalism; distant suffering; empathy; migration; newsgames; refugees

representing the Other; serious games

Introduction
As European governments along with many others in the world struggle with an
increasing influx of people crossing borders as migrants and refugees, many countries
have also experienced a rise of jingoistic movements on the far right. Of concern is the
role the media play in negotiating and contextualizing the plight of the newcomers to a
potentially worried or even apprehensive audience. Yet the news media’s established
impetus to focus on negativity, crisis and ethnocentric frameworks to explain change
may aggravate misinformation instead of fostering understanding by informing audiences
about the struggles migrants and refugees have to face on a daily basis. The actual experi-
ence of what it means to be a refugee is often drowned out by news coverage on legal,
political, economic or security issues for the home audience targeted by national media
(e.g., Allen 2016; Georgiou and Zaborowski 2017). However, a new type of content has
emerged that has the potential to overcome these deficiencies: newsgames, as a hybrid
of interactive storytelling and news content, potentially allow the player not only to
follow the news, but also to interactively engage with the content to gain a deeper under-
standing of it (Bogost, Ferrari, and Schweizer 2010). While newsgames are increasingly used
in tandem or in addition to news content, the question remains if these games actually
enhance journalistic discourses.
Journalism Studies, 2017
https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2017.1351884
© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 2 CHRISTOPH PLEWE AND ELFRIEDE FÜRSICH

This study sets out to evaluate if newsgames are meaningful supplements to already
existing forms of journalism. Using the case of refugee issues, this study first asks how do
newsgames convey information about refugee issues in interactive game-play, and how are
refugees and their situation represented in these games. The findings are then discussed in
relation to empathy, objectivity, complexity and the representation of distant suffering. The
overarching question is how newsgames hold up against traditional journalism when it
comes to helping audiences understand political events of global concern. Three exemplary
games are examined that use different game concepts and architecture to present the situ-
ation of refugees and immigrants to the players. After delineating and analyzing various
structures underlying these games, the discussion evaluates the overall significance of
newsgames and their cultural position in current media discourses on migrants and
refugees.
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Contextualizing Newsgames
The massive growth of the internet in the last decade and the increasing possibilities
of information distribution via mobile devices had a strong impact on the news industry.
News companies had to adjust to this development and constantly look for new ways of
digital storytelling to keep their audiences attracted (Sturm 2013). Given the popularity
and cultural impact of computer games, it made sense that news also adapted this form
of digital storytelling to convey information (Zehle 2012). Renowned newspapers and
magazines like the New York Times and Wired magazine have featured newsgames on
their websites (Bogost, Ferrari, and Schweizer 2010); BuzzFeed’s announcement to create
a development studio solely for the creation of newsgames has renewed the interest in
this topic (Stuart 2014).
Newsgames—like digital games in general—differ from traditional media regarding
their interactivity. Games demand an active involvement in the production of content. They
turn more or less passive “recipients” of a predefined media content into users or players
who are actively engaged in how they experience the information presented (Aarseth
1997; Schrape 2012). Working through an abundance of descriptions, Juul offered this
helpful definition of games:
A game is a rule-based system with a variable and quantifiable outcome, where different
outcomes are assigned different values, the player exerts effort in order to influence the
outcome, the player feels emotionally attached to the outcome, and the consequences of
the activity are negotiable (Juul 2005, 36)
This definition takes into account the importance of specific game goals which, according
to McGonigal (2011), provide essential motivation for the act of playing and are one of the
reasons why games are so appealing to so many people. It also suggests an understanding
of games as rule-based systems. As Bogost (2010) states, a game’s characteristics are pri-
marily based on the rules specified in the algorithms of the program code. These rules
define the game’s audiovisual design, goals or challenges the player has to face, actions
that can be performed and more. They form the game mechanics that shape the
players’ overall experience of the game content (Juul 2005; Kapp, Blair, and Mesch 2014).
The resulting interdependence between the textual content and the game mech-
anics (Frasca 2003; Juul 2005) leads to a unique type of authorship in the production of
text: the authorship of procedures in the code. According to Bogost (2010, 4), programmers,
 ARE NEWSGAMES BETTER JOURNALISM? 3

unlike traditional authors, use, “code that enforces rules to generate some kind of represen-
tation, rather than authoring the representation itself.” The portrayal of actual social, cul-
tural or political events in games can be deliberately modeled according to the
programmers’ viewpoint using the means of “procedural rhetoric” by “assembling particu-
lar rules that suggest a particular function of a particular system” (Bogost 2008, 125),
thereby shaping the players’ experience regarding these issues.

Defining Newsgames
As more games are developed that deal with actual events—current and past—the
term newsgames refers to “a broad body of work produced at the intersection of video-
games and journalism” (Bogost, Ferrari, and Schweizer 2010, 6). While there is not a gener-
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ally accepted definition of the term newsgame, there are certain characteristics of
newsgames that scholars seem to agree on:
. Created in response to actual events: Newsgames all refer to actual events, current or
past, with most of these events standing in the context of bigger social, historical or
political issues (Bogost, Ferrari, and Schweizer 2010; Burton 2005; Sicart 2008;
Treanor and Mateas 2009).
. Easy to access: In order to appeal to a wide audience, newsgames need to make use of
simple or previously existing game mechanics that their players are already familiar
with. This allows for a fast and easy access to the game content (Bogost, Ferrari, and
Schweizer 2010; Treanor and Mateas 2009). Newsgames themselves also need to be
easily and universally accessible for everyone. This, for example, can be established
via specific platforms on the internet that allow playing these games directly in the
Web browser window or via download as an app for mobile devices (Bogost, Ferrari,
and Schweizer 2010; Sicart 2008).
. Persuasive intention: Just like digital games in general, newsgames have a persuasive
direction through the artificial, modeled character of their game rules. Additionally,
the rules and game mechanics in newsgames are especially created using the
means of procedural rhetoric to support the opinion of their designers on the topic
the game is about (Bogost, Ferrari, and Schweizer 2010; Sicart 2008; Treanor and
Mateas 2009). But this does not mean that newsgames are limited to the role of a pol-
itical cartoon or editorial comment. Newsgames can also provide contextual infor-
mation in the way journalistic documentaries or features could. Their advantage lies
in the ability to demonstrate the mechanisms and developments behind specific
events by providing a rule system that lets the player experience (and probably manip-
ulate) the events as they unfold (Bogost and Poremba 2008).
. Supplementary to traditional news: Since newsgames use rules and game mechanics to
convey information and, even more importantly, to present a point of view on a topic,
many expect transparency about what is shown in the games and what the intention
of the content presented is. Games that claim to be informing people without reveal-
ing their agenda or bias are criticized as political propaganda or advertisement (Bogost
and Poremba 2008; Sicart 2008). To understand how games use the combination of
rules and text to convey information, it is necessary for the players to have a certain
degree of media literacy regarding videogames, or, as Treanor and Mateas (2009, 4–
5) put it in this case, “procedural literacy” (see also Sicart 2008, 32). Burton (2005),
 4 CHRISTOPH PLEWE AND ELFRIEDE FÜRSICH

therefore, suggests that newsgames should not (yet) be understood as independent

means of reporting the news, but rather as valuable interactive supplement to
already-existing information.
While studies on the overall effectiveness of newsgames are still rare, there have
been studies showing that readers and editors perceived interactive content on news web-
sites as helpful in understanding and engaging with the content (George-Palilonis and Spill-
man 2013; see also Brook 2013). Even less is known about the actual content created in
these games. Even as game mechanics are very specific to every game, there is still a
need for systematic analysis of the structure of exemplary games in order to explain
how they make use of the advantages of the interactive medium “game” to convey
information.
As an exemplar, this study analyzes the representation of migration in newsgames
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guided by the following questions: How do newsgames convey information about

refugee and migrant issues with the means of interactive game-play, and how are refugees
and migrants and their situation represented in these games? The findings are used to
evaluate the potential of these games to enhance traditional journalism’s capacity to com-
municate effectively issues of global concern and the suffering of distant Others. Are they
able to destabilize entrenched media representations of migrants and refugees as Others?

Method of Analysis
We selected three newsgames that have a thematic focus on the life and fate of refu-
gees and immigrants: The Refugee Challenge by the British newspaper The Guardian (2014),
Against All Odds by the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR 2005) and The Migrant Trail,
developed by software studio Gigantic Mechanic in cooperation with filmmaker Marco Wil-
liams (Gigantic Mechanic 2013). These critically acclaimed games employ distinctive under-
lying game concepts in presenting the topic to the player. Moreover, they also exemplify
different types of newsgames. The Refugee Challenge developed by and for an online news-
paper easily fits within even narrow definitions of newsgames. While not produced by a
journalistic outlet, The Migrant Trail is part of a documentary film project with journalis-
tic/investigative intent. Only Against All Odds seems to stray from the concept of news-
games as it was developed by an intergovernmental organization with a clear
educational focus aiming at younger gamers. The decision to include it was based on
the argument above in favor of defining newsgames more broadly. The game includes
links to media content and embodies all four characteristics established for newsgames
above. Employing purposive sampling led us to these games as distinctive exemplars of
newsgames suitable for qualitative analysis (Lindlof and Taylor 2011).
The interactivity and multi-linearity of the medium poses a challenge for the analysis
of digital games. Scholars from the field of game studies have made several recommen-
dations regarding a methodology of analysis. Some focused on formal aspects of games,
such as interface, rules, goals, entities and entity manipulation, (Zagal et al. 2005),
whereas others suggest a holistic approach, including formal, technical, cultural and semio-
tic aspects (Konzack 2002). Since the focus of this study was on both technical as well as
content aspects, we followed a method suggested by Carr (2009). In reference to
Barthes’ methods of structural and textual analysis, she recommends a way of analyzing
games that incorporates both the level of rules and game mechanics as well as the
 ARE NEWSGAMES BETTER JOURNALISM? 5

textual level, since both are relevant for the content experience of a digital game as a “play-
able text” (Carr 2009, 1–2). Further including aspects of Aarseth’s method of game analysis
(Aarseth 2003) and the methods of Zagal et al. (2005) for the analysis of formal aspects of
games, in the following section the three games will first be examined regarding their
general rules and game mechanics that form the platform for the presented information
about refugees. Employing Carr’s method of textual analysis of games, the news-games
will then be interrogated “on units of meaning, or semes, with a binding quality […] that
form clusters and continuities with, across and beyond text” (Carr 2009, 5). Following
Aarseth (2003), the necessary data for the analysis was gathered by playing the three
games multiple times and taking detailed notes about the games and the impressions
during the act of playing before coding these procedural and textual observations.
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Narratives and Rules of the Games

The Refugee Challenge
The Refugee Challenge (The Guardian 2014) is a short interactive, primarily text-based
feature on the website of the British newspaper The Guardian. It is not a digital game in the
traditional sense, involving graphics and complex game-play mechanics, but is rather similar
to the literature genre of the “game book”. In this kind of books the reader, instead of follow-
ing a predefined storyline, is presented a multitude of paths to choose from, leading from
one text fragment to another, which results in different outcomes of the narrative of the
story dependent on the choices made by the reader. Aarseth (1997, 1) described this kind
of texts as “ergodic,” requiring “nontrivial effort … to allow the reader to traverse the
text.” This shifts the position of the reader from the passive spectator of depicted events
to an active participant with at least partial control over the narrative. In this type of text,
as in the case of The Refugee Challenge, the narrative resembles a labyrinth-like structure,
demanding the active reader to “scrutinize the links and venues in order to avoid
meeting the same text fragments over and over again” (Aarseth 1997, 78). The player is
thus encouraged to explore all the different possibilities of the narrative.
In The Refugee Challenge the player reenacts the role of a 28-year-old Sunni woman
from Syria, whose husband was killed during a mortar attack, leaving her with an 8-year-old
daughter and a 10-year-old son. Because of the ongoing war, she decides to flee the
country to protect her children. It is now up to the player to decide how this will be
done, but the options are limited to the paths given by the authors. Nevertheless, the differ-
ent combinations of path choices add up to a complex labyrinth of text fragments that
structures the narrative of the story. The interface of the game consists of different com-
ponents. A photograph at the top illustrates the content of the text fragments with depic-
tions of the described events. To the right of the text fragment there is a map indicating the
geographical position at this specific point of the game. The text fragments contain infor-
mation about the situation the player is in and suggest different paths to take from this
point on.
The information about refugees from Syria is conveyed by the choices (and their
limitation) as well as links to traditional news media content. By not making every part
of the information of the text accessible at once, the player is forced to find out which
actions lead to success and which might not work or end up in failure. Certain information,
for example that Sweden offers permanent residence for refugees, will be missed if the
 6 CHRISTOPH PLEWE AND ELFRIEDE FÜRSICH

player chooses to travel to Turkey at the beginning. The players will also experience the set-
backs of refugees on the way into Greece, Italy or Turkey, making it necessary to retry the
choices or rethink their strategy and change the path.
Additionally, the text fragments contain contextual information about the situation of
refugees in the European countries, such as the flaws of the Greek asylum system or Bul-
garia’s and Greece’s illegal push-back policy towards refugees. Several text fragments
also contain hyperlinks to external sources on the internet. These external sources
include, for example, online articles from BBC News or the United Nations Refugee
Agency (UNHCR). Some of the text fragments also include short video-clip interviews of
Syrians who have fled their country. Possible endings of the game in Bulgaria, Italy and
Turkey portray the desperate situation of the refugees in these places and the player is
encouraged by a text message to try the game again from the beginning to see how
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things might have turned out if different choices were made.

Against All Odds

Against All Odds (UNHCR 2005) is a Web-based game that consists of 12 different
short segments assembled in three parts that employ a variety of different game mechanics
to convey what it means to be a refugee. The first part, “War and Conflict—Running from
Persecution,” gives insight into what forces people to leave their home country. Various
mini games let the player reenact an escape from the local authorities, having to leave
one’s belongings, relatives and friends to an unknown fate. In the second part, “Border
Country—Can I Stay Here?,” the player character has arrived in a new country and must
organize a life within unfamiliar surroundings. The mini games vary from having to find
a place to stay and applying for political asylum to experiencing the first day at school,
where the player character does not understand the language. The third part, “A New
Life—Loss and Challenge,” mainly deals with the situation of having to organize one’s
life in a new community. The focus of this part lies on experiencing prejudice in
daily life. One mini game, for example, is about going shopping and being accused of
stealing.
Most of these mini games are controlled with the mouse. The actions performed vary
with each mini game, but most of the time the player is told to pick up, search for and inter-
act with objects or persons. Juul (2005) refers to this kind of game as “games of pro-
gression,” because of the linearity in which the player is presented with the challenges
in the game. In a game of progression the players are confronted with one or more chal-
lenges that need to be completed to succeed in the game. Here, game designers have
great control over the overall game experience, practically forcing the players to behave
as they wish them to. Unlike The Refugee Challenge, Against All Odds does not let the
player explore possible different outcomes of the player’s actions. Even the mini games
that suggest forking paths and thus multi-linearity, such as “You Must Flee the Country,”
only let players progress by making them take the “right” option.
What at first appears to be a flaw in the design of the game can also be seen as a very
intriguing way of conveying information. Especially at the beginning of the game, the
player is presented with several moral choices. In the first game, “Interrogation,” for
example, the player has to sign agreements that result in giving up basic human rights;
in “You Must Flee the Country,” the player even has to decide whether to leave a friend
behind to face an unknown fate, because having him in the group increases the risk of
 ARE NEWSGAMES BETTER JOURNALISM? 7

being caught. In forcing the player to make these existential decisions, the game simulates
what it means experiencing such a grave situation. The game also comments on the
player’s actions, scolding for “unwise” decisions or giving hints on what would have to
be done if the situation was real. Time limits in some of the mini games further exert
pressure on the players; the sometimes intricate controls add to a feeling of stress and help-
lessness. The information transported here is therefore less factual but rather affective, trig-
gering an emotional engagement. In these situations the player—at least to a certain
degree—is made to feel what the player character might be feeling in that situation.
Apart from the in-game information, Against All Odds also provides additional content
on refugee issues in their “Web Facts” section, linking to many articles and videos with inter-
views as well as reports from refugees directly related to the game situations. Additional
hyperlinks lead to external organizations, such as Amnesty International or the European
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Court of Human Rights.

The Migrant Trail

The Migrant Trail (Gigantic Mechanic 2013) is a game developed as a supplement to
Marco Williams’ documentary The Undocumented about Mexicans illegally crossing the
Sonoran desert in southern Arizona to migrate into the United States. The game portrays
these people as forced to do so for political, economic and personal reasons, and seeing
this dangerous journey as their only option to cross the border, because the strict immigra-
tion policy of the United States makes it very difficult for them to receive a visa or work
permit. Many of these people—on average 200 a year—do not survive this dangerous
endeavor because of dehydration, heat strokes or injuries, and are left behind in the
desert to die (Williams 2013a). In the game, the player acts either as one of the border
patrol guards or as one of the migrants. The game rules and mechanics differ between
the two groups, thereby changing the experience of the situation.
When choosing the migrant side, the main goal of the game is surviving the hike
through the Sonoran desert and reaching the US border. The game can be played with
several different characters who all have a different motivation for making the dangerous
journey through the desert. Each player character is briefly introduced with a text and short
videos; and each player character has different starting conditions and physical abilities,
such as health, strength, stamina, willpower and money available.
If the player fails to manage the distribution of the supplies, specific consequences
arise, such as heat strokes or exhaustion when starving, all having consequences on the
moving speed of the group and therefore making it more likely for the group to be
spotted by a border patrol. When that happens, the game ends automatically.
The game experience varies strongly when the player chooses to play as one of the
guards of the border patrol. Here the main goal is helping as many migrants as possible in a
five-hour working shift (equaling approximately five minutes of game time). Every action
performed reduces the amount of “time” left. When the player decides to follow tracks
in the desert, little sequences appear where the player can decide if he or she wants to
follow tracks or not. When the time limit runs out, the game ends. However, there is no
winning scenario because the “game score” in the epilogue shows that many more Mexi-
cans die than can be saved by the player during the work-shift in the desert. As a border
patrol the player experiences the tragedy of the situation, because no matter how effective
the player plays the game, the game cannot reach a positive outcome. Even the positive
 8 CHRISTOPH PLEWE AND ELFRIEDE FÜRSICH

action of helping injured migrants by applying first aid leads to the consequence that after-
wards they are taken into custody and sent back to Mexico.
Since the game can only be controlled with the mouse and several actions have to be
coordinated and performed at the same time, playing as a migrant constantly provokes a
feeling of tension, stress and trepidation, demanding the player to keep an eye on the
status bars, the resources, as well as the patrolling guards and the path ahead. The
moral dilemma of not wanting to fail in the game by being caught, but eventually
having to sacrifice injured or weak group members, aggravates this situation. Being told
each character’s background story and what personal hardships have forced the people
into making this journey makes the act of leaving people behind a morally difficult experi-
ence, even if these people are just virtual.
The game design of The Migrant Trail can best be described as what Juul (2005, 73)
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refers to as a “game of emergence”: by having a set of relatively simple rules combined and
applying at the same time—such as the individual physical abilities, resources and move-
ment strategies of the opponents—a quite complex game experience is created.
Although the depiction of the events is a stylized animation, a connection to the
actual events in Mexico is established through video footage during the game-play both
as migrant as well as border patrol. These short videos, showing injured migrants or the
dead remains—oftentimes decayed beyond recognition—of fellow migrants that did not
survive the trip, demonstrate the graveness and tragedy of the situation. Since the game
is embedded in the website of Williams’ documentary The Undocumented, additional infor-
mation can be obtained on the website, for example available background information of
every dead migrant found in the Sonoran desert since 1981 (Williams 2013a).

Representation and Empathy Through Game Design

The examined games share common traits regarding their use of game mechanics
and how they portray the refugees and their situation. The superior motive of the games
is clearly advocatory and emotional: directing the player towards sympathizing with the
refugees and migrants, and encouraging the development of empathy for them to gain
a better understanding of their position.
A fundamental characteristic of the three games is that they invite the player to take
over the role of one or more migrants and to reenact situations that they have to go
through. Games often challenge their players to take on a certain role and/or perform
certain actions within the game structure, thereby creating “ludic” suspense beforehand
and encouraging identification of the players with the player characters (Schrape 2012).
If games are supposed to foster empathy, it is even more important that the players are
told to identify with the protagonists, as Belman and Flanagan (2010) point out, to make
sure players understand the intention of the game. All games contain these appeals to
the players. The Refugee Challenge, for example, asks in the subtitle “Can You Break into For-
tress Europe?” (The Guardian 2014). Against All Odds proclaims that the game “lets you
experience what it is like to be a refugee” as well as challenging the player “You are
living in great danger and must flee your country. Will you survive? Test yourself”
(UNHCR 2005). The Migrant Trail introduces itself on its website as presenting “a first-
person journey through Arizona’s desert borderlands. Play as an undocumented immigrant
attempting to cross the Arizona desert and/or a border patrol agent attempting to secure
the border” (Williams 2013b).
 ARE NEWSGAMES BETTER JOURNALISM? 9

Besides verbal requests, players are also encouraged to take sides with the refugees
by the way the games graphics are designed and information is presented. In Against All
Odds, graphic aesthetic is used to mark how the refugees and their oppressors are depicted.
While the player character(s) and relatives or friends are depicted wearing colorful clothing
and are generally designed to look appealing, the military police and their cooperators, the
border guards, and the members of a xenophobic and aggressive group in the neighboring
country are depicted in muted colors, mostly gray or black with menacing expression
towards the player character. Over the course of the game, this opposition of color
slowly dissolves as the surroundings of the player character become safer and less hostile.
The Refugee Challenge instead uses photographs and videos to illustrate the situation
of the refugees. In the video interviews, several actual refugees deliver insight into their
situation. They talk about hopelessness and despair facing the struggles of entering the
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European Union, ranging from physical abuse by border patrols in Greece and Bulgaria
to their feeling of being unwelcome or stranded in one of the refugee camps in or
outside Europe.
While in the other games players are clearly directed towards feeling empathy for the
refugees by highlighting their situation, the developers of The Migrant Trail also show three
US American perspectives on the situation, expressed through the playable characters of
the border patrol Anderson, Ruiz and Silva. Anderson, as a religious person, expresses
pity for the migrants’ situation and understanding for their actions. For the other two play-
able characters, Ruiz and Silva, the migrants are breaking the law as they take “the wrong
way” to enter the United States, some of them even working as drug traffickers. The motiv-
ation on the migrants’ side for the illegal crossing of the border is mostly based on personal
and economic reasons. For example, Josefat needs money to buy food for his family, or
Francisco needs money to finance the urgent medical treatment of his eldest son. But
the migrants’ side also includes a player character named David, a former gang member
of Mexican origins who was deported for crimes he committed as a teenager, and now
tries to get back into the United States illegally. Although the player in The Migrant Trail
is also clearly directed towards sympathizing with the migrants, the game does not entirely
portray the migrants as victims (of a political fate), unlike the other two games. In general,
however, the grave situation in the Sonoran desert with the countless casualties and deaths
among the migrants is not downplayed, but explicitly shown in actual video footage.
By demonstrating the hardships that the refugees and migrants have to face, the
three games portray occurrences that are generally agreed on as non-appropriate or
immoral treatment of people for violating basic human rights. At the same time, the
games avoid integrating cultural or personal habits of the refugees that might alienate
them from the players, such as religion, customs or political affiliation. The games
thereby emphasize the similarities between players and the refugees while excluding
potential dissimilarities. This strategy makes it easier to identify with the refugees, since
players can easily connect to the refugees’ drastic experiences and perceive migrants as
fellow humans instead of members of a specific political, religious or ethnic group.
Stephan and Finlay (1999) stress that establishing shared values, beliefs and norms is an
important part in the process of developing a cognitive empathy towards other people,
i.e., taking their role and perceiving the situation from their point of view, thus gaining a
better understanding of their position.
Moreover, the games can also evoke emotional empathy in the player. Emotional
empathy can be described as “emotional responses to another person that either are
 10 CHRISTOPH PLEWE AND ELFRIEDE FÜRSICH

similar to those the other person is experiencing (parallel empathy) or are a reaction to the
emotional experiences of the other person (reactive empathy)” (Stephan and Finlay 1999,
730). Belman and Flanagan (2010) borrow these concepts of parallel and reactive empathy,
that are usually applied in the analysis of interpersonal relationships, to describe the
emotional reactions that players might show while playing a game. Since virtual player
characters in games do not have actual emotions, developing parallel empathy, i.e.,
feeling what the player character feels, depends on the game design as well as the
players’ appraisal of the game situation (Perron 2005). In our case, the games Against All
Odds as well as The Migrant Trail contain elements that let the player experience the dra-
matic moments that refugees have to go through, such as having to act against one’s
own will or being forced to make (im)moral decisions under time pressure. These games
are designed to evoke emotions and feelings such as stress, trepidation or despair in the
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player in order to—at least to a certain degree—convey the emotions that the player char-
acters would feel if the situation were real (Trefry 2014).
The games also contain elements that foster reactive empathy, a feeling of sympathy
or pity, towards the refugees. This is partly achieved by providing insight into the personal
background of the refugees, their stories, their motivations and their losses due to their
escape. In doing so, a personal connection can be established between the player and
the migrants. The player might notice that the biographies of the (virtual or actual) charac-
ters in the game show similarities to his or her own life—e.g., regarding family life, relation-
ships or their job previous to being a refugee—leading towards a feeling that the player
could be in their position instead (Belman and Flanagan 2010; Galloway 2004). Examples
for this kind of information can be found in the videos in The Refugee Challenge, several
mini games in Against All Odds displaying interaction between the player character and
other people, or the prologue and epilogue screens of the migrants and the border
patrol in The Migrant Trail.
This form of reactive empathy can even be intensified by making the player feel
responsible for the life and fate of the refugees. As studies by Hartmann, Toz, and
Brandon (2010) have shown, empathetic players can develop empathy or even feelings
of guilt towards virtual characters if the players were presented with the personal back-
ground of the virtual characters and then were made responsible for these characters
falling victim to acts of virtual violence. The three games presented in this paper all
contain the possibility of failing and thus reaching a negative or dissatisfying ending. In
The Refugee Challenge, this is achieved by showing the negative life conditions in all of
the possible endings of the game except for the ending in Sweden which is supposed to
be the main goal. In Against All Odds the player can fail in innumerable ways, for
example by being caught by the military, which probably leads to the death of the
player character, by making mistakes at the first day in the new school leading to being
ridiculed by other kids, or not receiving a job the player character has applied for. While
playing as a migrant in The Migrant Trail, the player character might either suffer from
heat stroke or dehydration for a mismanagement of resources or get caught by the
border patrols, leading to negative personal consequences that vary with each character.
Playing as a border patrol guard even leaves the player with the frustrating scenario in
that no matter how well the game is played, there will always be more migrants dying
than can be saved; thus, the game does not even offer a positive reward for playing well.
Although failing in games is not automatically connected to negative feelings, as
studies with less-serious entertainment games have shown (Ravaja et al. 2005, 9–10),
 ARE NEWSGAMES BETTER JOURNALISM? 11

especially in games with a political message, failing can be used as a means of rhetoric strat-
egy (Bogost 2010). Games can be designed to contain difficult passages that demand scru-
tiny and critical reflection of the processes in the game, thereby producing “crisis that can
lead the player to subjective insights” (Bogost 2010, 87; see also Lee 2003). In the three
games analyzed, these insights can include the understanding of the hardships the
migrants have to face when being forced to enter the United States illegally as in the
The Migrant Trail, learning about the necessity of unpleasant and morally difficult decisions
in Against All Odds, or the questionable treatment of refugees that try to enter the European
Union as in The Refugee Challenge.

Discussion
The newsgames analyzed make use of different game mechanics to convey infor-
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mation about refugee issues and illegal immigration. These mechanics structure how the
game is experienced as well as what kind of information is conveyed.
The Refugee Challenge, as an example for the use of ergodic text in newsgames,
allows for a relatively free exploration of the situation of being a refugee attempting to
gain access to the European Union. Due to the multi-linearity of the story line, it is possible
to discover several “what if” scenarios regarding the multiple possibilities of an outcome of
the player character’s story, thus teaching the player about the complex conditions that
influence these events.
The game concept of Against All Odds is supposed to present the situation of refugees
with a clear focus on the emotional experience of the events. Through the linearity of the
game the player is guided through various aspects of the life of a refugee. Because of the
progressive design of the game mechanics, these aspects are experienced exactly in the
way the designers intended them to be.
The Migrant Trail presents a dynamic simulation of the attempts of Mexicans to
cross the US border illegally on a dangerous journey through the Sonoran desert.
Drastic insights into the complexity and tragedy of the situation are delivered by
demonstrating the behavioral conditions of the situation and portraying different per-
spectives on this topic,
All games show similarities in their design that suggest that these games have been
primarily created to foster empathy for the refugees and migrants among the players. The
games mainly encourage the player to identify with the refugees and migrants and to per-
ceive them as individuals sharing the same general human values, rather than seeing them
as members of a different ethnic, religious or political group.

Newsgames as Journalism
The question remains, what worldviews do these games convey and is there a surplus
to the narratives of traditional journalism? Four issues guide our discussion here: objectivity,
complexity of information, the representation of distant suffering, and the ideology of the
games.

Objectivity
It is obvious from the description of the games that these newsgames do not strive
for objectivity. The central intention is to create awareness of the plight of refugees and
 12 CHRISTOPH PLEWE AND ELFRIEDE FÜRSICH

migrants and to counter jingoistic stereotyping. This open, advocatory approach may lead
entrenched journalism experts to rebuff any claim of the producers of these types of
content as valid journalism. Two arguments complicate such an outright rejection. First,
all newsgames analyzed were more or less connected to other journalistic news content.
There were no stand-alone games that claimed comprehensive information about the
topic. In this case, the newsgames very much fall under the category of editorials or com-
mentary that traditional news outlets would allow for. Second, the newsgames, neverthe-
less, miss an important chance to add differing perspectives and complexity to their
narratives. The game architecture itself and the interactive and hyperlinked structure
offer possibilities to produce such complexity—a type of enhanced objectivity—that is
missing from traditional journalistic forms. Only The Migrant Trail begins to introduce
such a strategy by using various characters (migrants and border guards) with diverse per-
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spectives. By allowing the player to step into these various roles, the game provides a
complex story beyond the usual pros and cons of objective journalism. This strategy
could be developed further: these games could present incongruous and contradictory per-
ceptions of various stakeholders simultaneously and even leave them in limbo, avoiding
the quick closure of news journalism.

Complexity of Information
This point connects to one of the central debates amongst voices on serious games
and newsgames: are digital games able to add complexity to a topic or do they trivialize
systemic problems for quick entertainment? McGonigal (2011), for example, advocates for
harnessing gamers’ intensive and enjoyable “labor” for games that solve real-life problems
of global concern (energy, environment, poverty, etc.). Bogost, Ferrari, and Schweizer
(2010) argue more specifically that newsgames can be used successfully to deliver
news and information by illustrating complicated topics for readers. Many hope that
newsgames offer an innovative strategy in the fight for the scattered attention of
online users.
In our case, all three games rely on “traditional” media formats to provide the player
with information about the real-life events the games are based on. Information sections
encourage the player to reflect upon the actual events with the insights gained from the
just made virtual experience. However, long text fragments in The Refugee Challenge or
the “Web Facts” section in Against All Odds risk disrupting the game flow and may be
ignored by or turn away players. As long as the games are used to lead to and display
information in extra links or even ask players to read long reams of textual information,
the analyzed games do not harness the full potential within the logic of games.
Instead, factual information should be created in interaction with the rule-based
systems and the specific characteristics of the games. As Bogost, Ferrari, and Schweizer
(2010) explain, journalists and game developers have to work closely together to
produce a new type of information-driven media content beyond traditional games
and journalism. Of course, such coordinated efforts will necessitate a more-intensive
newsgame development that financially strapped media outlets may not be willing to
engage in. Moreover, newsgame advocates may underestimate how the lacking affinity
between the professional cultures and ontological standpoints of journalists (facts, infor-
mation, reality) and gamers (fiction, imagination, multiple realities) may hinder productive
engagement (see also Foxman 2015).
 ARE NEWSGAMES BETTER JOURNALISM? 13

Representing Distant Suffering

From a psychological perspective our section on empathy clearly supported the
expectations that these games can generate compassion amongst audiences. From a cul-
tural perspective, however, the question remains what power relations are accepted in this
digital storytelling and whether the engagement with the suffering of distant others can
foster international understanding.
A stream of research had tried to answer this question for international journalism.
Especially visuals of the suffering of Others have been scrutinized for their potential to
lead to compassion and action towards improving international relations. In Regarding
the Pain of Others, essayist Sontag (2004) questions the potential of drastic visuals on
death and devastation to hinder war. Directly examining news journalism, Moeller (1999)
argues that the profusion of negative and drastic reporting and imagery (on famines, con-
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flicts and natural catastrophe) about Africa ultimately desensitizes audiences in the Global
North and leads to “compassion fatigue” that hinders active engagement. Chouliaraki
(2010) extends this analysis from news journalism to aid campaigns and celebrity advocacy.
Her focus has been on the power relations between the audience and the Others portrayed.
She advocates for communication that moves beyond a “politics of pity,” for example
through shocking visuals towards a “discourse of justice” that positions the perspective
of Others eye-to-eye with the Western observer. In what she calls “post-humanitarianism,”
she sees at least conditionally the potential to establish a “new altruism” (120) through less
emotionally driven campaigns.
The fact that the newsgames analyzed appeal emotionally may continue to push a
discourse of pity. However, their connection to information media and their existential
engagement complicates quick interpretations. What makes these games distinctive is
that they do not just simply present visuals and information but that they engage
players in an experiential way. Most effective are games that lead to physical experiences
of players, especially in the mini games in Against All Odds, by generating feeling of stress
and helplessness or the rush while “packing” necessities before fleeing. The physical and
psychological connection established to the Other has the potential to diminish com-
passion fatigue and power asymmetries. The problem remains that the playfulness and
the cartoonish graphics of these games counteract honest engagement. Here the “reality
checks” integrated in these games are important: by providing additional sources of infor-
mation that contain background information on the events the games are about, the player
is reminded that what has just been experienced in the games is not completely fictional,
but rather based on actual events that might even take place at the same moment. If the
games manage to induce this way of thinking in the player, as Lee (2003) states, it “trans-
forms play from a gaming action into a thinking event, from a means of fun seeking to a
schema for the revelation of the games’ critical engagement.” For example, the short inter-
views with refugees from Syria who have experienced exactly what is played in The Refugee
Challenge reinforce the notion that this is not “just a game.”
Yet these newsgames are presented to users immersed in a digital environment
characterized by information overload. Advocates like McGonigal (2011) hope that
especially the logics of gaming can redirect audience labor from the always-scarce “atten-
tion economy” to an focused and cooperative “engagement economy.” Still even she
describes the exhaustion from being bombarded with countless attention-grapping
online petitions. Moreover, many critics, such as Morozov (2011), condemned online
 14 CHRISTOPH PLEWE AND ELFRIEDE FÜRSICH

petitioning and activism as ineffective slacktivism. The analyzed newsgames cannot escape
the dilemma of online activism. Just like other campaigns, they need to be carefully
designed so as not to run the risk of promoting self-complacent humanitarian consumerism
and narcissism (Chouliaraki 2010).

Ideology of the Games

The openness, interactivity and multiple perspectives of the game may lead analysts
to expect that underlying ideological and cultural assumptions get dissolved. Yet, as Flana-
gan and Nissenbaum (2014) stress, game rules are largely based on the beliefs and values of
their designers. Since games as a medium are “engrossing and reach deep parts of the
human psyche, they may not only reflect but also activate these beliefs and values in
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powerful ways” (3). Given the “procedural rhetoric” of newsgames, as Bogost (2010, 29)
explains, “arguments are made not through the construction of words or images, but
through authorship of rules of behavior, the construction of dynamic models.” For
example, Schrape (2012) meticulously demonstrated in his dissertation about the rhetorical
structures of political games dealing with the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in the Middle East,
that specific social values and political ideologies can very well be conveyed through the
combined use of game mechanics and rhetoric structures on the textual level.
In the analyzed games, Euro- and US-centric perspectives of the journalistic discourse
on refugees and migration certainly get destabilized. The experiential efforts of the player
to take on the perspective of the migrant disrupt long-established problematic represen-
tations of the Other that need to be acknowledged. Yet there remains an inherent predica-
ment related to the games’ logic and aesthetic: on the one hand, the arguably low-level
animation and graphic aesthetic of much of the games and narrative shortcuts such as
the portrayal of the “good” migrant devoid of conflicting cultural, religious or political
markers, generally helps to humanize the protagonists and transcode problematic rep-
resentations. On the other hand, these discursive strategies also sanitize complex human
behavior and trivialize the existential experience of encountering difference by creating
Others like “one of us.”

Conclusion
The debate on the potential of serious games and newsgames is often polarized:
impassionate voices who expect a revolutionizing rejuvenation of journalism through
newsgames face pessimistic voices who fear trivialization of geopolitical problems
through a total gamification of social relations. Our analysis of currently used newsgames
on refugee and migrant issues grounds these arguments by evaluating the actual technical
and textual potential of these games in relation to traditional journalism. Both sides, it
seems, exaggerate the impact of newsgames. The games we analyzed successfully trig-
gered empathy, opened up perspectives on the complexity of geopolitical interrelations,
disrupted representations of Others, and augmented news journalism with added
content and multiple perspectives. Newsgames especially enhanced journalism when
they cleverly employed game logics and rules to generate experiential engagement with
the existential crisis of involuntary dislocation. They added a new dimension to the dis-
course on migration often overlooked by political news journalism.
 ARE NEWSGAMES BETTER JOURNALISM? 15

Nevertheless, the games did not use their game capabilities to the fullest which
would entail opening up a discourse that allows for contradictory life worlds and existen-
tially different perspectives of and by Others in context. Instead, the inherent logic of the
game architecture tended to force a quick closure and a problematic binary (good
versus bad behavior) on still unresolved and more complex issues. Most problems in the
games had one clear, if at times effortful, solution. This finding resonates with arguments
of critics that poorly designed games may privilege a very limited approach of problem-
solving disconnected from real-life complexities (e.g., Chaplin 2011). Still, totalizing criticism
of newsgames as a downhill move towards gamification and trivialization of information is
exaggerated as well. The games we examined contextualize and sometimes even enhance
journalistic content and practices. They often depend on and are situated within the tra-
ditional discourses of documentary journalism. This strategy might ease worries about a
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takeover of information media by entertainment logics but it also leaves these newsgames
tied to established Western media representation of Others (Fürsich 2010). These digital
narratives often seem to accept Others from across borders only when they are more
“like us.”

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

FUNDING
No external funding was received for this work.

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 18 CHRISTOPH PLEWE AND ELFRIEDE FÜRSICH

Christoph Plewe, Institute for Media and Communication Studies, Free University of Berlin,
Germany. E-mail: [email protected]
Elfriede Fürsich (author to whom correspondence should be addressed), Department of
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