Publishers Are Playing Around with Games Again

Posted December 15, 2016

External Article: Digiday

Ian Bogost was quoted in DIGIDAY'S article “Publishers Are Playing Around with Games Again:”

Excerpt:

A few years after publishers fell in and out of love with games, they are toying around with them again. In the past couple months, Hearst Digital has begun producing branded puzzle games and quizzes for MSN; both Mic and the Washington Post have begun experimenting with non-branded game bots on platforms like Kik and Facebook Messenger, respectively… Indeed, the just-concluded election seemed to get publishers back into the gaming mood. The New York Times published an Everyday Arcade game called “The Voter Suppression Trail”; The Washington Post launched a mobile game called “Floppy Candidate”; Wonkette worked with the UK-based game developer Auroch Digital on “Game Of U.S. America Elections: The Game,” a turn-based card game it funded on Kickstarter.… These all grabbed headlines. But they never spurred publications to invest more meaningfully in them.

“This stuff is made to be novel rather than to do journalism,” said Ian Bogost, a distinguished chair of media studies at Georgia Tech and the author of “Newsgames.” “[Those games] never rose to the level of becoming speech.”