“Be the Reporter” in minutes
In the journalism epistemic game, science.net, players spend days and sometimes weeks learning to think like reporters by taking on this professional role and writing, and ultimately, publishing stories. So I was a bit anxious when I learned that The Poynter Institute and News University were providing an online game called “Be the Reporter” (BtR) that promised to “help users understand some of the basics” in only 15 minutes! After playing the game a couple of times through (and taking nearly an hour), I’m less anxious and more excited by the interesting design elements built into this intriguing mini-game.
Like many journalism simulations, BtR is a single player experience in which players are presented with a hot story tip, multiple sources of information situated in various buildings on a small town map, and a deadline for filing a story. Follow up with too many sources, and your story gets scooped by a rival paper. Fail to check into particularly important sources, and your editor barks at you, as I heard in one instance, “How can you write a story without doing research with Public Records? Get over there!!” 
Filled with interesting video clips that flesh out an investigative story of corporate greed and wrong-doing, BtR simplifies many of the challenging complexities of reporting to ensure players can in fact complete a round in minutes. When interviewing non-player characters, players can only choose pre-defined questions to ask (as opposed to creating their own), the only ‘people’ available to interview are people with useful information, and ‘filing’ the story means simply choosing a predefined title (and not writing a single word).
At the same time, BtR retains some very important challenges – such as deciding when do you have enough info (and that your sources have been properly confirmed) to actually file the story, or even deciding amongst the different possible sources which you feel are most important. The game also shows players important values for the profession in multiple ways, partly through an ethics handbook (a list of do’s and don’ts) and, more entertainingly, through intermittent feedback from your editor, such as “Remember to confirm your facts; follow up on what people tell you.”
Not actually doing any writing–or having to decide from a blank notebook page what questions you ought to ask during an interview–makes this feel more like an interactive movie about being a reporter than an immersive simulation. But with that important caveat, BtR does show some interesting ways that the a game engine for journalism role playing can incorporate some of the “human interactions” and other challenges of the profession.
In other words, BtR is a good example of how an epistemic game can pack more and more elements of a professional practice into the computer simulation–and thus potentially make these kind of games easier to play for more people.
