From crossword puzzles and quizzes to more complex gamification strategies and serious newsgames, legacy media has long explored ways to deploy playful approaches to deliver their content and engage with the audience. We examine how news and games fit together when news organizations, game creators and news audiences welcome gameful forms of communication and participation. Moreover, we reflect on the theoretical and empirical significance of merging news with games as a way to reformulate normative assumptions, production practices and consumption patterns. As a result, the boundaries between journalism and game’s logics start to erode, and they begin to find new ways of converging.
This audience research was designed to interrogate the UK fans of Big Brother so as to present evidence that might shed light on the audience's understanding of the `reality' in this form of reality television. Using quantitative and qualitative data obtained from a web-based questionnaire linked to Big Brother's UK web site over three years, I investigate how the fan audiences negotiate what I have called `personalised reality contracts' with the contributors, and how this affects their understanding of what they are seeing as `real' or `constructed'. I argue that it is Big Brother's constructedness that serves to liberate its content, allowing the viewer freedom to navigate past the performative elements typical of the docu-soap genre. I outline how this form of multi-platform TV creatively involves viewers on a number of levels, allowing them to develop strategies for watching that satisfy the desire to witness `the real' through the lens of the camera. This is set within the context of the larger debate surrounding the change in status of factual programming.
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