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.

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This study explores how social inclusion and exclusion manifest as a dynamic continuum in the everyday lived realities of irregular migrants. Based on narratives of Iraqi Kurdish asylum seekers, who were eventually deported from Finland, the analysis depicts the ways in which societal structures, personal negotiations as well as relationships and social networks interplay in lives characterized by multiple locations, transitions and positions. Establishing and maintaining social contacts, belonging to various networks and being able to decide and act are primary factors that help us understand how the narrators relate to the continuum. The participants construct narratives illustrating several viewpoints or positions regarding participation, agency and dependency on outside actors and networks.

The social dynamics of player communities in online games have been the subject of much research during the last decade. Following a systematic review of empirical research publications from 2000–2010, this article synthesizes the key methods and concepts researchers have used to study and characterize player communities. It also synthesizes the key aspects and operationalizations researchers have concentrated on. The analysis shows that qualitative approaches have been more common than quantitative ones. The concepts used to characterize player communities were often not clearly defined or overlapped in meaning. Yet they revealed a prevalence of micro (groups or teams), meso (guilds or organizations) and macro (communities and networks) perspectives. About 22 different aspects and operationalizations of player communities were identified. Six were most common, i.e. culture and social norms, social structuring, rationale, number of members, used information and communication technologies and time of existence. The article concludes with several suggestions for future research.

This paper looks at leadership communication in the context of multiplayer computer games and the groups that operate within them. In multiplayer games promoting teamwork and long-term cooperation, issues of management and leadership are prevalent. The paper explores the experiences that members of multiplayer communities have towards leadership communication in multiplayer games by looking at one specific case of organized team play within the framework of a turn-based online strategy game. The data utilized in this study consists of themed player interviews conducted via e-mail. The analysis proposes three central dimensions that emerged from the data. These were labeled: 1) the leader as a primus motor, 2) the necessity of authority, and 3) the discourse of leadership as work. At the end of the article, directions for future research are outlined.

Producing digital and interactive journalistic products offers unique and important new learning opportunities for journalism education. This study analysed the experiences of two pilot courses on so-called ‘newsgames’ in a Finnish university in 2015 and 2017. The data consisted of the newsgames and other materials produced by the students, student feedback concerning the course and observations of teachers throughout the project. Our analysis demonstrates how producing newsgames in the context of higher education may foster project-based learning experiences, something that has been relatively rare in traditional journalism education. Collaboration with media companies also offered valuable feedback for the students throughout the course and provided them with an opportunity to practice selling their expertise. The study highlights how interdisciplinary and project-based cooperation may benefit journalism education.

This study analyzes how team members perceive changes in relational leadership processes over time. Interview data from three virtual teams ( N = 18) were analyzed using qualitative thematic analysis. The findings illustrate how ideals of well-functioning leadership and teamwork communication can differ both between and within teams at different times. Team members may perceive benefits of the passage of time in teamwork, including experienced closeness, adjustment, and clarification of practices, as well as challenges such as rigidity and historical baggage. Organizations and teams may experience a shift in the ideals of leadership, but adapting to and adopting new forms of leadership over time may not be unproblematic. The findings also highlight how relational leadership is neither stable nor linear in its development. Overall, the study contributes to leadership and team research by increasing understanding of the relational construction of leadership among naturally occurring teams and by challenging assumptions about how leadership and time are perceived by team members. The implications of studying subjective time in connection with relational leadership are discussed.

This study analyses the application of a co-production approach in utilizing digital games and game-related methods in mental health services. The goal is to offer a real-world experiment on co-production, focusing on mental health service users, active gamers and mental health practitioners who worked together in equal ways and valued each other’s unique contributions during the experiment. The implications of a co-production approach for applying digital games in the field of mental healthcare are somewhat limited and under-explored. In this case study, seven workshop sessions were held involving service users, gamers and professionals. Participants were interviewed concerning their experiences with the activities and content of the co-production workshops. Thematic analysis of the participants’ experiences and perceptions resulted in three main themes: 1) empowering participation; 2) cooperation on a level playing field; and 3) improving self-efficacy. The experiment showed that applying a co-production approach in utilizing digital games is worth implementing in mental health services, particularly when putting novel nursing approaches and procedures into practice. Overall, co-production turned out to be a beneficial approach to introduce and implement game activities into mental healthcare; therefore, it can be taken one step further, meaning that service users’ experiences are truly valued, and they can play a crucial role in developing mental health services.