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 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.
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.
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.
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