This game was designed by Heidi and Mazen Newsroom Sensation! is the tentative title for our digital narrative game about sensationalism. In it, you play as a manager in a newsroom, working with journalists and editors to approve articles and headlines.
You play with a point system that you keep a tally of for Integrity and Popularity respectively. Different tasks and events in the game affect your score - and depending on how you're doing by the end, you'll reach a different ending! There are five endings total besides the automatic loss for letting either your Integrity or Popularity drop to zero. By the end of it, you should be able to identify sensationalism and the ways news media goes about using it. You should also have a better idea of examples of sensationalism, and why people might choose to use it despite it potentially being deceptive or misleading. You can play the game by clicking here. Keep in mind that we haven't added any visuals as of yet, but we definitely intend to. Otherwise, we'd love to hear what you think of the game! Feel free to leave feedback to let us know what we can work on.
2 Comments
Abdelrahman Abouzeid
19/4/2021 01:36:13 am
The game is very interesting and I got Spent vibes from it where I sometimes need to compromise and do stuff I do not think is right just to keep my job. I really like the points system (would be great if your points were in front of you, otherwise I was able to keep count of my score just fine). Also, something else I thought about is that I think that nobody will want to pick popularity on their own I feel like everybody will be forced to do sensationalized papers when their low on popularity points, maybe add a more interesting incentive like being invited to (shady) parties if you're more popular, or having less articles to report about since you're not so popular (i.e. being popular gives you the chance to write more articles). This is just a thought though I'm not sure if that disturbs the flow of your game at all (which I really like by the way :) ). Also, I felt like it was a lot of reading which I didn't mind, but could deter other people.
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hi Heidi and Mazen - this is a REALLY well done game, really detailed. Well done! I cannot believe the details and nuances in it. And I like that the player learns some things along the way, that scenarios are diverse in terms of topics and choices (some about choosing headlines, some about fact checking) and some have delayed consequences (like fact-checking you discover 2 days later that the story was fake or inaccurate). The main things I would do to improve the game are:
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