Effect of newsgames on audience understanding and engagement with news content
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Digital media and the internet have increased the ways in which news can be shared, including through formats like newsgames, which combine journalism and gameplay. Previous studies have found that using newsgames in journalism can be persuasive in message sharing and increase audience emotional response. This study explored how exposure to a relevant newsgame before a complex news story would impact participant engagement and understanding of the news story. A total of 164 participants took part in an online experiment in which the participants were exposed to either a newsgame followed by a news story or to only the news story and then responded to a series of self-reported outcome measures about their understanding and perception of the news story. The results of this study showed that the inclusion of a newsgame as a message element prior to exposure to a news story had a statistically significant impact on the participant's understanding and engagement. The results show that with the given stimuli, the inclusion of newsgame stimuli prior to message stimuli had a negative overall effect on the audience's understanding of news content. When considering time spent, the inclusion of a newsgame prior to message stimuli resulted in an adverse effect that was not statistically significant. The engagement measure had a positive impact by including one of the newsgame options and a negative impact by including the other newsgame, though neither was statistically significant.
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M.A.