ANALYSIS

Gaming is a new frontier of public media content development.

Platforms such as Roblox have been identified as an opportunity to raise public media’s brand awareness amongst a generation of young people that otherwise don’t know much about them, or don’t consume much of their content. There’s also public media’s commitment to provide a universal service, and young people are included in that as much as any other audience group.

With 150 million daily users on Roblox worldwide – over half of whom are under 17 years old – it’s clear that this is a space where public media can meet and engage with young people.

The latest episode of the podcast, Media Uncovered, looked at what public media are currently offering on these platforms: mainly centred around education or entertainment, with cornerstone public media IP – like Eurovision – finding a space in these digital worlds.

But could such spaces be used for that third pillar of public media’s offering – news and journalism? And if so, what does that look like?

The TikTok of the next generation

To assess whether Roblox, or Minecraft, or some other gaming platform could eventually support news and journalism, we must first look to another platform, Wesa Aapro, the Metaverse lead for the Finnish public broadcaster, Yle, told Media Uncovered. “When TikTok was Musical.ly, I never thought about news. That didn’t even cross my mind. And now it’s obvious.”

The last few years, the number of many legacy media brands making content specifically for TikTok has exponentially increased. The number of people who use TikTok specifically for the purpose of consuming news is also on the rise, as outlined in this year’s Digital News Report. The importance of not just TikTok but other sites like YouTube has been recognised by the UK government, which has proposed introducing regulations giving public media profiles special prominence.

Not to say that the news content that is packaged up for a TikTok audience would work on Roblox. Given how different they are as mediums, any news and journalism made for Roblox would have to align with the interface and experience of a gaming platform.

“I do think news [and] journalistic content will come,” Wesa Aapro, Metaverse lead at the Finnish public broadcaster, Yle, told Media Uncovered. “Many games are already quite serious about communicating what’s happening in the world. Games are a pretty good way for journalism, for documentary storytelling, when we find a way to do it. It just takes a bit time.”

Roblox does have potential, said Robin Rymenans, who runs the gaming hub for Future Media Hubs. The hub is a collection of 30 European media organisations, who meet monthly to exchange knowledge, update each other on their work, and explore opportunities to collaborate.

But any potential news offering would have to align with the specific experience of Roblox, which is entirely different to a TikTok experience. “I think the game world sets this a little bit apart because you still have some active participation that you need to do,” Rymenans told Media Uncovered. “It’s a different way of interacting with content or with information, and I really do believe that in some way, if it’s kept interesting and fun – because that’s very important – I do think that’s possible.

What does Roblox for news look like?

Despite not being an obvious destination for news and journalism, Roblox does have some innate characteristics which makes it an appealing partner. One opportunity Aapro said he wants to explore is using Roblox’s audio chat features to vox pop users. “We would have [a] way more democratic audience for that sort of interview. That’s the sort of thing I would like to happen – that metaverse turns into a public space where you can actually do journalism in.”

Using Roblox to collect opinions and hear directly from audiences would be enormously fruitful, and that content could be repackaged elsewhere across a public broadcaster’s platforms.

“Games are a pretty good way for journalism, for documentary storytelling, when we find a way to do it. It just takes a bit time.” – Wesa Aapro, Metaverse Lead, Yle

But before any of that starts, there are significant safety concerns that would have to be addressed. Earlier this year, Roblox made some changes to ensure young people are protected when on the platform, following an investigation which highlighted “deeply disturbing” evidence that children could access inappropriate material, as well as directly engage with adult strangers. The tech consultancy behind the investigation, Revealing Reality, said of the latest safety features, “Roblox may have cleaned up its most obvious problems, but without meaningful separation between adult and child users, serious risks remain.”

For public media to start using these platforms as a way of content gathering, significant assurances and protective measures would be expected to ensure that young people aren’t being put at risk by doing so.

An exciting adventure, but not without precedent

Using gaming platforms for news and journalism is clearly a new field of interest, but not entirely without precedent. There are some examples, already, of how such these platforms could be used to communicate news and information.

Two broadcasters have already used gaming as a way of educating young people about the practice of journalism and building their media and information literacy. The first example is from NTR, a Dutch public service broadcaster. They created a game called “Brand!” (“fire”), in which users play as different types of ‘reporter’ looking into a building fire. They do so as one of four different characters: a journalist, a vlogger, an investigative journalist, or a journalist without press freedom. In each situation, while trying to understand what happened, the user operates under the constraints of that scenario. For example, if playing as a journalist without press freedom, speaking to a police official can get you threatened with arrest. The purpose is to allow users to “experience first-hand how easy it is to launch nonsense and why truth matters,” said Marlène Zwetsloot from NTR.

A similar principle is behind the CBC/Radio-Canada game, Reporting 101: Misinformation, where users must overcome challenges that journalists face, in order to tell an accurate and verified story. “The core of the lesson focuses on learning to recognize and distinguish misinformation and disinformation, and what makes a good source of information,” said Lisa Fender, from CBC Kids News.

Away from children, RSF has used Minecraft as a vehicle for bypassing censorship and providing resources and articles that might otherwise be censored. Where digital websites or social media platforms might be blocked, “Minecraft is still accessible by everyone … These articles are now available again within Minecraft hidden from government surveillance technology inside a computer game. The books can be read by everyone on the server, but their content cannot be changed. The library is growing, with more and more books being added to overcome censorship.” While young people are not the target audience here, this example highlights gaming’s capacity as an instrument of press freedom, a safe repository of information, and the circumvention of digital blocks or takedowns.