This is the second episode in a series of articles I am writing on innovation in journalism. The episodes will run each Monday in Crikey until I run out of ideas.

The first episode was last week, and told the story of a newspaper company that has swum against the tide, turning itself around from bankruptcy by truly engaging the audience. I like to think that it lived up to the rhetoric journalists spout — that we serve our communities, that we know our audience.

This week, I want to talk about games people might play. Games that journalists could inform, write and help to build.

I have been inspired by two things. The first is this article by News Limited’s Innovations editor David Higgins. In it, he cheekily imagines a news media company that employs not journalists, but  a bunch of Hollywood types who draw cartoons and create games sourced from the news.

Higgins wrote: “I’m not trying to argue that good quality journalism doesn’t matter. Good stories are the foundation for any news product. But I worry about how often I hear the blind belief that quality journalism will save us… The news itself, no matter how many exclusives and how good the quality, will never again be enough to differentiate a news product. Whether its personalisation or social connection or convenience or a full-blown James Cameron experience a news product needs much more than the quality of its copy.”

I think we might need all the things Higgins nominates.

Higgins quotes News Corporation’s Jon Miller, who observed at the launch of Rupert’s online paper The Daily that digital newspapers delivered to mobile devices compete not only with each other, but also with Angry Birds.

The reason for this series is that nobody ever seems to talk about innovations in the journalistic method itself — something that has not changed all that much since the early days of newspapers.

Because journalists have experienced the importance of what they do — the impact of exposure or scrutiny of the powerful — they assume that everyone else understands that journalism is essential. They assume that if only a new trick can be found, or a new delivery mechanism devised, the public will continue to support quality journalism, and that they will be able to continue doing the things they have always done in much the same way.

They assume that their artisanship is important, and will be valued, and is the heart of commercial value for news organisations.

You can hear this thinking in the reassurances of people such as Fairfax CEO Greg Hywood when he talks about journalism being at the heart of the business, and promises to invest in it — by which he seems to mean hiring some old, big-name hacks and training up some new ones.

But news is now all pervasive. Everyone is doing it. Many are aggregating it. A scoop is only an exclusive for a a matter of seconds. The killing of bin Laden is tweeted before it is announced — indeed almost before it has happened. Whereas once information was relatively scarce, now it is everywhere. It has become a commodity, rather than a lovingly handcrafted artefact.

Meanwhile, the public at large might appreciate the things journalism brings — such as accountable government and a more or less functioning democracy — but  they tend not to value what it takes to bring this about. So people like good government, but hate politicians. They like to know what’s going on, but they hate journalists. And so on and so forth.

To use an analogy, they value the toaster or the television program. The even might like the toaster, or the television set. But they seldom think about the electricity that is essential to the end product. That, they take for granted.

In this environment, ordinary news reporting is, I would suggest, not so much an end product, but rather a utility off which many good things can run. It is not the toast, nor the toaster,  but the electricity. Not the cup of tea, nor the kettle, but the water in the tap.

And what we need to make journalism sustainable is, to put it bluntly, better applications and appliances.

One of the possibilities is games. There are others, which I will talk about in future episodes of this series.

Online games are the biggest media success story of our times. The sales figures are truly mind-boggling, outranking just about any other media content product you can think of. To put it mildly, it would be nice for the journalism business to get even a little piece of that.

Any intelligent gamer will tell you that games can be very serious — that they are not only entertainment.  In fact the word “game” is straining a bit under the weight of things that are now squeezed into it. There are “games” that help city planners learn their trade, games that are used to train pilots and cops and even doctors.

Online gaming is also intensely social. People play in groups. Friends of mine use games as a way to catch up with people who live far away from them. People help to build the game environment — as with Second Life. And, of course, games can carry advertisements, and have been doing so for a long time now.

So what kind of games might run off the utility of news journalism?

Take a look, and have a play, with this — Darfur is Dying. Developed by the Reebok Human Rights Foundation and the International Crisis group, it is based on the experience of aid workers in Darfur. The user takes on the role of a refugee and has to negotiate the forces that threaten the survival of his or her camp.

The game is nothing special in terms of its realism or graphics. Perhaps, if it was, it would be more disturbing — even censored. But the possibilities it signals are fascinating.

In journalistic terms this is not really a game, in the sense of entertainment. It is analogous to a feature article or a documentary. One of the mantras of feature writing, or of any creative writing for that matter, is “show, don’t tell”. As journalists we aim to take the reader or viewer into the experience of the subject of the article. We aim to immerse people in the story.

Darfur is Dying nods to that principle. So, too, does Hurricane Katrina a free-to-download game designed to educate people about what happened in New Orleans.

So what if we, as one writer on this topic has put it, add a joystick to the repertoire of tools available to the news consumer?

What if we bring the utility of high quality journalism — facts, context, integrity, story telling,  caring, speaking truth to  power — to a game?

It’s an idea that is being explored by several non-journalists. In June this year, New York City will host the Games for Change Annual Festival, devoted to exploring the potential of games for social change. There will be awards, including one by the Knight Foundation — a philanthropic foundation that also funds such worthy journalistically oriented enterprises as the Poynter Institute and the Center for Public Integrity.

The Knight Foundation sponsored award is for games that are based on current events, but lots of games nominated for other awards are relevant to journalism too. You can see the nominees here. They include Evoke, a multiplayer alternate reality based around the idea of saving the world. Or there’s Participatory Chinatown, a game aimed at stakeholders in Boston’s Chinatown, used as a way to encourage them to get involved in a town planning process.

Imagine how a game based on the same principles as  Participatory Chinatown might be used to illuminate Australia’s population debate, or the quest to build better, more functional cities. Imagine how an organisation such as the Journal Register Company, which I wrote about last week might use it to extend its engagement with audiences, and its brand as the main place for the conduct of community business.

The Knight nominees include a game in which the user plays the role of the cat belonging to Dr Mohammed Mossadegh, the first democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran. Or there’s Fate of the World, which simulates the impact of climate change, and is based on rigorous (and frightening) research.

Or look at America 2049, described by the developers as “an alternate reality game on Facebook that presents a near-future America at a crossroads: civil liberties are in peril, and democracy is on the brink of destruction. You, the player, are an agent of the Council on American Heritage, tasked with the capture of a presumed terrorist”.

And also relevant, though not up for these awards,  is Macon Money created for the Knight Foundation, which attempts to break down socio-economic segregation in the United States city of Macon, Georgia, by encouraging residents from different post codes to work together. Players must use social media and online communications to find and meet each other before they can redeem their reward, Macon Money, a real-world local currency that can be spent in participating local shops and businesses.

Journalistic games will, very naturally and appropriately, soon run into controversy. Take, for example, the graphic and realistic Six Days in Fallujah, which was released soon after the battle after which it is named, and is based on the real-life experiences of marines who fought in the Iraq War. Who would want to be seen to be making war entertaining? And yet, who can deny that many people now have a more nuanced knowledge of Iraq as a result of encountering the game. You can read some of the controversy it generated here.

If journalists got into creating games, we would need a new take on the code of ethics, but the same principles would surely apply — disclose all relevant facts. Make nothing up. Strive for balance. As the Australian Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance Code puts it, “describe society to itself”.

Transparency of method would also be important. And perhaps we would, Second Life like, allow the users to add to our game world with their own contributions, where they have information that adds to the story..

Take a look at Ars Regendi — the Art of Politics the political online game and economic simulation, in which you create your own realistically simulated state, and have to make the kinds of decisions real politicians have to make.

And, bringing it back to Australia for a moment, ask yourself what it would have done to the budget just past if instead of, or as well as, endless articles about the challenges Wayne Swan faced, we had provided an application that allowed the “reader” to try being treasurer themselves.

Would a citizen who had gamed their way through that experience still be subject to the blandishments of those who behave as though it was possible to simultaneously cut tax, lift services and eliminate the deficit? Or would they actually be thinking about the process, the challenges, the trade offs.

Or imagine the gaming scenario:

“You are the prime minister, and you have been told there is a global financial crisis … what do you do?”

Right there you have what I think could be one of the most positive things about journalistic games. The very nature of the medium means that in building and playing the game, you are focusing, not on the personalities or the spectator sport of public life, but on the process, the issues and the choices.

It may seem like a paradox, but an medium intended for entertainment could actually take us away from what Lindsay Tanner has termed the Sideshow of current political journalism.

But, sad to report, not one of the games I have mentioned here has been developed by, or even in conjunction with, traditional news journalists.

Perhaps we should get in on the game.

Next week, I want to talk about some other kinds of appliances that might run off the utility of journalism. To be specific, engines that can power citizens’ own investigations.