I really like Russel Davies’ term barely game. In particular I like that he includes collection in his description of barely game. It feels right. Although these barely games are almost, or in some cases mildly, competitive externally, collecting is always something which can be competitive internally. You can play collecting games by yourself. Wanting to complete the set of something. Maybe it’s a boy thing some would say, maybe it’s a geek thing many people would say, but there is something deep rooted in all of us about collecting in some way shape or form. 

I’ll get to newspapers now. The other day at Chirp I bumped into Eric and Mike from Stamen, which is always lovely. At the moment I’m sitting in their offices enjoying my last day as a volcano refugee in San Francisco. 

Eric said something interesting, as he always does, but this time it was about physical newspapers which I’ve been thinking about a lot of late. He said he “liked physical newspapers as he could finish them”. It felt important at the time and I couldn’t quite work out why. It felt right though and I immediately had a sense of agreement. Then on picking up the behemoth that is the Sunday edition of the New York Times it started to click. It’s about games. Newspapers as games or barely games. 

The end of level boss that is the New York Times Sunday edition…

If we for a moment consider a game, it’s something we play as we hope there will be an outcome, an end point, a completion. In newspaper terms it’s finishing it, cover to cover. It’s the completion or collecting of a set we strive for, that we have at least skimmed the whole thing. If we consider newspapers as games then the New York Times Sunday edition is the end of week or end of level boss, which feels about right. We can’t hope to beat it alone, it needs the help of friends and loved ones to vanquish it. But what this means is that by having a fixed end point, an on the whole achievable goal, it makes us want to do it.

Newspapers online are different, they are to a greater or lesser extent infinite. The web as a whole even more so. The concepts of broadcast abundance and peak attention that Matt Locke and Matt Webb talk about are in play. The news website feels infinite at the very least. You can’t hope to complete it, the end is never in sight, so you simply do what anyone does with an insurmountable task, you reduce it to one which is more achievable, completing a section. You filter and at that point the wonders of the newspaper of joyous discovery of the unexpected are to some extent lost.

Considering a newspaper as a game adds other things into the mix. The sense of loss for instance, of jeopardy. Many games have some form of jeopardy to make the game more interesting, you may not find everything. There are items hidden which you have to work for by making you character jump on a particular point so you can reach them. You may never find them but you try and you’re set goals and targets, just as you are with the physicality of the paper. They are things though, which when they are found and collected, that give you a rush of joy at discovery and collecting. 

So it is with a physical paper. You’ve bought it, you invested in it and to not find all of the hidden gems would be a disappointment. How often does the New York Times Sunday edition sit there as a benign and gentle tyrant. Full of missed opportunities and fascinating things which lie within the pages as yet unturned. The sense of loss is palpable and so it spurs you on to complete the task. 

Physical papers also have intrinsic physical progress bars. As you progress through them there is a slow movement of mass from right to left, or left to right depending on your nationality. As you read you open and turn pages; more read ones appear on one side and less unread ones remain on the other. The pristine order of the paper is disrupted; pages lie at angles and the once mainly flat paper is crumpled. 

So what does this mean for the web. Could you level up on The Guardian. Should there be a progress bar showing you how far you’ve gone through the news that day. I’m not so sure this would be seen as anything other than a gimmick in some ways, but it might be fun to try. Maybe you could level up and earn badges.

Maybe its more about how the newspaper is atomised and then recombined into a finite thing. You can achieve several pages of the Random Guardian and find lovely things you never knew about, but you can actually complete Dan Catt’s lovely Zeitgeist once a day and have a glowing feeling of having read something in total. It comes back in some ways to making omnibus editions or collections which are not just sections or filters but a curated collection of things of varied subjects that you may or may not be interested in, full of the things you never knew you wanted to know and are as a collection completable.

p.s. Thank you Stamen for the lovely space today to think and work.