Immersive journalism in times of pandemic. Comparative study between newsgames and interactive journalistic narratives to report on Covid-19

ABSTRACT

This research studies the immersion techniques used by interactive narratives broadcast by the media and newsgames, hybrids of video games and journalism, when reporting on Covid-19 during the first year of the pandemic. From a comparative perspective, five journalistic pieces made by national and international newspapers and five serious games on Covid-19 have been analyzed, applying thirteen categories of a playful-narrative analysis, which have been gathered in groups focused on the story, the interaction, the realism, the points of view of the narrator and the recipient, as well as in the theme of the narrations. The results show that none of the techniques analyzed to study immersion in the story have stood out in journalistic publications, while in newsgames only factors typical of digital leisure have been used, such as interaction, the assumption of roles and the narrative experience. Despite the advantages it offers as a differentiating channel and to attract the audience in a context of overabundance of information, neither the media nor digital entertainment have taken advantage of immersion when reporting on the Covid-19 pandemic. © 2022 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)