Journalism has long asked readers to pay attention. Now, some journalists are asking them to play. As audiences spend more time gaming than reading, iMEdD spoke with journalists, designers, and game developers who explore whether gamified investigations can immerse audiences, challenge them, create empathy, and perhaps generate revenue.
Featured image: Evgenios Kalofolias
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The clatter of a keyboard. An ominous score swells in the background. The door creaks open. As you sift through documents, connecting clues one by one, another feeling creeps in: the uneasy sense that someone may be watching you.
This is Predatorgate, a browser game inspired by Inside Story’s reporting on Greece’s spyware scandal. The game puts players in the role of Greek journalist Eliza Triantafyllou as she discovers that her colleague, Thanasis Koukakis, has been targeted with spyware. When the game’s developers, Izzy Fiacco and Z. Daniel Barnett, were refining its puzzles, they debated how difficult they should be. Should players breeze through them, or struggle? Barnett argued for the latter. “I was like, no, leave the frustration in. People should feel the frustration that a journalist would feel sitting down to write this story. I think that’s part of the experience, too. I don’t think it’s a flaw. I think it’s a feature.”
In early June, the game took the top prize in Floodlight Gaming’s second investigative journalism game jam, and the team received $5,000. It was part of a larger experiment by Floodlight, an independent organization founded by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and its partners, that tests whether the mechanics that make games absorbing – curiosity, uncertainty, discovery, and choice – can also make journalism more meaningful.
The experiment is still young, but early projects suggest that some investigations may be better experienced than simply read.
The next life of an investigation
Gaming is a global entertainment industry measured in hundreds of billions of dollars. Investigative journalism, meanwhile, remains chronically expensive and dependent on grants, donations, and philanthropic funding.
For Paul Radu, co-director and the head of innovation at OCCRP, games are not simply another way to distribute investigative journalism. They are a potential business model: a way to turn years of reporting, data, and unused material into new products that can help finance the journalism that produced them.
“The investigative reporting industry sits on a lot of intellectual property that is unused,” he told iMEdD. “When you publish an investigation, you only publish a very small fragment of what you know, and you have a lot more data, a lot more stories that you haven’t told. You end up using probably 5% to 10% of what you gathered.”
That unused material points to a larger problem: investigative journalism can spend months or years on a story only for its impact to remain confined to a relatively small audience. “The question is how to expand that ecosystem, how to engage more people and how to achieve more impact,” Radu added.
This is where game jams like Floodlight come in.
As he explained, Floodlight, launched in 2025, starts with journalists submitting investigations. A jury selects 10 to 12 stories, which the organizers turn into a catalog for game developers. They are then paired with reporters and, after signing nondisclosure agreements (NDAs), they spend a few weeks learning how the investigations were reported, including unpublished details and reporting techniques. Then, they build playable prototypes inspired by the work. The whole process lasts roughly one month.
“Games are perfect for describing investigative methods because they are about curiosity, and investigative reporting is about curiosity,” Radu noted.
Floodlight is betting on a category known as “serious games,” which uses games to pursue a purpose beyond entertainment. He personally sees an opening in an “untapped market” crowded with successful “noir” and “crime games”, but with relatively few that bring the depth and ethical standards of investigative reporting.
The investigative reporting industry sits on a lot of intellectual property that is unused […] When you publish an investigation, you only publish a very small fragment of what you know, and you have a lot more data, a lot more stories that you haven’t told. You end up using probably 5% to 10% of what you gathered.
Paul Radu, co-director and the head of innovation at OCCRP
Making Predatorgate
For game developer Izzy Fiacco, the Predatorgate story immediately stood out while reading Floodlight’s catalogue of investigations. “I’ve been super interested in data security and computers this past year, and I’ve really been spending a lot more time on that,” they said to iMEdD. The fact that the case had recently reached a moment of justice also drew them in. “Real-life stories are always ongoing, but the fact that they got justice so recently was just so exciting to me, to kind of see a light at the end of the tunnel.”
It was the first time Fiacco had created a game based on real events, but they already knew that working within a “grounded world” would come with constraints. “With a real story, you obviously want to be respectful of the source material and try to stay as true to the events as possible,” they said. “Our puzzle design meant we couldn’t use the actual documents, so I tried to fictionalize them in a way that condensed them while still allowing them to function as puzzles.”
Real-life stories are always ongoing, but the fact that they got justice so recently was just so exciting to me, to kind of see a light at the end of the tunnel.
Izzy Fiacco, game developer and co-creator of the Predatorgate game.
Fiacco teamed up with longtime investigative political reporter Z. Daniel Barnett, who worked on the project’s sound design, music, and voice. “I did a lot of reading to break the story down into specific puzzles and moments that we wanted to highlight,” Fiacco said. They later reached out to Greek journalist Eliza Triantafyllou, whose firsthand experience helped add texture beyond what was captured in published reports. “That was really handy because I got to ask her about things that weren’t going to show up in the reporting,” Fiacco added. “It was more about trying to capture the mood and the moment of her experience: where she was, what she was doing, what she was thinking about, and who her colleagues were.”
A gamer themselves, Fiacco gravitated toward role-playing games (RPGs), especially the kind that build dense worlds or bend immersion in clever, unexpected ways, like Return of the Obra Dinn. Predatorgate’s retro feel is largely inspired by 1960s and 1970s cinema, said Fiacco, rather than personal gaming habits. Films like “The Conversation” heavily influenced the game’s atmosphere of surveillance.
“For me, my contribution became kind of making my part a love letter to old-school journalism,” Z. Daniel Barnett told iMEdD. He took an analog approach to the game’s sound design, creating its sounds from real objects. “Instead of using a keyboard, I had a 150-year-old typewriter. I recorded its clicking and clacking. (…) I felt like, in a way, I paid homage to those old films and made, I think, a much more haptic experience. Some of the noises for pointing and clicking are from an old pair of scissors that I actually inherited from a reporter when I first started.”
The music was designed to be “anxiety-inducing” and “creepy ambient,” he added, using recordings of his piano and percussive effects on its strings to heighten the suspense. He wanted the voiceover to convey the “worn-out” state of a journalist immersed in a demanding, long-term investigation. “I intentionally recorded those parts at like one or two in the morning, so I just sounded tired.”
Fiacco said that hundreds of players have played the game immediately after its launch. “The increasingly unsettling music and “mini game” of having to disable sources of paranoia in the room gave me a glimpse at what the real investigator might have felt,” a player wrote on the game’s page.
The empathy experiment
In 2021, business reporter Anna Thulin began studying how newsgames tell stories after years of reporting on Sweden’s growing gaming industry. For research with LSE Polis, she interviewed 10 journalists and game developers. She initially saw newsgames as “a fun way to tell stories, a bit like entertainment.” The interviews changed her mind. “I really felt that there was much more to it,” she said to iMEdD. “You could add complexity, make the audience engage in the story, have agency.”
She studied projects including Hacked and the Financial Times’ Uber game, which put audiences in the middle of complex stories. Games can also hold attention longer, she found. “A good, in-depth article might get a minute of someone’s attention. With games, you have much more time to tell a story.” But time is only one measure. Empathy is harder to quantify. “You can build empathy with a normal article. I mean, it doesn’t need to be a game. But I think there’s a possibility of having more complexity to maybe bring up questions. In an article, maybe you answer those questions, but in a game, there are many different solutions or ways to choose from.”
Playing the odds
In 2025, investigative data journalist Lam Thuy Vo pitched a story on her personal IVF journey to The Pudding. The idea was picked up by senior journalist and engineer Michelle Pera-McGhee and visual journalist Jan Diehm.
Vo meticulously tracked her IVF data in a spreadsheet, a coping mechanism she has used since 2013, notably for her “Quantified Breakup” project. “One of the things that I noticed early on with IVF, when I started my journey, is that I talked to other friends, and they called themselves ‘warriors’. We are warriors because we survived this thing that has many, many hurdles. This inspired the concept of a “quest” with adversaries, just like a video game,” she said.
In March 2026, The Pudding published A Journey Through Infertility. Vo’s personal data became the empathetic core of the game’s narrative. The team identified two core aspects: the emotional and personal journey of the parent, and the scientific and medical process of the child. This led to the “dual path” idea, heavily inspired by the game Monument Valley, with its isometric paths.
“This journey is like being a warrior who has to fight different enemies to get to the end, from insurance companies to bad doctors,” continued Vo. “There’s also a lot of luck involved with IVF, including how many eggs you have and how good they are. (…) And so it was this interesting thing that combined both the journey of someone going through and facing a lot of hurdles, and then also the aspect of it being about luck.”
Jan Diehm said the cliffhangers Vo left along the way “allow people to sit in the discomfort of what could happen,” and maybe empathize with women who have gone through IVF.
What was important in all of our stories really was trying to give people a window to see themselves in the data that we’re talking about.
Jan Diehm, visual journalist at the Pudding
“At The Pudding, we’re a data publication, so we were thinking about where the data fit into that journey. Where are the reveals?” said Diehm. “What was important in all of our stories really was trying to give people a window to see themselves in the data that we’re talking about”.
The team also scattered optional “data deep dives” throughout the game as side quests, rather than front-loading them, giving readers another reason to keep exploring.
For Michelle Pera-McGhee, good UX design is about earning the audience’s attention, while balancing effort and reward. “We’re thinking a lot about, in a gamification sense, when to ask for some interactivity, how much you can ask for, and how often you can ask people to engage. Is this better for a passive experience, or does it need to be active?” Also, testing the experience with new users is vital for identifying design flaws and simplifying the experience.
“We are asking someone for their time. Their time is super valuable…We have to value their time and give them kind of a return on investment. We want to make sure that spending time with our story was worth it for them,” she said.
We are asking someone for their time. Their time is super valuable…We have to value their time and give them kind of a return on investment. We want to make sure that spending time with our story was worth it for them.
Michelle Pera-McGhee, senior journalist and engineer at The Pudding
Three newsgames you should try
- The United States of Abortion Mazes: Think you can navigate a maze? Try 51. Each one is shaped by the abortion laws and policies of a U.S. state. The harder the maze, the harder the access. Play it at The Pudding.
- The Waiting Game: What does it feel like to put your future in the hands of an immigration system — and then wait? This newsgame by ProPublica and Playmatics lets you experience the asylum process through five stories based on real cases. Play The Waiting Game.
- The Uber Game: What does it really take to make a living in the gig economy? Drive for Uber for seven days, juggle fares, bills and unexpected expenses, and see whether you can keep your life on the road. Based on real reporting and interviews with dozens of Uber drivers. Play The Uber Game.
You can find a wide range of newsgames on Journalism Games, an online library of news interactives curated by students and faculty in the University of Miami’s Department of Interactive Media.
The way forward
In 2026, Floodlight is expanding its network at major industry conferences like Gamescom, Paul Radu said. Two commercial games, Dark Money, expected to launch in the first quarter of next year, and Hunting the Hunter, are now in production. Another eight browser-based games are set to enter incubation in 2027.
“Things are rolling,” he said. “We’re hoping to be able to generate some revenue at the beginning of next year. That will be where we prove, or we disprove, the concept.”
Making a game is far easier today than it was just a few years ago. Fiacco points to no-code and low-code tools such as RPG Maker for top-down role-playing games and Ren’Py for visual novels.
As AI also becomes more integrated into journalism, Thulin sees both new possibilities and new risks for newsgames development. “It’s become much easier to code yourself, or at least to vibe code,” she said. “You might still need someone to review it at the end, but for simple prototypes, pitching ideas, or testing [game] concepts, it’s much more accessible. Even if you’re a journalist who doesn’t know how to make a game, you could probably work with Claude to create a prototype, take it to an editor, and potentially get support to develop it further.”
But the technology also raises concerns about transparency and data protection. Sensitive material, she cautioned, is precisely the kind of material that cannot be put into an AI system. For all the possibilities the technology opens up, there are still some things journalists cannot afford to hand over to it.
