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Far ahead of social networks and information applications, gaming represents a large part of our time spent on smartphones, all audiences combined. At France Télévisions, we wanted to exploit this particular format for the presidential election, to inform differently while educating.
The 18-24 year olds, under-represented in the audience of traditional media groups, are a major target for France Télévisions, especially when it comes to political information, a genre to which this target seemed particularly hermetic. This is why we sought to develop a new format specifically for this audience, in line with its uses and in particular its appetite for mobile gaming.
A project in partnership with ESJ Lille and the Pôle 3D school
We brought together journalism students from the ESJ in Lille and Game Design students from the Pôle 3D school at the Plaine Images innovative business incubator in Tourcoing. Since they belonged to the target population, we gave them carte blanche to tell us what interested them in politics and especially how they wanted to be told about it. The result was totally unpublished.
To discover the workings of French political life, they made a role-playing game where the player plays a candidate for the presidential election and decides on the best campaign to run to win the Elysée Palace. Starting from a basic program, the player had to make weekly choices of trips, meetings and encounters, answer interviews, react to current events... Depending on the consistency of the campaign with the commitments of his program, an algorithm granted a popularity rating to the candidate, until the final victory... or not.
A game about political strategy
It is therefore the political strategy that most interested our students, and the respect of the commitments of politicians. After having established different scenarios, they looked for real information to support the situations proposed to the players and verified in political history the consequences of their choices on the future of the candidates .
The game was therefore intended to be documented, informative and realistic, while combining the imperatives of a successful smartphone game: mobile, personal and fun. And it worked: more than 35,000 downloads, a high rate of gameplay time and exciting qualitative feedback.
2 conclusions
First of all, the young public does not shy away from information, they even consume a lot of it, including the most serious. By finding the right formats, we can effectively deliver our information content.
Secondly, gaming is a vast and very promising field to invest in quickly. It is not the processing of information that is playful, but its transmission. Gaming also has the character of building loyalty among users, who would naturally turn to France Télévisions content.
Beyond an innovative information offer, we therefore discovered, during this fruitful experience, a new horizon where France Télévisions' information could find a new lease of life.
