Head in the News

Head in the News is a small simulator of recommender system, where players compete to earn the most points as News outlet or Search engines. The game take place over the 2020 timeline of events related to the SARS-Cov2 pandemic, and involves two news outlet vying for popularity in the search engine Gogol.

Select headlines, rank them, harvest data, use sponsored content, and most importantly earn points! Or is that it ?...

How to play

You need to switch to full screen to play the game

The game take place over ten weeks, in each week News outlet select from a list of articles the one they wish to publish in relation to the weekly topic indicated on top, then the Search engine receive a ranking of the headlines (the first answer being on top) based on their popularity which they can adjust in order to have more relevant result at the top. Once the search engine is satisfied with their changes, their answers are sent to users which will rate how satisfied they are with it and net the search engine points (irrelevant headlines will cost you points!). News outlet receive points based on the ranking and popularity of their headlines by the search engine.

The News outlet or Search Engine currently playing is indicated in the lower left corner, points are indicated in the lower right corner. The upper right corner indicates how many articles are selected from the number required for News outlet, and the cost of the adjustment for the Search engines (which is limited to 3,  a swap of two headlines that are 1 headline apart costing 1 and so on) respectively.

To select articles to publish you need to click on them (clicking them again deselect them), and to make changes to the ranking you need to click on the two headlines you wish to permute (provided you don't go over the cost limit!).

Articles and headlines are pre-sorted by popularity,  with the most popular on top, for News publishing popular headlines will net you more points, for Search Engine this popularity determines the initial ranking and limits the adjustment you can make to it.

From week #3 onward, sponsored content start appearing in yellow, publishing those contents as News outlet or ranking them highly as Search engine nets you some additional points!

At the start of week #4, News outlets can now pay so that their published content get a boost in popularity, ensuring higher ranking, this cost 300 points and can be done using the [paid content] button on the left.

When week #5 starts, the Search engine can opt to harvest data about their users in order to see their position on the pandemic for a one-time cost of 800 points. This reveals a pie chart color-coded in the following way : blue are provax, white are neutral, and lastly red are antivax.

We suggest the following roles when playing the game:

There are two news outlets, the Transalpine Time and U-News, the first is a reputable newspaper focusing on the quality of their publications, while U-News is an upbeat infotainement channel which can publish more popular content in order to earn more.

Gogol, the search engine, should mostly be preoccupied with answering the questions with relevant headlines (the one that are relevant to the topic of the week), i.e. having them on top.

Team

Tâm Nguyên, Lúcás Meier, Beiqian Qi, Emma Mozer, 

WARNING: all headlines are fictitious and at no point is this game a reliable source of informations about the SARS-Cov2 virus, Covid19 disease, or the pandemic as a whole. The game only aims to illustrate how recommender system in the wake of the pandemics can acts as echo chamber when the drive behind publicized content is popularity.