From content to interaction: Gaming’s opportunity for local media

It’s well past time for public media to embrace general audience games. In general, electronic media acknowledges this. The New York Times is, in addition to being a newspaper of record, a gaming company. The Atlantic, Netflix, YouTube and even LinkedIn have embraced this. And if that doesn’t convince you, let’s follow the money.”

Chad Davis, chief innovation officer, Nebraska Public Media

In the 1950s and 1960s, American media critics looked at the cutting-edge media of the era and said, “We can do better.” The fevered dreams of those visionary thinkers were a key leg in the long march to the founding of public broadcasting in the United States. Public broadcasting’s injection of diverse voices and plurality viewpoints into the mid-century American monoculture meant public broadcasting did its part, this side of the pond, to sustain a healthy democracy at a time when the democracy was feeling its post-war oats.

Flash forward 60 years. Broadcasting’s time has come and is going. Like the economies of many technologies, the cost of creating linear video and audio has dropped to a near-frictionless state. Mass media, if it even still exists, is no longer synonymous with broadcasting. The media of the masses is now interactive, including games.

Video games are a huge industry. They are bigger than TV, film and music … combined. They are also a largely self-regulated industry, one that is still very white and very male. When you multiply the size of the industry by its homogenization, you get a media space that is just as in need of pro-social media creation as television and radio were in the 1960s.

Of course, public media has created games for kids. PBS Kids is a leader in that space, and as I’ve gotten to know the public media video game landscape, I’ve been surprised by how many individual stations have made multiple games. Most of those come through station education departments, which ends up putting a box around the medium's potential in many people’s minds.

A surprising number of us working in public media seem to have the desire, skills and/or connections to make video games. But to make games for all ages, or general audiences, is in some way “not what we do.” Even at PBS, few outside the Kids team and their supporters seem to see PBS’s potential as a gaming company.

Of course, games are not just for kids. The oldest [video] gamers are now approaching 60. AARP now considers advocacy for gamers part of its mandate. My dad, who would have been 79 this year, brought home a Pong game console when I was little. Video games have been a part of popular culture — and I’ll hasten to add a constructive part — for more than five decades.

Tech journalist and essayist Evan Armstrong writes, “Nearly every consumer innovation you come in contact with, in one way or another, owes its lineage to some video game company’s innovation in content, pricing or go-to-market strategy. NVIDIA built graphics chips for video game rendering; Slack started as a video game chat system; and that 30% fee that Apple takes from developers partially stems from mid-1980s agreements between Nintendo and Pac-Man creator Namco.”

It’s well past time for public media to embrace general audience games. In general, electronic media acknowledges this. The New York Times is, in addition to being a newspaper of record, a gaming company. The Atlantic, Netflix, YouTube and even LinkedIn have embraced this. And if that doesn’t convince you, let’s follow the money. Krishan Arora reported in a Forbes piece from December 2023, “Global revenue generated by the gaming industry is greater [by 3X+] than the global revenue generated by the music and movie industries combined.” For scale, according to Arora’s numbers: in 2022, that amounted to around $26B each for music and movies, and $184B+ for games. (All totals are global.)

That money is not solely pooling into the coffers of AAA gaming studios either.  A creator economy exists for games just as it does for YouTube, TikTok and Instagram.

In Nebraska, we are committed to general audience games. We’ve been working up to this cautiously and organically for years and have now released two games. Our thesis is that if we want to be relevant to future generations, we need to ensure that the good work PBS Kids does to “meet children where they are” eventually extends to adults as well. And adults are gaming. On the broadcast side, we’ve long lamented that we lose audiences between childhood and parenthood. There is a chance right now to avoid replicating the problem by embracing this medium.

That doesn’t make games mutually exclusive with linear audio and video. You can do both. Both sectors of the media landscape need public media’s values. But games are unequivocally part of American culture and can benefit from the values and editorial sensibilities of public media. As an ecosystem, we have something to contribute to this industry.

For years, public media has embraced the idea of lifelong learning. It’s time for public media to embrace lifelong play with the same commitment to mission.

Chad Davis is the chief innovation officer at Nebraska Public Media, where he founded the Public Media Futures Lab and co-founded the Public Media Innovators Peer Learning Community. Prior to that, he was the inaugural head of Nebraska Public Media Labs and led teams responsible for publishing experiments in AI, video games, virtual reality, 360-video and podcasting. He speaks regularly about the intersection of public media and emerging media and publishes a semi-regular newsletter under the Public Media Innovators banner. He can be reached at cdavis@nebraskapublicmedia.org.