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Recently gaming has been coming up everywhere! I was listening to Jay Rosen and Dave Winer's podcast, "Rebooting the News." Rosen reported on his panel at South by Southwest. He said that at the end he twittered about how interested he had become about looking at the intersection of gaming and journalism. Rosen also mentioned that they had set up a webset for their Future of Context panel. I went looking and I found a post about gaming and journalism that includes these paragraphs about how gaming might bring context into journalism. "The way I envision it is to create some sort of social gaming experience that fills in the gaps. Want to fill the audience in on why health care costs so much? Why not an audience scavenger hunt that takes them through insurance companies, doctors, service providers, employers who pay premiums, and such? Or why not a Farmville type of game run in a hospital where users have to try and actually bend the cost curve themselves lest they go bankrupt, a situation that allows them to experiment with different health care systems so they can see the cause and effect of the choices we make as a society (in terms of patient coverage, costs, profits, etc? If Mafia Wars on Facebook can take off, surely this could. And how do they make these choices along the way? With blasts of information, ideally pulled from well reported news stories, that the user can actually apply to the situation in a way that increases both recall and understanding." Littau is presenting his vision here, and what a fvision it is. I can totally imagine playing a game in place of reading an article about health care. Once again, just when I thought I understood what gaming is, I see that there is more to learn. This is exciting!