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DCM0010.1177/1750481319856202Discourse & CommunicationMagdi Fawzy

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Discourse & Communication

Neoliberalizing news discourse: 1­–19

© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1750481319856202
https://doi.org/10.1177/1750481319856202
news gamification journals.sagepub.com/home/dcm

Rania Magdi Fawzy

Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport, Egypt

Abstract
Gamified news is a clear example of contemporary convergent practices which conflate the
functionalities of formerly separate entities, video games and journalism. This practice marks
a shift in the journalistic norms, positioning journalism and news users within the neoliberal
paradigm. In this view, the study proposes a discursive approach to examine how gamified news
discourse is colonized by the neoliberal values of marketization and commodification. The analysis
takes a case study of Pirate Fishing: An Interactive Investigation, a gamified news launched by Al
Jazeera. It is not just the narrative of Pirate that carries ideological bearings, rather the ludic
design itself is found to be fit within the neoliberal mentality. Therefore, the ludic semiosis of
Pirate Fishing is examined as well. As such, a dialectical relation between discourse, semiotics
and neoliberal ideologies, in the context of gamification, is drawn in this article. Based on the
analysis, seven interrelated neoliberal discourses are highlighted: ‘calculative rationality’, ‘self-
entrepreneurship’, ‘minimalism’, ‘aesthetic preferences’, ‘individualism’, ‘sovereign consumer’ and
‘personal responsibility’.

Keywords
Discourse analysis, gamified news, immersive aesthetics, interactional engagement, ludic design,
marketization, neoliberal journalism, neoliberal news user, neoliberalism, news gamification,
news marketization, Pirate Fishing, semiotic analysis

Introduction
News gamification marks the application of game properties, mechanics and tools
like points, badges and leaderboards to news context (Burke, 2016; Ferrer Conill,

Corresponding author:
Rania Magdi Fawzy, College of Language and Communication, Arab Academy for Science, Technology and
Maritime Transport, Heliopolis P.O. Box 2033 Elhorria El Moshir Ismail st. – behind Sheraton, Egypt.
Email: raniamagdi33@hotmail.com
2 Discourse & Communication 00(0)

2016). This new journalistic practice redefines news reading activity by turning it into
a playful and meaningful experience (Ferrer Conill, 2016: 41). Gamification of news
stories offers ‘new journalism formats’ with a view to emphasizing the democratic
and civic purposes of journalism while engaging younger users (Ferrer Conill and
Karlsson, 2015: 357). From a neoliberal economic perspective, news gamification
can be seen as a reaction to the recent drop in news consumption. Gamification, then,
is a medium where interplay of the professional and commercial logics of journalism
takes place (Ferrer Conill, 2018). However, the shift from a reading mode to a playing
mode involves a shift in the discursive practices and semiotic affordances that need to
be investigated to reflect on this emerging genre. In this regard, the article investi-
gates this new form of journalism that prompts new discursive competencies and
neoliberal values. The analysis takes a case study of Al Jazeera Pirate Fishing: An
Interactive Investigation. This gamified case fits this study because it uses gamifica-
tion on a large scale, and because it transforms news experience for users (Ferrer
Conill, 2018).
This study seeks to examine how news gamification is colonized by the neoliberal
logic. In so doing, it discusses the discursive and ludic semiotic strategies deployed in Al
Jazeera gamified piece Pirate Fishing that connect with and reinforce neoliberal values.
The study is drawn on Fairclough’s (1993) notion of the marketization of public dis-
course and Pérez-Latorre’s (2015) suggested analytical model for examining the semi-
otic affordances of video games. As such, a dialectical relation between discourse,
semiotics and neoliberal ideologies is drawn in this article. Insights and findings from the
semio-discursive analysis are interpreted in light of some works on neoliberalism
(Harvey, 2005, 2007; Rose, 1999; Turner, 2008).

Al Jazeera gamified Pirate

Pirate Fishing is award-winning gamified news which is produced by Al Jazeera 2014.
It is the first gamified, interactive investigation in which the users assume the roles of
both an investigative journalist and a player. This gamified piece of news places users in
the role of an investigative journalist with the task to unveil the story of illegal fishing
operations off the coast of Sierra Leone. The whole story is narrated in the form of an
investigation with the aim to discover the identity of mysterious trawlers, starting with
spotting the trawlers and knowing the tools, the techniques and the vessels they use in
their illegal fishing until their arrest. In doing so, the user is turned into a video game
player who is asked to play the news by watching clips and photos of destroyed nets and
pirate ships, examining maps and listening to audio stories from the local fishermen. By
entering this information into the right sections of the notebook and differentiating
between criminal evidence, notes and background information, the news player scores
points and advances in the game status from a junior researcher to senior investigative
journalist.
Pirate game is divided into four stages. The stages are named as follows: (a) Sherbro
Island Delta: Investigate, illegal fishing; (b) Freetown: Contact the authorities; (c)
Freetown: Discover the identity of the pirate trawler; and (d) The ocean: Board the pirate
trawler.
Magdi Fawzy 3

Neoliberalism
Neoliberalism introduces a market-driven logic into public sectors which were not previ-
ously influenced by economic relations (Dean, 2010: 72). McChesney (1999) provides
the following definition of neoliberalism:

Neoliberalism is the defining political economic paradigm of our time – it refers to the policies
and processes whereby a relative handful of private interests are permitted to control as much
as possible of social life in order to maximize their personal profit. (p. 7)

However, neoliberalism is not confined to the economic or political landscapes. Most of

the social and institutional sectors undergo a transformation of their activities to fit the
neoliberal metaphor (Oleksenko et al., 2018: 114). In this regard, post-modern neoliberal
rationality instantiates a reconfiguration of various social disciplines such as the sectors
of education (Bamberger et al., 2019; Gray et al., 2018; Ng, 2014), medicine (Defibaugh,
2019), architecture (Spencer, 2016), interior design (Ledin and Machin, 2018; Roderick,
2016), video games (Baerg, 2014; Oliva et al., 2016) and media (Phelan, 2014). That is
to say, neoliberalism becomes a ‘hegemonic paradigm’ (Bello, 2009) that extends to
reach all social sectors. In the words of Harvey (2007), neoliberalism is a ‘hegemonic
discourse with pervasive effects on ways of thought and political economic practices to
the point where it is now part of the commonsense way we interpret, live in, and under-
stand the world’ (p. 22). Examples of the values that many scholars associate with the
neoliberal mentality are ‘individualism’, ‘freedom of choice’, ‘flexibility’, ‘personal
responsibility’ and ‘self-entrepreneurship’ (Rose, 1998, 1999).
In addition to being a market and social driven paradigm, neoliberalism is a linguistic
phenomenon as well (Gray et al., 2018: 471). Kauppinen (2013) points out that ‘neolib-
eral governance is a mode of power that fundamentally operates in and through dis-
course’ (p. 113). Holborow (2012: 41) argues that everyday discourse and institutional
practices become colonized by ‘neoliberal keywords’ such as the lexicon ‘choice’
(Holborow, 2012: 41). These neoliberal words, Holborow explains, ‘have special mean-
ings and associations within the framework of neoliberal ideology and reflect a version
of reality which promotes the interests of capital’. Correspondingly, neoliberalism pro-
duces and is reproduced by institutional discursive practices.
Fairclough (2005) states that ‘in dealing with neo-liberalism we are dealing with
questions of discourse’ (p. 23). In the same vein, Krzyżanowski (2013, 2016) notes that
neoliberalizing public domain entails various discursive changes that need to be investi-
gated. In this view, this article centres on the notion that the ideological changes of social
and political institutions are a discursive phenomenon (van Dijk, 1998). Chouliaraki and
Fairclough (1999) comment on this instrumental nature of discourse saying:

It is an important characteristic of the economic, social and cultural changes of late modernity
that they exist as discourses as well as processes that are taking place outside discourse, and that
the processes that are taking place outside discourse are substantively shaped by these
discourses. (p. 4)

Fairclough’s (2005) notion of discursive neoliberalism investigates how discourses are

‘enacted as new ways of acting and interacting and new social relationships, inculcated
4 Discourse & Communication 00(0)

as new ways of being, new identities, and materialized, for instance in new ways of
organizing time and space in institutions and organizations’ (p. 27, original emphasis).
Fairclough (2005) contends that discourse analysis can specifically contribute to
investigating different aspects of social life, in a process which he calls ‘operationaliz-
ing’ discourses. Discursive operationalization of social ideologies refers to ‘the effectiv-
ity of discourses in constructing and reconstructing social life’ (Fairclough, 2005: 23). In
this regard, this article examines how the discourse of Al Jazeera gamified news is opera-
tionalized to produce neoliberal rationality.

Theory and methods

This study takes Pirate Fishing, a game launched by Al Jazeera in 2014, as a case study
to be analysed from a discursive-semiotic lens. The study aims at examining how the
convergent practice of gamification marks a stance of a neoliberal marketization of news
production. However, analysing gamified news discourse is challenging at the methodo-
logical level due to the particularities of the medium, combining two different disci-
plines: video games and news genre with their different invoked associations. In this
regard, the study examines, from a semio-discursive perspective, the ludic design of
Pirate Fishing, its play activities, including aesthetic immersion and interactional
engagement, and the player’s roles.

Ludic design of video games

For Pérez-Latorre (2015), analysing video games should consider the meaning mode
driven from the medium and the user’s experience. He specifies this notion with the term
‘ludic design’, referring to the game world, including verbal, visual and audio modes; the
soundtracks and music; the character/player; and the game play activities. The ludic
design of video games influences the representation of the character/player by defining
their performed actions within five rules: (a) performance role, (b) operation rules, (c)
state rules, (d) rules for inducing behaviours and (e) game mechanics.
Performance rules define the possible actions carried by the players or their avatars in
the course of the play. As for operation rules, they refer to the way in which player’s
performance on the physical (keyboard, mouse and game-pad) and visual interfaces of
the game influences the game world and the sequence of events. The third type of ludic
rules is the state rules which define the type of status achieved in the game world such as
the player’s ‘lives’, ‘health’ or ‘social status’ according to the performance of the charac-
ter/player. The rules for inducing behaviours, Pérez-Latorre argues, are the set of rules
enacted by the game interface and promote the players to behave in a certain manner.
These rules can be the reward or punishment system of the game. The game mechanics
constitute the core experience of the video games. They dictate the set of actions the
player should perform. There is a close relation between the game mechanics and the
embedded ideologies of video games (Pérez-Latorre, 2015: 420–424). Another layer of
the ludic design, as suggested by Pérez-Latorre, is the game play activities. Each unit of
the video game (level, sublevel and mission) promotes performing certain activity to
achieve the game objective.
Magdi Fawzy 5

Marketization of public discourse

Fairclough (1993: 142) defines the concept of the marketization of discourse as the ‘col-
onization of discourse by promotion’ in the different social institutions and practices.
Such a socially informed new discursive practice is powered by neoliberal ideas which
blur the boundaries between public and private life and collective and individual respon-
sibility, mixing the discursive nature of fact and opinion as well as information. In his
seminal work on the marketization of public discourse, Fairclough (1993) comments on
the changing discursive practices of higher education institutions in the United Kingdom.
He argues that the discursive practices of universities are colonized by those of the pro-
motional discourses. Discursive marketization, according to Fairclough (1993), defines
three aspects of contemporary communication: ‘technologization’, ‘conversationaliza-
tion’ and ‘commodification’.
Technologizing discourse defines the redesigning of existing discursive practices to fit
the criteria of institutional affectivity (Fairclough, 1993: 141). It points to the ‘level of
conscious intervention to control and shape language practices in accordance with eco-
nomic, political and institutional objectives’ (Fairclough and Wodak, 1997: 260).
Importantly, technologization here does not refer to the strict meaning of the word ‘tech-
nology’; rather, it means a shift to the increasing ‘codification’ of communication resources
and social practices (Ledin and Machin, 2018: 3). The codification of communication
practices is achieved by the reliance on what is called ‘New Writing’ (Ledin and Machin,
2018; van Leeuwen, 2008). New Writing is a type of communication that relies mainly on
visual resources and multimodal interaction, rather than on verbal resources alone. Ledin
and Machin (2018) argue that the concept of New Writing ‘goes hand in hand with tech-
nologization and the drive to increase control over communication’ (p. 4). They provide
an example with newspaper design which deploys the semiotics of fonts, colours, images
and layout to codify specific attitudes and identities to readers.
As for conversationalization, it refers to the ‘colonization of the public domain by the
practices of the private domain, an opening up of public orders of discourse to discursive
practices which we can all attain’ (Fairclough, 1993: 140). The process of conversation-
alizing discourse appropriates the communication principles used in informal and per-
sonal conversations for the marketing goals of formerly professional discourse.
Accordingly, conversationalization gives expression to what is referred to by Fairclough
(1992, 1993, 2003) as ‘synthetic personalization’. Concerning the notion of commodifi-
cation, it refers to ‘the reconstruction of, for instance, public services on the analogy of
commodity markets’ (Fairclough, 2003: 235). Commodification defines as well the
increased dependency on the promotional power of non-verbal (e.g. visual, digital, aural)
semiotic modes other than language. Fairclough’s concept of marketizing public dis-
course is significant to be considered when studying news gamification since it gives
insights on the market logic governing this new type of journalism.

Analysis
Discursive operationalization of neoliberal ideologies is a ‘dialectical process’ in the
sense that it is not just a matter of discourses but also of genres and styles (Fairclough,
6 Discourse & Communication 00(0)

Figure 1.  A screen shot of Pirate interface displaying its playing activities.

2005: 27). One particularly significant feature of news gamification genre is their con-
vergence of news narrative and game design, that is to say, their complex mixture of
news logic and gameplay logic. To this end, the current analysis focuses on both the
discursive and ludic dimensions of Pirate.

The ludic design of Pirate Fishing

Pirate ludic design is defined in this article as the game-like affordances made available
to the news user. Converging news storytelling with the elements of video games, Pirate
produces a unique experience of news consumption. The game play activities are dis-
played in the right vertical bar of the game screen. Like video games, Pirate Fishing is
divided into levels represented by different stages and steps. The game contains four
stages displayed horizontally in the upper part of the bar, where the completed stage is
highlighted in yellow colour.
As shown in Figure 1, the use of the lexical items ‘stage’, ‘steps’, ‘badges’ and ‘points’
invokes games norms and reinforces the gamifying properties.
To get the full story behind illegal fishing in Sierra Leone, users are required to com-
plete 32 steps. The number of steps achieved is written also in yellow under the stages
‘progress bar’. The progress bar helps the players to follow their progress and to know
how much content is left to reach the next stage. From a neoliberal perspective, the pro-
gress bar and the yellow-coloured number of the completed stages, steps and points
reinforce the neoliberal calculative rationality and the consumerism logic of ‘the more is
better’. Rose (1999) points out that under neoliberalism social behaviour is framed by
economic logic ‘as calculative actions undertaken through the universal human faculty
of choice’ (p. 114). This notion is reflected in Pirate since the more stages and steps are
completed, the more the news user advances in the story.
Magdi Fawzy 7

Figure 2.  Pirate Fishing interface of visual collections.

Interestingly, Pirate Fishing interface deploys the video games mechanics of ‘rewards’.
Throughout the course of the play, the users are encouraged by getting ‘investigation
points’ after correctly classifying information in the ‘notebook’ or ‘collected badges’. By
abiding by the performance rules of the game and interacting more with the game inter-
face, the users increase their status from ‘junior researcher’ to ‘senior reporter’. When
completing ‘extra tasks’, the user gets ‘badges’. The game-like news includes six badges
of ‘activist’, ‘city explorer’, ‘corruption investigation’, ‘ship spotter’, ‘technology expert’
and ‘undercover specialist’.
Similar to video games, users are asked to ‘collect’ different pieces of evidence and
notes in their notebook. Collections differ from badges in that they carry visual represen-
tations of an achievement, see Figure 2.
Significantly, the reward system of Pirate Fishing implies that the more effort the
news users exert in their news consumption, the more rewards they get. As the users
navigate through the game, they receive badges for completing certain stages, which are
shareable on social media platforms (Facebook and Twitter) found at the bottom of the
right vertical bar.
As displayed by Figure 3, the game-like mechanics deployed in Al Jazeera gamified
news enhance the players’ ability to construct their own status and badges. Pirate players
are encouraged to proceed with the investigation process to become ‘senior reporters’
and gain the ‘specialized badges’. Thus, the motivation behind consuming the news is
altered in the context of gamification from being an informative practice to being a com-
petitive one. Interestingly, the news user becomes the game avatar who is customized
and developed throughout the course of news consumption, or in other words, the course
of playing the news. Correspondingly, the ludic design of Pirate with its affordances
 8

Figure 3.  A screen shot of two interfaces demonstrating the ludic state rule of Pirate.
Discourse & Communication 00(0)
Magdi Fawzy 9

echoes the neoliberal value of self-construction. The news user’s performance and navi-
gation in the game world reflect the neoliberal rationalities of competitive individualism
and self-entrepreneurship through which individuals are encouraged to become ‘entre-
preneurs of themselves’ (Rose, 1998: 158). Moreover, the incorporation of video games
mechanics into Pirate interface corresponds to the neoliberal rationality of marketization
which blurs the boundaries between public and private discourses. Here, the boundaries
between playing and consuming news, between fun and seriousness, are conflated.
A close reading of Pirate interface reveals that this journalistic practice marks a shift
from news composition to news design. The design of the game screen represents a pro-
cess of technologization since it depends on visual resources and multimodal interaction
to establish cohesion and coherence. Significantly, how the interface presents the news
content to users corresponds to Halliday’s (1994) notion of ‘the grammar of little texts’
that describes advertising discourse. Such ‘minimalist’ form of news exposure contra-
dicts the traditional complex arguments or storytelling techniques that the journalistic
genres rely on. This corresponds to the neoliberal value of ‘minimalism’, or in other
words, ‘the less is more’ (Murphy, 2018) when considering design. Under neoliberalism,
minimal designs are more significant and functional than large ones (Hartman, 2007).

Pirate play activities

The aesthetic experience of immersion.  Pirate playing activities exemplified in watching
as much videos, photos and maps create an immersive storytelling environment that
affectively engages the news user into the piece of news. The multi-semiotic modes of
the interface establish an aesthetic experience of immersion achieved from (a) sensation,
game as a sense-pleasure; (b) narrative, game as story; and (c) fellowship, game as social
framework. These notions are parts of a list1 proposed by Hunicke et al. (2004) in the
context of video games and which are thought to be the most appropriate to describe the
aesthetic experience of immersion offered by Pirate ludic interface. The playing activity
of the game-like Pirate affords the immersive aesthetics of sensation through the back-
ground music and the recurrent depiction of the waterscapes of the cost of Sierra Leone.
The resort to bird’s eye view and horizontal wide shots as in Figures 4 and 6 establishes
an aesthetic sensation of ‘spatial immersion’ which can be translated into ‘see for your-
self and contemplate’ (Rodriguez, 2018: 74) as the players are invited to think about how
the illegal actions of piracy are being carried out in Sierra Leone.
Spatial immersion is employed as well in the game interface by the various uses of
maps and aerial photography of Google earth screen shots through which the user gets to
know the virtual locations of the illegal fishing activities (see Figure 5).
Throughout the different stages of the game, players learn more about the negative
consequences of illegal fishing trade through the pop-up videos of locals, achieving the
aesthetic immersion of both ‘fellowship’ and ‘narrative’. The locals tell their stories
directly to the users by looking at the camera and using the first personal pronouns.
Seeing real people, in real situation, adds to the sensuous, aesthetic experience.
To find the bigger picture of trawler fishing, the player should navigate different semi-
otic interfaces of the game which display the social and economic impact of the pirate
fishing operations on the locals, which, in turn, stresses the dramatic and social aspect of
10 Discourse & Communication 00(0)

Figure 4.  A screen shot taken from one of the game videos.

Figure 5.  A screen shot of Pirate displaying the virtual spatialization offered to the users.

Pirate. Documentary videos, sound bites, pop-up messages and photo captions which
depict how Pirate Fishing destroys the living resources of Sierra Leone keep appearing to
the players while navigating the game interface. The following examples are illustrative:
Magdi Fawzy 11

Figure 6.  A screen shot of Pirate Fishing interface showing the personalized experience of
news-making process.

(a) They are destroying our materials, our fishing gears, hooks and nets.
(b) They destroyed 700 hooks.
(c) Industrial trawlers depleting coastal waters leave fewer fish for local fishermen.

This, in turn, gives the players a sense of presence and increases their empathy for the
game cause.
Therefore, the immersive nature of Pirate renders users bound to the news affectively.
Its immersive ludic design resources the user’s sensuous and explorative capabilities as
involving aspects of the game aesthetic experience. In this regard, Al Jazeera Pirate
gives the users the opportunity to not just consuming the news, rather to experience it.
The playing activity promotes the neoliberal logic of ‘aesthetic preferences’ (Julier,
2007: 57) with an emphasis on the aesthetic experience of the game.

Interactional engagement.  The game interface provides the players with various multi-
modal resources to interact with. This brings us to the concept of digital ‘interaction’
(Adami, 2015: 135). Pirate enacts user’s interaction in order to get the full story. The
more the users interact with the interface, the more news stories are unfolded. Corre-
spondingly, the neoliberal valuing of entrepreneurship is also expressed here, drawing a
link between productivity and the engagement with the game world.
Significantly, Pirate play activities conversationalize the news-making process. It
stimulates conversational genre by, for instance, starting the game with an assignment
email from the commissioning editor defining the mission of the investigation, posing
the following question to the player: ‘Can you fly to Sherbro Island in Sierra Leone and
help our reporter and her team in their investigation?’ When the player presses ‘accept
the assignment’, the first stage of the investigation starts.
Interestingly, the use of the second person pronoun ‘you’ personalizes the news
exposure experience. The imperative mood in ‘accept the assignment’ indicates that
12 Discourse & Communication 00(0)

Figure 7.  A screen shot of Pirate underlining its immersive discourse.

immediate response is a must, synthetically personalizing the news experience. This is a

clear example of the shift towards a neoliberal news consumption which refutes collec-
tivism and emphasizes the neoliberal value of ‘individualism’ (Turner, 2008). In some
instances of the game, the personal pronoun ‘we’ is used as well.
The use of ‘we’ in Figure 7 indicates that the discursive nature of Pirate interface
involves the users in the game domain. Besides, the pronoun ‘we’ shows that the present
task is shared collectively between the news user and the investigative team; the news
user is one of the investigative team. The use of uppercase typography emphasizes the
seriousness of the situation. A neoliberal concept of ‘personal responsibility’ (Turner,
2008) is, then, instantiated. This notion of personal responsibility is further elaborated in
section ‘The role of pirate players’.
The engaging nature of Pirate is also reinforced by the use of pop-up messages that
appear in the form of emails to the players from Juliana Rufus or other ‘secret friends’ or
by the use of comment adjuncts in the form of ‘congratulations!’ pop-up screens.
Comment Adjuncts as argued by Halliday (1994) ‘express the speaker’s attitude either to
the proposition as a whole or to the particular speech function’ (p. 129). In this context,
congratulations windows are used as incentives to tell the player that he or she has
achieved the assigned task and is about to successfully move to another stage of the
game, adding to the interactional properties of the game world (Figure 8).
The following section reflects on how gamification changes the process of news con-
sumption by engaging, empowering and even changing the identity of the news users,
turning them into players and investigative journalists while stressing their ‘agency’ (van
Dijk, 2009) and social responsibility.
Magdi Fawzy 13

Figure 8.  A screen shot of Pirate Fishing interface showing its interactional nature.

The role of pirate players

As mentioned earlier, Al Jazeera gamified news marks a shift from composition to
design, such a process which, in the words of Bezemer and Kress (2010), ‘points to cur-
rent changes in power and in principles and agencies of control which are – among oth-
ers – about a shift from “vertical” to “horizontal” social structures, from hierarchical to
more open, participatory relations’ (p. 11, original emphasis). The interface affordances
of the game correspond at large to various neoliberal values. Most importantly, the user’s
performance is an essential part in instantiating these values. Accordingly, the news user
in this study is considered a semiotic mode that defines, along with other semiotic values,
the affordance of the gamified news medium and, therefore, influences the content and
unlocks the news story potentials. Once deciding to play, Pirate users are invited to be
part of the investigative process. Significantly, Pirate players have a say in the sequence
of delivering the information sources by choosing which videos to play or photos to
display. The players construct individualized ‘reading paths’ (Zammit, 2007) in their
interaction with the game mechanics. Therefore, Pirate interface affords user’s agency
and autonomy (Ferrer Conill, 2016, 2018) marketizing the neoliberal culture of choice.
Most importantly, coherence is now the responsibility of the reader which was previ-
ously exclusive to journalists. Meanwhile, the journalist’s role in determining the best
course of the events is minimized. The neoliberal logic of a sovereign consumer is, then,
instantiated.
In the context of Pirate, social responsibility, which is an inherent journalistic value,
is extended to include the users themselves. By proceeding into playing the game, the
user assumes a social responsibility role of helping the investigation team to find the
identity of the trawlers. Examples to cite are ‘Can you fly to Sherbro Island in Sierra
Leone and help our reporter and her team in their investigation?’ and ‘If you and the team
can manage to track down one of the “pirate trawlers” that operate illegally in Sierra
14 Discourse & Communication 00(0)

Leone’s waters, I will run the story’. Accordingly, the neoliberal value of social respon-
sibility is discursively operationalized by the lexical choices of ‘fly to Sherbro Island’,
‘help our reporters’ and ‘track down one of the pirate trawlers’. The sense of social
responsibility assigned by the game interface to the users is exemplified as well by the
use of the imperative mood:

(a) Meet an official involved in suspicious activities;

(b) Let Amara show you the fish market;
(c) Click if the trawler was in the Inshore Exclusive Zone (IEZ);
(d) Discover the identity of the pirate trawler;
(e) Request a meeting with officials.

Imperatives direct the users to perform certain actions, all of which serve to position
them as ultimately responsible for discovering the identity of the trawlers. The users are
placed as the primary agent for the investigation process. The neoliberal ideology is thus
instantiated in these examples where the users are depicted as responsible for unlocking
the story behind illegal fishing.

Discussion
In the context of Pirate Fishing, the news experience is marketized through playful
immersion, interactional engagement and personalisation. This study argues that news
gamification reconfigures news discourse in the process of marketizing and commodify-
ing it. Marketization here means deploying market logic within the domain of news
production. The neoliberal marketization of news discourse in Al Jazeera gamified news
Pirate Fishing is defined through the three aspects of ‘technologization’, ‘commodifica-
tion’ and ‘conversationalization’.
As revealed by the analysis, the ludic design of Pirate Fishing deploys numerous
video games mechanics: stages, badges and rewards. The ludic interface affords as well
multi-semiotic resources such as videos, audios, photos and maps. By converging and
mixing discourses of different disciplines, news discourse in Pirate is technologized
through, in the words of Fairclough (2012), ‘inter-discursive hybridity’. Significantly,
the hybrid discourses, Pirate encompasses, mark a transformation from the informative
functionality of news discourse to the aesthetic experience of affective immersion and
interactive engagement. From a linguistic lens, Ledin and Machin (2018) attribute what
they call the ‘affective functionality’ of social discourses to the medium of technologized
social events in a process of the indexical coding of various semiotic elements. From a
journalistic perspective, the ludic design of the Gamified Pirate can be described in the
words of Papacharissi (2015) as a ‘hybrid production’ of ‘affective news’ since it sup-
ports the subjective experience and emotional immersion of the news user. Significantly,
affective functionality is related to the discourse of neoliberal marketization since they
echo Jenkins’ (2006: 319) ‘affective economics’, meaning a ‘new discourse in marketing
and brand research that emphasizes the emotional commitments consumers make in
brands as a central motivation for their purchasing decisions’ (quoted in Ferrer Conill,
2018). Furthermore, the trend of affectively engaging social participants, which is
Magdi Fawzy 15

evident in Al Jazeera Pirate Fishing, ‘is part of the project of reshaping social relations
and our priorities for the neoliberal order’ (Ledin and Machin, 2018: 21). Relying on
convergent discourses, employing affective immersion and mixing different semiotic
modes, the marketization functions in Pirate are then evident with ‘the hybridization of
discourse practices, the subordination of meaning to effect, and [the change in] the mode
of signification’ (Fairclough, 1993: 153).
Studying the roles of users in ‘a media environment where the boundaries between
commerce, content and information are currently being redrawn’ (van Dijk, 2009: 42) is
important to tell about the socio-economic and technological transformations affecting
the journalistic industries. Gamification as a new journalistic practice enacts ‘audience
reconfigurations’ (Ferrer Conill and Karlsson, 2015: 357) as audience/users are empow-
ered to assume the role of investigative journalists. News technologization in the domain
of Pirate marks another significant process of convergence; the news users are converged
with the journalists. The gamification essence, then, is the professional experience of
being an investigative reporter offered to the users. As such, gamification, in the context
of Pirate, entails a revolutionary shift not only in the conceptualization of news but also
in the representation of the news users’ identity. Pirate landscape commodifies the identi-
ties and practices of media consumers, providing them with new participatory possibili-
ties and new identities such as ‘senior reporter’, ‘activist’, ‘city explorer’, ‘corruption
investigation’, ‘ship spotter’, ‘technology expert’ and ‘undercover specialist’. Furthermore,
Pirate ludic interface not just enables users to establish their own reading path, rather, it
makes them perform ‘new media rituals’ (Ferrer Conill and Karlsson, 2015: 13) of com-
pleting ‘stages’ and ‘steps’ to acquire ‘badges’ and ‘points’ as news ‘players’. It mar-
ketizes the news experience by empowering the user to assume the role of a journalist and
to have a say in not just the sequence but also the coherence of the events. Moreover, the
rewarding system of Pirate reconfigures the motivation behind news consumption shift-
ing it from the habit of informing oneself to a more competitive activity. This opens a
space for the emergence of a neoliberal news user who conceptualizes the neoliberal val-
ues of ‘calculative rationality’, ‘self-entrepreneurship’ and ‘sovereign consumer’.
News discourse in Pirate is conversationalized through the use of personal pronouns,
verb moods and comment adjuncts. The recurrent use of the second person pronoun
‘you’ and ‘we’ reveals how the games interface speaks directly to the users and how the
users are invited to be engaged in a personalized game experience. As for the use of
imperatives, it highlights the ways in which the ludic interface of Pirate directs the users
to perform certain actions. This personalization style in addressing audience directly is
commonly used in advertising practice (Fairclough, 1993). This conversationalizing
technique is regarded by Fairclough as a type of commodification of public discourse.
To this end, it can be argued that Pirate Fishing marks a ‘semiotic moment of change’
(Fairclough, 2007) in the journalistic practices. The thesis of this study is that news
gamification is a step towards neoliberal journalism.

Conclusion
News gamification is established in this study as a clear example of the neoliberal colo-
nization of journalism. Embraced by neoliberal values and beliefs, news gamification
16 Discourse & Communication 00(0)

turns towards a redefinition of the journalism discipline with much focus on user’s
immersiveness, interaction and engagement. The marketization process of public dis-
course, according to Fairclough (1993), entails three aspects of contemporary communi-
cation: ‘technologization’, ‘conversationalization’ and ‘commodification’. These three
aspects are found in this study as discursive strategies that help in reproducing a dis-
course of neoliberalism. Furthermore, Fairclough (2007) stresses the importance of con-
ducting semiotic researches to underline the relations between semiosis and other
‘moments’ of the social process. To this end, this study has examined as well how the
affordances of the ludic semiosis are operationalized in Pirate to echo neoliberal ration-
ality. Gamified news discourse is not a mere multimodal medium that incorporates ver-
bal, audio and visual narrative; rather, it borrows from video games its distinctive
language of the ludic design and ludic interactive dynamics to convey meaning. In this
regard, this article is drawn on Pérez-Latorre’s (2015) analytical model for exploring the
structures and processes of the ludic design. Studying the ludic design of Pirate has
helped in understanding how communication operates within this game-like news.
The article has investigated the discursive strategies and semiotic affordances made
available by the Al Jazeera gamified news interface. It has examined the meaning poten-
tials instantiated by the ludic interface and the user’s interaction with and acting upon it.
It is found that gamification reconfigures news consumption by engaging, empowering
and even changing the identity of the users, turning them into players and investigative
journalists. It is found as well that gamified news interface personalizes news discourse
in the process of commodifying and marketizing it. This notion is interpreted in light of
Fairclough’s (1993) marketization of public discourse. As shown in the case study, the
ludic interface conversationalizes the news-making process, reflecting upon the neolib-
eral values of ‘calculative rationality’, ‘self-entrepreneurship’, ‘minimalism’, ‘aesthetic
preferences’, ‘individualism’, ‘sovereign consumer’ and ‘personal responsibility’.
This new journalistic practice marks a shift from composition to design in the process
of technologizing news production. News gamification marks a significant change in the
resources which were traditionally used in news-meaning making. This new form of
communication prompts new discursive and semiotic competencies. Within the games
world, the focus is now shifted from the structuring of the text to the structuring of the
news engagement and interaction resources. Pirate empowers the users/players to do the
story and investigation themselves. In this sense, news gamification reconfigures the role
of news users. The study argues that the news message of the game-like news is concep-
tualized by the player’s interaction with the ludic interface. Pirate users are perceived in
this study as semiotic resources that have input and a say in the news-making process and
the unfolding of the news content. What is newly presented in the news gamification
environment is the involvement of the player into the ongoing events while being
assigned the social responsibility of proceeding into the investigation processes. This
brings to the emergence of a neoliberal news user.
Concerning the adopted methodological approach, it raises a number of opportuni-
ties for future research, in terms of studying the new journalistic practices of news
gamification. That is, it is shown that synthesizing semiotics with discourse analysis has
the potential to shed further insights on the changes in journalism. Further studies are
Magdi Fawzy 17

required to examine how news gamification entails for the concepts of news values,
impartiality and truth.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this
article.

Note
1. The rest of the list proposed by Hunicke et al. (2004) includes challenge, game as obstacle
course; discovery, game as uncharted territory; submission, game as pastime; and expression,
game as self-discovery.

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Author biography
Rania Magdi Fawzy is a Lecturer at the College of Language & Communication (CLC), Arab
Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport. Her areas of research interest include
critical discourse analysis, social semiotics, multimodality and translation. She is also interested in
interdisciplinary approaches to political, cultural and new media studies. Her recent published
papers are as follows:
Fawzy RM (2019) Aestheticizing suffering: Evaluative stance in pulitzer-winning photos of refu-
gees’ crisis in Europe. Discourse Context Media 28: 69–78.
Fawzy RM (2018) A tale of two squares: Spatial iconization of the Al Tahrir and Rabaa protests.
Visual Communication. Epub ahead of print 9 October 2018. DOI: 10.1177/1470357218803395.