One of the most interesting comments from Digiday Social conference in New York City on Tuesday was that more people play social games, like Farmville, than read the newspaper. I haven't found a source to back up this comment or to get details about exactly who they are counting, or how, but on the surface, it is frightening. More people seem more concerned about acquiring fictitious grapes from a fictitious farm stand than about acquiring information that is necessary for our democracy to thrive. Perhaps the politician seeking to get elected would do better seeking ad placements in social games than they would be in participating in debates.

Yet perhaps there is a glimmer of hope from the Digiday Mobile conference for the future of journalism coming in the form of a neologism. The emerging buzzword of the conference was "Gamification". A San Francisco startup calledGamify defines the verb gamify, as "Applying game mechanics to bring fun and engagement where needed." Perhaps it is sorely needed to bring fun and engagement back to the news industry.

A few years ago, I participated in some "Play The News" games where participants would read up on a news story and make predictions about how it would turn out. As an example, people might read up on the primaries that happened last night, and make predictions about the outcomes. Will Christine O'Donnell and Karl Rove make nice? Will she win the general election? People who follow the news would be expected to perform better in this game. With game mechanics in place to track who is doing the best, people will feel encouraged to participate.

Unfortunately, this was a couple years ago, before social gaming really took off and I don't know whatever happened to the game. Another site that I've always been interested in is NewsTrust. This site crowdsources efforts to find quality journalism. They base their results not on gaming the news the way people do at Digg or Reddit, but on aspects of whether the story has multiple sources, anonymous sources, uses purple language, only presents one side of the story, and other means of judging the quality of a news story. You could review reviewers as well and see how well each reviewer was doing. They are on their way to gamification.

Of course, NPR listeners are likely to think of Wait, Wait... Don't Tell Me!, the NPR news quiz show. They have done a great job of gamification of the news. However, a social media game for listeners to play along at home could take this to a whole new level.

So, it may be frightening that more people play social games than read newspapers. On the other hand, it might be a great opportunity to encourage greater understanding of what is going on around us and greater civic engagement by gamifying the news.