If an award for the best iPhone game of the past year were being awarded purely on my personal tastes, Word News would be it.
It probably won’t be received anywhere near as enthusiastically by the general gaming population, so an even-handed critique is as exercise in self-restraint as much as anything. It’s edutainment, for goodness’ sake. It focuses on the news, as the name suggests, which is suffering from a massive loss of public interest and trust these days. Its gameplay is a simplistic word quiz using magnetic poetry titles, probably solvable by any sixth grader forced to endure it long enough to provide an answer.
But not only do I love it, it’ll probably be the most played game in my collection for years (unless a better version comes along). It’s made me part of the previously befuddling category of people who make things like crosswords and sudokus as much of their daily routine as coffee.
Why?
Much like romance, it’s a case of perfect matchmaking (again proof there’s probably someone for all those “who could possibly like this” titles). I’m a lifelong newspaper journalist who moved to the Arctic realms of Norway nearly three years ago, so covering the news and learning the language are the dominant focus of my time. Word News combines these activities in a way I desperately wish had greater appeal to a public I see as increasingly hostile toward knowledge. (Obviously this app touches off a nerve reaching my core social and political beliefs, which I’m not proselytizing about here except to provide context for my enthusiasm.)
Word News offers quizzes in ten categories and 70 languages. Headlines for stories are presented as a scrambled set of magnetic poetry titles at the bottom of the screen, which much be tapped in the correct order before a timer runs out. The completion or failure of each headline is followed with a short summary of the article, with a Web link to the full story in the newspaper it was published in. An online connection is obviously necessary, but the puzzles and news summaries are loaded for all categories when the program launches, making subsequent offline play possible (although the links to the newspapers won’t work, of course).
There’s generally ten headlines per quiz, with the final score based on how many are solved correctly, how many words remain unused in partially complete headlines and the time required to complete each puzzle.
This may sound mundane enough for a sizable number of people reading this to lose interest, and in truth there’s not much more to offer as enticement. The program does aid the player by displaying the first word of the headline in green and the final word in red, and incorrect words are automatically sent back to the bottom of the screen. Players can also vie for national and world rankings online.
I’m far from blind to the program’s shortcomings. There’s no customization of options beyond language, so it’s not possible to turn off the green/red hint system, for instance. Nothing happens when the player completes a set of headlines – they need to hit the abort button at the top corner of the screen if they want to try another category. You can’t load more sets of questions, so once you complete each category you’re done for the day unless you want to repeat the same questions in the same order. It doesn’t handle multitasking – switch to another app or screw up taking a screenshot and you’ll have to start your quiz over (the puzzles do remain loaded). Finally, as mentioned above, it’s not terribly challenging for any reasonably literate person if using it in their native language.
Of course, I haven’t used it in my native language since my first run-through to get familiar with the program. Which is massively responsible for my smittenness.
Journalists have long been taught to write for a sixth-grade reading level, which is also ideal for someone struggling to attain fluency in an unfamiliar language. It’ll be a long time before the quizzes presented in Norsk become rote for me – and of course trying to read the full article is unlikely be second nature for years (I was an A/B student in everything except foreign languages, which had me consistently teetering on the brink of failure). Even if I achieve fluency, it’s a quick way to sample the main news of the world from a diverse range of sources, which anyone watching/reading about the protests in places like Tunisia and Egypt on Al Jazeera probably knows the value of. I’ve also spent a lot of time on assignments in other countries, and this is certainly a great way to learn some of the language beyond the usual travel phrasebooks.
Which brings us to a rating for Word News. They say objectivity is dead among journalists, if by “they” you mean the legions now relying on the likes of MSNBC and Fox News to be informed by sources adhering to their personal beliefs. I consider the accusation not only wrong in most instances, but offensive and a contributing factor to media companies increasingly replacing real reporting with screaming heads in a desperate attempt to lure disappearing audiences. So while Word News would get the full five stars if I allowed my biases to prevail, the actual rating – much like my reporting of things I have strong opinions about – leans perhaps overly cautiously toward what seems the likely public perception. Something to ponder the next time you’re ranting about the liberal/corporate/fictional media.
Mark Sabbatini
Word News by Duna Blanca Dream, S.L.
$0.99
Category: Quiz
Language: Multiple
Requires: iOS 3.1 or later
Rated 4+
Size: 8.0 MB
