Despite its necessity, Ruhfus said it was hard to watch at times. User testing played a key role in producing the game. Her team was comprised of professionals like Nataly Rios Goico, creative consultant at Conducttr and #Hacked co-creator Ilze Juhnevica and Zahra Warsame, who worked part-time on the game design Lau, who provided his game-making skills and ethical hacker Ali Haidar, who offered his expertise in “info-sec.” Her journalism experience was an asset, but she also relied on younger collaborators who had different visions and were particularly good at the technical aspects of production. Ruhfus said collaboration is essential to any innovative journalism project.
“I think I had spotted the problems and I knew what I was uncomfortable with, but I really needed somebody who understood the nature of the problems and to talk it through. Lau, who studies game design, provided a fresh set of eyes and a different way of thinking, she said. She collaborated with John Lau, a graduate student at the National Film and Television School in London. While Ruhfus has years of experience in making documentaries, news games lie outside her comfort zone. As the team producing it kept adding interactive elements, they suddenly realized it looked a lot like one. Ruhfus is not much of a gamer, and the Syrian project didn’t start as a game. “The starting point for the Syrian project was to say ‘Your click actually matters,’” said Ruhfus. In her newest game, the player can lose interviewees, risk their lives, get viruses and ultimately fail to file the report on time depending on the choices made. “The starting point was to create something where the interaction was a bit more meaningful, because personally, I felt that one of the things we could have done better with Pirate Fishing was to create an interaction that could change the outcome,” Ruhfus said. It won Best Digital Award at the 2015 One World Media Awards. In 2014, she developed Pirate Fishing, an investigation into illegal fishing off the coast of Sierra Leone. #Hacked is not Ruhfus’ first foray into game journalism.
It became the basis of the innovative game she later created with a team of collaborators. The Al Jazeera journalist produced a documentary on Syria’s cyber war in 2015. Juliana Ruhfus is a real person, just like most of the people encountered in the game. Over the course of the game, the player investigates the underground conflict while exchanging with Juliana, the producer in charge of the report. The messaging app-based game takes the player into the complicated and dangerous world of Syria’s cyber war. This is the safe phrase Ziad, a Syrian producer, gives the player at the beginning of “ #Hacked: Syria’s Electronic Armies,” Al Jazeera’s new interactive game.
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