In a link post a few days back, I briefly mentioned MSNBC’s new interactive news game, Newsbreaker. The game was given a positive review by the excellent Influential Marketing Blog. In the link post, I called it pointless and left it at that. I wanted to expand a little and offer two additional thoughts:

(1) Any promotion you launch should be consistent with your brand. As a serious news organization, I’m not sure this game really projects the image MSNBC wants to project. By presenting your news in this way, it seems to me that you kind of trivialize the stories you write. You cheapen the news a little bit.

I also think the time spent developing this game could have been better spent building other, more community oriented features.

(2) Even if you think doing a game is a great idea, for these things to work the game has to be really fun if it is going to get passed around. This one isn’t, in my opinion. And I’m not afraid to waste a little time on a Flash game either.

What do you think? Am I off base?