In "We saw a game!" we expose the different perspectives in TV sports and news in order to build broadcasting systems that unify rather than divide. We use the galvanizing impact of sports and live events as a forum, and then we add production and viewing opportunities to distinguish fact from opinion and to challenge the basis of those opinions.
In 1951, when the Dartmouth football team played against Princeton, there was deep disagreement between the two schools as to what had happened during the game. In "They Saw a Game: A Case Study," the psychologists Albert Hastorf and Hadley Cantril found that when the same motion picture of the game was shown to a sample of undergraduates at each school, each individual perceived a different game, and their versions of the game was just as "real" as other versions were to other people.
However, little is known about whether and how broadcasting media are adding fuel to the fire. In order to study the relationship between storytelling/perspectives and opinion formation, we built the following two applications: "Let's see a game!" and "Let's watch news!"
In the first step, we built an interactive application that exposes different perspectives in sports broadcasting. The application plays two broadcasts of the same game, created for each team's home audience. The user can tune into an audio channel by moving the slider. Additional buttons allow the user to take other actions.