Two weeks after the first swine flu case made headlines, video-game developers Jude Gomila and Immad Akhund unleashed a viral outbreak of their own: an online game poking fun at the much-hyped “epigdemic.”

Their game, “Swinefighter,” lets players send a doctor, armed with a massive syringe, around the world to take on flying green pigs. It’s a silly spin on the news, but the game’s popularity has grown quickly. Since its release in April, “Swinefighter” has been played more than a million times, thanks to fans spreading the word through social-networking websites such as Facebook and Twitter.

“Swinefighter,” is just one of many online or mobile games inspired by current events. This increasingly popular genre, often called news games, has played off topics as diverse as rebuilding the economy, Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger’s successful landing of Flight 1549 on the Hudson River, and the Iraqi journalist who threw a shoe at President George W. Bush.

“Games like these generate buzz,” says Kate Connally, vice president of AddictingGames, an independent gaming site that has developed numerous news games including “Hero on the Hudson,” which reenacts Mr. Sullenberger’s landing. “While these games are entertaining, they also inform, and in some cases, educate.”

Ian Bogost, video-game researcher and professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, has been studying news games for the past nine months with a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. There are many ways to tag news games, he says, but two emerging types have gained the most traction.

There are “tabloid games” – quick, simple, news-driven games often designed in the easy-to-learn program Adobe Flash.

Tabloid games sometimes require a knowledge of current events to get the joke, but they rarely teach the player anything. Really, such games are designed simply as “traffic grabbers” to garner publicity and make money, he says.

One of Bogost’s earliest memories of a tabloid game came shortly after the 2006 World Cup. An opportunistic game designer turned soccer star Zinedine Zidane’s head-butt heard round the world into an amusing ball-bashing blitz.

The other big category of news games includes more informative, journalistic titles, such as how to manage finances in a recession to running a campaign office during the 2008 election. Bogost, whose company, Persuasive Games, has developed such games for CNN, MTV, and The New York Times, is still working on a term for this type.

The trend of using news games hasn’t taken off with many news outlets, says Eric Newton, vice president for the Knight Foundation Journalism Program. But they’ve grown so popular with gamers that it’s just a matter of time, he says.

“There hasn’t been a breakthrough in terms of a digital news game the way that the crossword puzzle was a breakthrough for the daily newspaper 100 years ago,” he says. “That hasn’t happened yet, but it will.”

The Knight Foundation, Mr. Newton says, sees news games as possible moneymakers for struggling journalism organizations – a way to reconnect with their audiences as more Americans play video games in their free time.

To embrace this notion, last month the Knight Foundation gave out its first award for the best news game. The honor went to Impact Games, in Pittsburgh, Pa., for its series of games titled “Play the News.” Since 2006, the company has released 127 free games where players could learn about anything from the O.J. Simpson trial to the 2008 debates between vice presidential candidates. As the games grew more popular, CEO Eric Brown hoped that a news organization would buy the series. No luck so far, he says.

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