Would you rather watch a music video or play a game? The new, online, interactive video from We The Kings, says you shouldn't have to choose.

The video, released yesterday, lets you listen to the We The Kings' new single "Say you like me" while battling a gang of evil cartoon characters who have kidnapped the band's love interest. The video takes players through different styles of game, influenced by Guitar Hero, Mariokart, wii Tennis and Streetfighter, to name a few. The jokey blend of live action and references to old school arcade games is a lot like Edgar Wright's 2010 movie Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, the difference being that here, the viewer actually gets to play the game (also, on a sadder note, there is no Michael Cera).

The video is truly interactive: the minute the player loses, the music stops, so you have to participate to hear the band. This was a prospect that didn't particularly excite Robin Wauters, who wrote up the video in TechCrunch and was less than impressed by the "god-awful music". But Wauter's found the gaming aspect "inexplicably captivating, and a nice change to all those boring, linear music videos".

The We The Kings video is the product of a partnership between the band's record label S-Curve and an Israeli start-up named Interlude, who also received a write-up in TechCrunch from Wauters. The company made another music clip, in which users could make different choices about how events should unfold in the video, creating different types of narrative. They could then download their "personalised" version of the music video and share it on social media platforms.

On the surface, all of this has little to do with news reporting. But it could also be seen as part of a trend which has seen digital publishers increasingly blending different types of interactive media. Another example, which we wrote up a few weeks ago, is the interactive documentary One Millionth Tower, showcased at the Mozilla Festival in London. The interactive film allows viewers to manipulate the camera with their mouse to see the world of the documentary in 3D, click on floating information boxes, and view the film constantly updated with new images from Google Streetview.

All kinds of media professionals seem to be moving away from using just one medium at a time. This can be true on a very basic level. Journalism.co.uk's "app of the week for journalists" is a program for creating audio slideshows, for example. At the more complex end, it can mean creating games around the news, to allow users to interact with issues connected to current affairs by 'playing through them'. This is something that Bobby Schweizer, doctoral student at the Georgia Institute of Technology and coauthor of Newsgames, discussed at the World Editor's Forum at the beginning of October. In this video interview he describes Cartoonist, a piece of software he is helping to create where "all you have to do to create a game is input the actors and the relationships with each other". New organisations could drop in key players from major news stories, and get their readers to act their way through current events, to gain a different perspective on how the news works.

The Guardian experimented with something similar at the end of October. In this animated explanation of the Euro Bailout, journalist Tom Meltzer uses the movie-making program xtranormal.com to explain the ins and outs of the Eurozone deal (Highlights include: "What is a credit event?" "That is the name for Europe exploding") Meltzer's post encourages users to make their own interactive videos with xtranormal, and the characters available include presidents and historical figures. So after absorbing one kind of news, users can go on to create another version - staging a debate between Thomas Jefferson and Barack Obama, for example.

This looks like the beginning of era in which games, videos and news media are being incresingly blended together. And all doubts about the musical stylings of We The Kings aside, that's an exciting prospect.

Sources: We The Kings, imdb, TechCrunch (1) (2), Editors Weblog, Journalism.co.uk, WAN-IFRA (1) (2), The Guardian, Xtranormal