Today we take a slight detour from our series on editorial games to celebrate an editorial machinima of exceptional quality, produced by everyone's favorite editorial game creator: La Molleindustria's Paolo Pedercini.

It isn't easy writing about thinking, talking, or writing about machinima. One of my professors (Michael Nitsche, who I just found out is heavily cited on the Wikipedia entry on the subject) is hopelessly obsessed with augmented reality and digital performance, so last semester he dragged us through the "serious" machinima canon in an effort to inspire us into creating cinematic experiences within the 3D prototype worlds we were creating. I can honestly say that I don't remember a single one of them, except perhaps the fact that many featured Half Life 2's G-Man. Comedy is there, as evidenced by the broad popularity and honing of craft achieved by Rooster Teeth's Red vs. Blue, but I've yet to see a dramatic or serious piece that worked for me.

Continuing the thread on editorial games from my history, part one.

Author's note: While I was finishing up this piece, Ian forwarded me an upcoming DiGRA paper by Michael Mateas and Mike Treanor of UC Santa Cruz on *roughly* the same subject (though they focus much more on further defining the shared qualities of both genres). It thus became difficult to round off the article without seeing almost every claim as an argument made against their position. I'm not going to reply directly to any of their assertions, nor am I going to include any further insights into the subject that I may have gleaned from reading their piece. When their paper is presented at DiGRA, I hope you'll take the opportunity to contrast my definitional stance with theirs. We will be incorporating and replying to their article directly, and in long form, much later on down the road. Thanks for reading!

The line between "newsgame" and "editorial game" is fuzzy no matter how you slice it. Basically, our suggestion is that most games called "newsgames" don't have the same intentions or goals as traditional reporting, or "the news," but rather those of the op-ed piece: to persuade; therefore, we should label these digital opinion pieces as "editorial" rather than "news." Most people are probably inclined to ignore the possible distinction, because there doesn't seem to be enough proof that we need one in the first place (we can't exactly place a finger on what a "properly journalistic" newsgame would look like, as Paolo Pedercini has pointed out to us before). By the end we will (hopefully) have a slightly better understanding of the relationship between editorial and newsmaking, as well as a firmer grasp on how procedural rhetoric is used in editorial games.

The history of the editorial game began not with a bang, but with three. The first (the Big Bang of editorial games, as well as a couple other genres, so to speak) was the wide adoption of Flash in the creation of casual webgames. We can date this as sometime around August 2000, when Macromedia released Flash 5 with ActionScript 1.0, XML functionality, and SmartClips (an early form of components). Flash 5 and Flash MX were instrumental in the popularization of gaming portals such as AddictingGames.com (which we will return to near the end) in late 2001.

The second bang occurred on September 11th, 2001. Al-Qaeda's attack on American soil plunged the country into what seems today to be a perpetual war, becoming the most visible public issue (until, perhaps, our most recent economic downturn) both in the United States and abroad. The war on terror is a polarizing issue, leading to an explosion of opinion-based publishing on the Internet. Opinions are cheap, and we're quick to form them. Flash isn't incredibly cheap unless you're a student, but it is relatively easy to quickly make a game with it if you have any knowledge of keyframe animation or basic object-oriented programming.

Finally, the prior currents converge in late September of 2003 (I'm now finished with the "bang" metaphor): Gonzalo Frasca launches newsgaming.com with a controversial "toy world" entitled September 12th. Frasca had casually created a political game called Kabul Kaboom during a transcontinental flight at the beginning of the war in Afghanistan, and the game's unexpected viral popularity led him to develop September 12th--an elegantly simple game about the dangerous assumptions of tactical missile strikes on terrorist pockets--over the course of the next few months. It employs an early example of what Ian Bogost calls "the rhetoric of failure"--a game that can only be "won" by not playing it at all. September 12th became wildly popular, gaining mainstream media attention and inspiring almost a decade of political Flash games (recently winning the Knight Foundation's Lifetime Achievement award for newsgames at this year's Games for Change).

Pictures for Truth is a newsgame funded by Amnesty International, produced using Microsoft's XNA software development kit. You play an American journalist in China just prior to the Beijing Olympics. You have a date to meet with a Chinese journalist covering poor living conditions at a toxic electronics dump. When you arrive at your hotel, you receive a call informing you that your friend has been detained by authorities at the dump.

A police officer at the dump confiscates your camera and hauls your friend off to jail. You must find a new camera, interview people at the dump and outside a jail, and take pictures to accompany the "stories" generated by the interviews. You write three stories: about the health issues surrounding the dump, the working conditions of those living near the dump, and about China's municipal system in regards to the death penalty (this story is unlocked by completing the first two).

In the course of our research we have examined how games or game-like interactive applications have been incorporated into some news outlets. But how do all these experimentations from the media industry relate to the training of future journalists and the research being done at Journalism schools?  Is there a space for videogames in J-school academia?

Traditionally, journalism schools, at least in the United States, have been separated into broadcast and print departments. This division of teaching has been present for decades as these platforms were completely different worlds: different skill sets, different media companies, and so forth. Today, with the efforts in the industry to converge and the growing space of the web as a blender of the traditional media, the separated platform training has been challenged.

Another focus that can be seen in Journalism Schools is a more theoretical one where it is possible to find more media, culture and communication research. Around this perspective we can see videogames taken as a cultural and societal phenomenon. For example, schools would observe how the entertainment industry is creating brands that are deployed across different platforms, including videogames, or they would assess how games affect people and society.

In both cases it is difficult to see videogames more than as an observable phenomenon, and far beyond from the idea that videogames could be something that journalists could create as news-related product. However, if I would predict how games will knock on the door of the Journalism schools, I could see that news-gaming might be introduced in the same way as multimedia and online journalism was done some years ago.

A few months ago I attended a couple of Journalism related conferences: The Society of News Design conference in Las Vegas and the Online News Association in Washington D.C. One of my goals attending these conferences was to assess the current understanding of new storytelling resources inside the online media industry, mainly interactive infographics and games, and how the newsrooms where adapting to the new challenges. It was good to see that many outlets were thinking and doing things about these topics. However, I believe their approaches are still too shy... and probably still unsuited for game development in a news environment.

For many years the word "convergence" has been present inside the media industry, but not many experiments became as successful as expected. Some companies blended their broadcast, print, and online newsrooms, others created collaboration teams between them, and many other combinations. In many cases the companies underestimated the culture clashes, technological challenges, and other issues that they would face. Others made deeper changes that seem to be going into the right direction. Even media companies where convergence was not an issue years ago are streamlining their operations and integrating as much as they can with their web counterparts.

Garry's Mod, a modification and customization tool based on Valve's Source Engine (used for Half-Life 2) has become a way for players to create three-dimensional environments that take advantage of the physics and object handling engine as well as existing (and new) assets. In Fall 2008, a Berlin Wall "mod" was released to the public by an independent creator. The creators of the map describe it as:

"This is the Berlin Wall singleplayer map for Half-Life 2: Episode Two. After a huge anticipation for almost 2 months, the little sketch by Stene was soon made real by a group of talented modders. As the story goes, you are a citizen of the East Berlin, and tired of the evil communist government. You dream of living at the West Germany, and you are about to find a way there somehow. There are many routes you can find and take, maybe you want to roam through dirty tunnel, or have a little gunfight with the guards. The buildings on the map are based on those of real-life, such as Checkpoint Charlie and the death strip."

As a proponent of the potential of three-dimension game spaces as informative experiential sources, the Berlin Wall mod caught my attention. In a landscape mostly void of what we have termed "documentary games," the Berlin Wall mod seemed a welcome addition. This kind of game represents an historical issue through exploration, the conglomeration of factual sources, and a presentation style akin to our common notions of the documentary in film and television. I downloaded it, gave it a go, and was severely disappointed. Though it has a documentary quality in its presentation it doesn't make much of an attempt to tell a story. Though it may have modeled some of the physical landscape, the mod lacked any of the qualities that would have represented the social and political tensions of the era.

The Newsgames Project was begun by identifying a number of areas of inquiry that seemed to address the big picture issues. You can see these in practice through the main categories of the website. One of these, discourse, was identified through Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel's book The Elements of Journalism. News is social because it affects groups of people and results in a desire for new facts, ideas, and opinions. Kovach and Rosenstiel feel that discourse not only promotes informative dialogue between citizens, but also acts as a way for people to talk to the newsmakers about their news.

When we think of discourse in this context, we are prompted to think about socially based discussions. Newspapers allow readers to write letters to the editor in which they voice their opinions on a story. Of course, this forum isn't as democratizing as we might hope. It's been often cited that online news outlets counter this by providing easier methods of feedback and unlimited space for participation, though a quick glance at the comments section of any news story prompts questions of the quality of this feedback. News radio often allows listeners to call in to argue (or perhaps more commonly, agree) with the host. The University of Virginia's David Golumbia finds this "revelation" suspect, however.

While the Internet has been lauded for giving power to the people--providing outlets for feedback or turning consumers into creators by providing a distribution channel for various forms of citizen-created media--Golumbia wrote that we most commonly end up replicating existing structures rather than creating new forms of discourse. It is not about our newly found ability to talk back that makes digital media powerful--after all, we've had feedback outlets long before the Internet. Instead, we should look to digital media for new forms of discourse that do not have their place in the current structure. So how do we handle discourse within games?