October 2008 Archives

When it comes to discourse over the Internet and the popular develop of the semantic web through tagging and sharing newsworthy items, we here at JAG have mostly read material that finds these areas of Internet development lacking. Our original discussions of the subject have largely fallen back on a somewhat weak stance of agreement that Reddit is better than Digg - because of filtering and its more intuitive upvoting and downvoting scheme - yet not better enough to mark a major victory for Internet intelligence and citizen journalism. As far as the quality of reader forums surrounding newspapers go, there's still far too much flaming and nitpicking going on to really generate useful input for a newspaper most of the time. I've been bouncing around an idea for awhile that might be a "gamey" or ludic solution to this problem (although requiring far more resources than we're able to acquire for our research). So I figured I'd jot down everything I'd come up with so far and ask for feedback from you, the reading community, on how you'd personally improve the system I've devised.

In response to Ian Bogost's discussion of Platform Studies at the GVU Brown Bag, we raised the question of delivery formats for news games. (Bogost's study deals especially in technical peculiarities of particular consoles, but we've adapted the idea for broader use here) We believe this is not just an important question, but a critical question for conceiving of newsgames. Not only do platforms imply different technologies affecting output, but they can also have an effect on audience. Though we can use some abstract and general concepts to begin designing our newsgame, the platform will dramatically influence its direction.

Despite the relative age of documentary and reportage photography, a tradition that can be traced back a century, photojournalism is often seen more as an extension of print journalism than a practice in its own right. Yes, photojournalists publish in glossy magazines as well as in dailies; Yes, Pulitzer prizes are awarded for the practice; yes, journalism schools train photojournalists as specialists within the field; and yes, the photojournalistic essay stretches back over a hundred years, at least to Jacob Riis's 1890 collection How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York. 

A few weeks ago, Adam and I gave Democracy 2 a spin.

In Democracy 2, you play as a newly elected president who analyzes data, sets policies, manages a Cabinet, and responds to crises. There are a number of different scenarios (nations) to choose from. Most of them are fake names based on real configurations, although there is one explicitly real-named scenario (the United States).

The game is certainly fun. For our purposes, Democracy 2 is especially relevant because it acts as a kind of commentary on current issues. Admittedly, the game does not claim to be journalistic. Nonetheless, it does suggest a number of interesting challenges and solutions regarding the intersection of simulation and news.

Note: This post is one in a series of posts that seeks to examine ways in which information visualization (infovis) can be game-like, or gamey (an unfortunate, but fun term we default to when discussing this topic as a group). 

One way we can consider infovis to be game-like is by exploring the notion of directed activity. Directed activity in games and in information visualizations influences the ways users navigate through the game or information space and it can occur implicitly or explicitly. In both games and information visualizations directed activity operates to guide the user to certain goals.

Welcome to the blog for the Journalism and Games Project. In this research, our goal is to identify the ways journalism and videogames intersect, and to offer new perspectives on how those fields might work together in important ways in the future. Of particular concern to us is this question: can videogames act journalistically? If so, how so?