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.
But both popular and professional understandings of photojournalism still frequently presume the practice is an illlustrative practice, one of adding images to news stories to help clarify, personalize, or generally accessorize written news. Ironically, this general attitude may persist even after, or perhaps even as a result of, television news and online video news. These forms, perhaps, strive less for a new or different form of news as they do a different way of delivering it.
Mark Hancock is a working photojournalist who wrote, over a decade ago, what remains a popular folk definition of photojournalism.
Apart from the differences in values between photographers and photojournalists, which corresponds to the differences in values between ordinary folk and journalists more generally, Hancock distinguishes between the journalist and the photojournalist in a way that makes the latter more than just a sidekick for the former.
But something else makes these verbs, and therefore these images, even more significant: they are overdetermined and complex. Adams's image in particular, as he wrote after Nguyen Ngoc's death:
A journalsit tells stories. A photographer takes pictures of nouns (people, places and things). A photojournalist takes the best of both and locks it into the most powerful medium available - frozen images. Photojournalists capture "verbs."Photojournalistic images, according to Hancock, are good when they home in on the most important verb in a situation and capture it effectively. This is hard to do, and when it's done well we get the best, most memorable, most journalistic of photographs. Consider, for example, Alfred Eisenstaedt's iconic Life magazine cover image from 1945, depicting an American sailor kissing a nurse on the streets outside Radio City Music Hall after the surrender of the Japanese. The verb is "kiss," of course. Or take AP photographer Eddie Adams' 1968 photo of General Nguyen Ngoc executing a vietcong prisoner. The verb is "execute."
But something else makes these verbs, and therefore these images, even more significant: they are overdetermined and complex. Adams's image in particular, as he wrote after Nguyen Ngoc's death:
The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them; but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths. What the photograph didn't say was, "What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American people?"In addition to galvanizing anti-war attitudes across America and earning Adams the Pulitzer Prize, the image had an enormous impact on General Nguyen's life. Even though the executed man was known as what we'd call an "insurgent" today, the photograph disambiguates the situation by putting him on the other side of the pistol. It's hard to empathize with Nguyen Ngoc in this image, even though the verb "execute," like all active verbs, takes both subject and object.
Hancock's definition is important for our purposes because it jives so well with important and influential theories of game design. Bob Bates writes, in Game Design, Second Edition: "It's useful to think of the things the player can do as 'verbs.' ... It's the doing that's at the heart of good gameplay." (20). Chris Crawford ascribest to a "most sacred rule of software design, 'What does the user do?'" and advocates the development of "verb lists" in the early stages of the design process. Atari VCS Adventure author Warren Robinett suggested that "every verb in the dictionary suggests an idea" for a game (cited in Salen & Zimmerman, Rules of Play, 431).
If verbs do indeed characterize the heart of both games and photojournalism, then we might want to consider the latter a more natural starting point for journalistic games, or at least a more immediately promising one. The playability of games might also suggest a possible prism for the ambiguities of photographs. Both the kiss and the execution bring about feelings of joy and sorry, loss and victory, conflict and resolution, and many more. But in themselves, these photographs have primarily told one side of that story; the joy of WWII's end in the case of Eisenstaedt's photograph, or the cruelty of the Vietnam conflict in the case of Adams's picture.
As in documentary or game subgenres, the possibility of taking on the roles in these images offers one direction for journalistic game design. But such approaches derive traditionally from the perspective of point of view with the goal of establishing actuality. The photojournalistic videogame, if that is even a sensible categorization, might do something less lofty and more attainable: simply to characterize a verb at play in a situation and to allow that verb to be enacted.
A potentially interesting exercise: consider Life's self-titled 100 Photographs that Changed the World. Can we imagine videogame versions of these images? How would they play? Would they still change the world?
