November 2008 Archives

So we read Chomsky's Propaganda Model earlier in the semester for insight into limiting forces on journalistic verification and transparency in mainstream news media. Before you discount this post as mental masturbation or the ramblings of another upper-middle class anaracho-syndicalist (which I'm not), I'd like to state clearly that I'm not going to suggest that there's any sort of collusion between the video game industry and the government to prevent the production of video games dealing with touchy foreign policy issues (or any government issue for that matter); however, I'd like to dispel the common association of video games with harmless "escapism."

I'd like to take issue with Bobby's post about "issues in games" following Rowsell's Escapist piece. I don't agree that "game poetry," such as the experience of playing Shadow of the Colossus, does a good enough job of making its players more informed or better humans. It's become a quick cliché in the indie game movement, feeding likewise into independent newsgames, to have games that teach a moral through "unwinnability." Take, for instance, September 12th or a game made here at Georgia Tech about heroin addiction, where the only way to "win" the games is to not play it at all. I don't think Shadow of the Colossus operates in the same way as these games, but many people seem to want to read it as one. From Bobby's examination of Shadow, it would seem that the only way to be a good person would be to not kill the colossi in the first place. The moral isn't that interesting: don't sell your soul in an attempt to play at being God. Do we really need more versions of Faust or Frankenstein in our lives in order to be better people?



The problem with these games is that there aren't any moral choices to be made within the games themselves (the decision to stop playing is meta-game). Shadow of the Colossus doesn't work on an ethical level for me, because simply watching a character's forced fall from grace through plot progression is about as persuasive today as an Aesop fable. September 12th and Shadow are old games now, and it's a cop-out at this particular moment in gaming history to create a game without a choice other than: play and be damned, or drop the controller. If only making such a statement got the mainstream game industry out of its slough of despond! (I'll also be linking this back to choice in newsgames at the end.)

Traditional works of journalism craft stories to present information in a cohesive manner. But what if there isn't any clear trajectory or narrative? What if a journalist really just wants to present an otherwise disconnected collection of references and fragments?

Digital media artifacts like palinaspresident.us suggest one interesting potential solution.

palinaspresident.us is a "click-through" flash app (developed during the election cycle) that satirizes the idea of Sarah Palin as president. The user clicks around the office to uncover graphics that poke at campaign issues and gossip in a humorous way. The content ranges from jokes about the "maverick" moniker, to dystopia visions of Palin blundering her way to nuclear apocalypse.

Admittedly, it seems dubious to deem palinaspresident.us as "journalistic." At the time, the game certainly played off relevant news topics (e.g. Troopergate, the "drill baby drill" chant), but the primary purpose here is clearly to amuse (or terrify), not to inform. Given its partisan nature, the website would probably be more fairly labeled as activism.

Nonetheless, we could certainly imagine using this kind of explorative, click-through interaction to craft engaging info visualizations. One might use this kind of framework to compellingly present a jumbled series of different issues and facts. 

Colin Rowsell, a writer for The Escapist, recently posted an article asking a variation of a common question: Why is the games industry so afraid of getting involved in the issues of the day? I understand and appreciate Colin Rowsell's point and believe it's worth pursuing further, but also feel we need to approach this question with a different strategy. We're still in the early stages of the medium of the game.

Answering Rowsell's question of why there aren't any commercial games discussing political or social issues is as easy as one word: money. The problem with Rowswell's article is that we already know this answer. Asking this question leads to an unsatisfactory answer, so we should reframe it. I'm hoping this blog post's exploration will let us arrive at a better question and encourage people to think differently about the medium's role in political/social issues.

One way to view journalism is as a combination of reporting and review. The first stage involves gathering and uncovering the information citizens need to know; the second stage involves contextualizing and interpreting that information in an engaging way.

Both stages are essential to the practice of journalism. Information without proper context and rigorous verification is just unreliable raw data; analysis without original reporting is just aggregation or editorial.

Of course, journalistic news media exists as a spectrum between these two poles. An interview typically focuses on reporting, whereas an editorial typically focuses on review. Nevertheless, we should note that the best interviewers contextualize and respond to the interviewee, and that the best editorial writers frequently incorporate their own reporting.

How do videogames fit into this spectrum?

The quiz is an interesting format that has been used for both pedagogical and entertainment purposes. Quizzes usually take the form of "general knowledge" or "trivia", but news themed "news quizzes" exist. These take various forms with radically different goals ranging from pedagogy, to entertainment, to self-exploration. The news quiz has permeated through various media, most interestingly, in digital forms.

One traditional news quiz is the New York Times News Quiz, which has a strictly pedagogical bent. The focus of this quiz, which is similar to many other newspaper-based news quizzes,  aims to instruct younger readers about techniques of reading and synthesizing information from a newspaper article whose style of writing is different than styles taught in school such as the essay or short story.

In Ian's prior post on transparency and games he mentions three types of transparency: transparency of influence, transparency of construction, and transparency of reference. Cutting across these facets of transparency I'd like to add the transparency of mechanics which is particularly applicable to any consumer-facing journalistic software, of which games are one instance.

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).

After a brief word on directed activity, I thought it might be useful to discuss a fundamental split in infovis that Bobby and I sussed out a few weeks ago. After some discussion, we noticed that most of the infovis examples we were looking at fell into one of two categories: narrative or free-form.

All infovis invariably boasts spatial exploration of data, but some follow a stricter pattern of narration to convey a cogent story with multimedia and infographics. Other visualizations, the free-form variety, are more open engagements with data sets, featuring multiple filters to achieve alternative perspectives on said data. Exciting right? In this post I want to explore two examples of what I believe to be narrative infovis.

The NYT did a lot of interactive pieces for the 2008 presidential election. One of these is an interactive chart presentation of different political polls done by different organizations. This isn't quite game-y, though it could be if there were some additional features like being able to compare one poll to another, or to try to predict a future poll based on current polls for points. Anyway, the important point here is that these visualizations are based on some simple polling data, things like # of respondents, and % in favor of each candidate. The Times is transparent about this data in 2 ways, (1) by providing a link explaining eligibility for polls to be included in the chart and (2) by providing a link to the raw database dump of the data. The eligibility link speaks to data quality issues that can arise in the collection of data, which can lead to invalid results or bias. The database dump link speaks to the ability to peer behind the graphic to the actual data used to produce it.

In looking at everything from online journalism courses open to anyone, to those under brick and mortar offered as part of a declared major at a college or university, it is clear that there are several journalism communities with different needs. For example, there is a community that cut its teeth on the traditions of print/text and a dedicated readership; a community born into a digital world - hybrids interested in print as well as interactive engagements; a community that has been defined as citizen journalists, watchdogs of events and points-of-view often not covered by mainstream press and unattached to corporate interests,  and more. Journalism communities have different backgrounds, interests and needs and interests.  When we rub the communities up against each other it can be uncomfortable. When we rub then up against gaming, as we are exploring, it could be disastrous.

But then

on Nov. 4th, as CNN was covering the presidential election, musical artist Will I Am appeared as a hologram interviewed by Anderson Cooper.  An odd/hilarious and memorable(for some) television moment, but also one suggesting that along with the hologram and Jeff Han's scalable interactive multi-touch display system (aka John King's screen), at least there is interest in embracing new forms of interactivity. Whether they work, are desired by journalists or forced by corporations is a different issue.

Update for Journalism 2.0 - remember to review facts given to you by holograms.

I love the idea of this and the possibility for expanded thinking on what games might offer seems not so far away.

We've been talking a lot about the idea of a "citizen gamist," the newsgame equivalent of a serious political blogger who uses new media tools to present their own form of independent journalism on the Internet. The question has been raised whether the sector of the game development sphere we'll just label "Indie Games" for purposes of simplification might be fertile ground for the future production of newsgames.

The question we're tasked to answer is, "Do the kind of people who create indie games have any reason to move away from their personal interests and goals in order to join our cause of making more thoughtful, creative newsgames (than the ones that are currently available) that follow the principles of The Elements of Journalism?" This question has multiple layers. Who are these people making Indie Games? Are they a homogenous group, or are they largely fractured in philosophy and practice? What constitutes a more "personal" style when it comes to newsgames, and does this raise issues for journalistic transparency or verification? And finally, is it actually important that a newsgame creator ascribe to the values in The Elements of Journalism that we've found so helpful in our own studies here at JAG?

Fantasy sports are an interesting case study for games that have already become a part of the news media. 'Fantasy,' as it is often fondly called, is a game in which the player assembles a team of real life players from sports who, based on their performance in a sports game, earn the players point.

As an example from the most popular of these fantasy sports, fantasy football, a player has a line-up of quarterbacks, running backs, receivers, tight ends, kickers, and defenses. The first player's team is pit against another player's team. When Sunday comes, the individual performances of these positions earns the player points which get added together and the scores of the two game players are compared. These two players are only one match-up in a league that parallels that of the NFL: generally 10 to 14 teams with one opponent each week producing a win-loss record that gets players into elimination playoffs. 

Structurally, the two most important things to note are that the game is driven by data and modeled in a format that resembles the source of the data.

In a recent editorial "Relevant Settings," Popmatters columnist J.B. Jeffries observes how pop culture can build awareness - even while entertaining.

Arguing that Rambo 4 ("despite its incredible violence") brought attention to turmoil and oppression in Myanmar, Jeffries advocates that videogames too should aspire to serve such an educational purpose: "At the very least we could teach people history by having them participate in wars and learn about atrocities that they otherwise would know little about."

The idea of "games with a purpose" is not a new one. But Jeffries' argument seems to imply a moral imperative that challenges conventional game studies wisdom: at least where journalism and other citizen-first pursuits are concerned, game mechanics might just not matter as much as the subject matter.

In analyzing the intersection of games and journalism, I thought it would be fruitful to look at games as they presently exist in print journalism. In this article, I touch upon the crossword, its history, and its possible use as a platform for Journalism.

While the crossword is a relatively recent construction (about 95 years old), word games and riddles have appeared in newspapers since the 17th century. The forms themselves, the riddle, word square, rebus, and enigma date back thousands of years .

Can poetry act as a form of journalism?

On Election Day, The New York Times published a series of election themed poems in the Op-Ed section. Even Stephen Colbert picked up on this oddity, making fun of the newspaper on his show this week.

Even if these poems aren't journalistic in themselves, The New York Times seems to be suggesting that other media forms and genres might usefully complement traditional journalism.

Or, restated in terms of our own project: whether or not games can function journalistically, they still might have a useful role in the larger news media "experience."

We still haven't decided here at JAG whether or not the idea of a breaking newsgame is possible. There are already many examples of public policy and news games of varying levels of quality, but the idea of being able to churn one out in a week or less in order to accompany a breaking story seems mind-boggling. One creator of the recent Truth Invaders 2008 presidential campaign game notes the difficulty of pumping out their relatively simplistic project on a two-and-a-half week timeline (look at the third comment down). Another issue we've been looking into is the rapidly expanding notion of the citizen journalist, and the question has been raised whether or not an analogue to the "professional" citizen journalist blog might be developed in the newsgame format. I'd like to suggest a way that citizen journalistic games and an expedited production schedule for breaking newsgames might be possible: the use of generic game creation software and game-specific level editors. It was jokingly asked in one of our project meetings whether a level made in LittleBigPlanet could be considered an "indie" newsgame. Yet within a few days of LBG's release a few players had already created levels that required one to fly an airplane into the Twin Towers, as comically recounted by The Penny Arcade. Below I shall discuss the multiple programs available, their relative strengths and weaknesses, examples we already have of games made in this way, and the idea of journalistic originality in the context of these pre-packaged game creation tools.

On July 5th, 2003, in the Op-Ed Page of the New York Times, instead of the various daily columns, a large puzzle is in its place. This puzzle, entitled Patriot Games, is one of ten so-called "Op-Ed Puzzles" created by Puzzability, a firm made up of three veteran crossword and other puzzle constructors: Wall Street Journal Crossword Editor Mike Shenk,  Former Games Magazine Managing Editor Amy Goldstein, and Puzzle Constructor and Illustrator Robert Leighton.

The puzzles take the form of several smaller puzzle, each a take on the theme (usually a holiday or event, such as the United Nations Day Puzzle, Country Club). The answers to these smaller puzzles are then used as entries in the last puzzle which answers a question posed by the writers at the beginning of the puzzle. For example, in Patriot Games, the question asked is: "our vote for the best way to spend Fourth of July holiday weekend". The answer for this puzzle (I hope it's not too much of a spoiler) is "Join a Party" which, as many word puzzles tend to be, is a pun on the word party as both a festivity and a political group.

This led me to think about the nature of these puzzle's construction and whether the creators themselves saw themselves working in a journalistic or editorial capacity. Moreover, how did these puzzle even come about in the New York Times and why did they take the form of "Op-Ed" Puzzles?

I'd like to once again thank Amy Goldstein and the other members of Puzzability for politely answering my questions regarding these puzzle and both the formal and ideological processes behind their construction.

Below my interview with Amy Goldstein of Puzzability:

Only two days left until November 4.

For months and months now, it's felt like the election has been on absolutely everybody's mind. With the stakes seemingly higher than ever, all sorts of people are coming out of the woodwork to support their candidate.

If we look to traditional media, we find scores of artists using their chosen craft to engage the election. To use a few Obama-centric examples: we've heard the Black Eyed Peas (and a gaggle of famous pop musicians) singing "Yes We Can"; we've seen Sarah Silverman use her in-your-face TV comedy to get out the Democratic vote in Florida; Ron Howard went as far as to resurrect The Andy Griffith Show and Happy Days for his own pro-Obama short; hell, even the Budweiser "Wassup" guys spoofed their commercial to urge people to vote for change. Hollywood too is cashing in on election fever: witness Oliver Stone's W or Kevin Costner's Swing Vote.

As a games researcher and designer, I can only ask: why are there so few - if any - compelling political games or newsgames about this election cycle?

The question, which plagues the so-called Serious Games movement more generally, is far too contentious to be answered in one blog post. Ian himself tackled the question just two days ago, drawing a distinction between politics and politicking. But in focusing on the various affordances of games, Ian only orbits around what I personally see as the heart of the issue.

For my purposes, I'd like to reflect on one particular example that, in my mind, symbolizes the failure of the game designer community to capitalize on this historic election. In doing so, I want to suggest that the "problem" - if we should even view the dearth of worthwhile election games as problematic - has just as much to do with the culture around game design. We need to address the mindset under which these kinds of games are designed.

Through our explorations of information visualization we have been able to identify some "game-y" characteristics. Some of the elements both common to games and infovis include: the modeling of data, investigating models through space, revisitability, experimentation of effects, and discovery through participation with the system. We also noticed that there are two general tracks for the representation of data: guided and freeform. Guided information visualizations are crafted to lead the participant to some sort of conclusion in a linear fashion. Freeform representations are depictions of data that are open to multiple readings. Looking for examples of each? Check out this geology diagram from Alberto Cairo and the Sense.us website. Each of these tracks have their own game element strenghts, but neither one is better than the other for imagining infoviz as a game. The guided track is often too linear and doesn't encourage procedural manipulation, whereas the freeform track lacks direction.