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.
For example, imagine a similar flash app that depicts Barack Obama's current Chicago office. Such an app could present information about his transition team, or remind us of his campaign promises, or summarize the talking points of his weekly addresses.
But does palinaspresident.us qualify as a game? The user "goal" could be stated as uncovering all the audiovisual events hidden around the virtual office. Indeed, this hunt is entirely the point of the flash app - the website dares us to find these "easter eggs."
Viewed this way, the placement of easter eggs gives a distinct game-like vibe to any interactive media piece. This realization dovetails nicely off of our recent thinking on the links between games and infographics; Adam writes about directed activity in infovis, and Bobby suggests that goals can make infovis more "playable."
Another game-like quality is the website's so-called replay value. Towards the end of the campaign, the flash app was updated daily with a new interaction. The creators effectively gave themselves the ability to respond to breaking new Palin-isms, and users were given a reason to return to the site.
This notion of replayability might not be so foreign to traditional journalism. As Kovach and Rosenstiel write in The Elements of Journalism, "The practical truth is a protean thing that, like learning, grows like a stalactite in a cave, drop by drop, over time." News stories must continually be updated as new developments occur and new facts are gathered. This is increasingly true in the blazing pace of the online news cycle.
Thus, perhaps journalism and games share what Peter Lunenfeld calls (in his essay "Unfinished Business") the aesthetic of "unfinish." Far from criticizing this "unfinished" nature of digital media, Lunenfeld embraces the aesthetic:
"Nor do I mean to conjure up the half-baked, the incomplete, or the anarchic, as did the Surrealists. To celebrate the unfinished in this era of digital ubiquity is to laud process rather than goal - to open up a third thing that is not resolution, but rather a state of suspension."
Looping this more theoretical digression back to palinaspresident.us, there seems to be some promise for websites and games that string together the desperate fragments of facts and news events. Games might be the perfect way to share the forgotten or otherwise unexplored spaces between "regular" news stories
In class, Ian brainstormed the term "detritus game" to describe this kind of interactive infographic. "Detritus" carries a somewhat negative connotation, but it might be a particularly savvy term if we believe that these games give us a useful way to present the scraps that lie on the journalist's editing room floor.
Epilogue:
After the election, the front page was replaced with this similar but static celebratory graphic. "No Drama Obama" indeed!
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