December 2008 Archives

It's not really worth going into, but suffice it to say this post is not engaging the argument of videogames as escape or play as isolation. We now know that the only true anti-social media are heavy metal music and comic books.

All kidding aside, the notion of videogames as escapist practice has been repeatedly debunked. Too many comment threads have been sacrificed to the topic. In this post I'm taking the stance that games are inherently social activities. That said, I'm most concerned with how videogames generate or supplement discourse and how they might even serve as platforms for discourse.

I know you've already looked at the title and exclaimed: "Cinema Envy!" Well step off it for a moment, because I'm not going to sit here and lament how newsgames "aren't as good" as documentaries. Rather, I'd like to take a look at the various sub-genres of documentary in order to identify some room for new types of newsgames that we might not have seen yet. Along the way, I'll make some  comparisons between works in both media. I promise not to analyze them using the same standards or theories. I'll also try to avoid stepping on Ayo's toes here, because she's planning on upcoming post on the value of transparent bias and reflexivity in film and games

I've gone back to basics and have been reading through the HCI bible (Human Computer Interaction 3rd Ed. Dix et al.) to get a better understand how transparency is conceived of in interactive systems. System transparency does get a treatment as an element of formal interface modeling. There are several key points that we can learn from and which tie into transparency as it concerns journalism and interactive media.

While the state of the system is central to the notion of system transparency, what we're really interested in is an idealization of the system state. What's important in a user-centric model is the representation of "state required to account for the future external behavior." In the text Dix refers to this as the "effect" which I think is nasty terminology. I'm going to call it the "User-Relevant State" or URS.

During the last three presidential election seasons, Comedy Central brought viewers its "Indecision" special programming. In 1992, Comedy Central entered the political ring as Al Franken presented humourous live coverage of the first Bush's State of the Union Address. But it was The Daily Show with Jon Stewart that launched the 2000 Bush-Gore election's coverage known as "Indecision 2000." Their spoof coverage even earned them a Peabody Award. 

My last post on how video games weren't necessarily escapist (and the subject I initially set out to address: how they also might fit Chomsky's propaganda model) raised quite a few objections, so I'd like to see if I can clarify my meaning on a few of those points. By the end, I'll try to segue back onto the subject of newsgames and how they relate to this issue.

In examining various sort of games that newspapers currently employ in order to see what can be changed to increase the level of journalistic discourse these games can offer, I have been looking at the quiz. With this in mind, I look at the quiz from various perspectives. In this entry, I will survey the history of the quiz as well as the various formats that quizzes are presented.

Journalism sees its first obligation as telling the truth by assembling verifiable facts.  Photojournalism, sometimes referred to as documentary photography and street photography, has historically served as a supporting player to this guiding principle.  While this profession has dwindled in the digital age as more stock photography and amateur photographs are being used along with photojournalists being pushed into video production, what has not changed is the belief that the "camera does not lie" and that a photograph provides evidence of the truth.  Odd that we are never expected to trust words just because they are words. This belief in a mechanical instrument's ability to capture the truth was profoundly challenged with the advent of digital cameras, which from the beginning, was vehemently unwelcomed by the journalism community.  The thinking was, and still is, that a camera does not lie, but a digital cameras can, (with its inherent mutability), and will.  It is as if every image by a photojournalist must be prepared to go to court to testify.

The cause for concern is around image manipulation, which was and still is synonymous with deception.  Any photographer will tell you how important it is to know the tools of your trade.  Considering a camera, this means that you must know how to manipulate its features to make (not take) the photograph that you desire.  So you manipulate the shutter speed, aperture, the sensitivity to light and other technical variables.  Manipulating these elements changes the outcome of the look of photograph as well as its feel.

Nintendo's ultra-popular Wii gaming console is a piece of hardware that, out of the box, is designed to do more than play games. The Wii comes a number of "channels" that aren't related to video games. These serve as dedicated portals for a few different media formats. It's worthwhile to note that the Channels attach themselves to the familiar namesake of television while behaving more like Internet sites.

The Photo Channel assumes that the Wii is the kind of thing a person might have in their living room and would turn on to share their photos friends and family. The presence of the Forecast Channel suggests that the designers at Nintendo wanted the Wii to be the kind of hardware that people turn on in the morning like they would sit down at a computer. The same can be inferred by the News Channel, which was added a couple of months after the Wii's launch and was clearly a part of their original design plan for Channels. Nintendo did not just want a media hub like the video and audio streaming Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, but rather they sought to encourage people to integrate play into their daily habits and their daily habits into play.

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).

Moving on from my earlier discussion of narrative infovis, I will now engage what Bobby and I identified as free-form infovis.

Free-form infovis allows users to engage large data sets in relatively open terms. A nice game analogy might be something like the experience of playing Grand Theft Auto. Players are free to roam within a large gamescape and adhere to a set of play guidelines only if they choose to do so. Structure is available as something to adhere to, react against or simply ignore and these choices, or options, are inherent in the game's system.

Last week, I explored the notion that digital media - and games in particular - might provide an opportunity for journalists to publish news "fragments" - pieces of relevant information that would otherwise be left on the editing room floor.

Turns out, major newspapers have already been playing around with this idea.

The day before the election, The New York Times published a series of small op-ed pieces about the campaign. Light-hearted and short, these commentary pieces wouldn't work individually, on their own; they aren't full fledged articles. One piece, for example, reminisces about Obama's victory in Iowa. Another calls attention to John McCain's Viagra gaffe.

So how would one organize these pieces under the banner of one coherent feature?

The Times editors chose Trivial Pursuit.

Earlier this year, BusinessWeek launched BusinessWeek Arcade, which they describe as "a collection of some of the Web's best free, independently produced games." The titles featured have nothing in particular to do with business, and include Crayon Physics, Gravitation, flOw, and Kriegspiel. I particularly like how Gravitation's genre is listed as "puzzle" (the game is a self-described "art game" about the creative process).

The best part of this incongruous effort is the comments that call out its incongruity. One reader queries, "is this a desperate attempt to attract an audience? what does this have to do with covering business?" Another adds, "Why is BusinessWeek stooping to this sort of thing? A couple of months ago they had a blog about the best airport pickup sites and now this. Grow up and stick to the basics! If this is what I can expect from this website in the future then I'll have to reconsider my subscription." What's interesting about these comments is that they don't have anything particularly negative to say about games as a medium for entertainment, business, or journalism; they simply question the wisdom and relevance of including seemingly random, if quite lovely, independent games on a business magazine website.

One of the first videogames to be treated as a legitimate work about a contemporary issue was Chris Crawford's 1985 title Balance of Power. It is a strategy game about geopolitics during the Cold War. The player is charged to take the role of the President of the United States or the General Secretary of the Soviet Union. The goal is to complete a term of office (eight years, with each turn taking a year) without invoking a nuclear war, and to end the game with a higher prestige than one's opponent.

The game was reasonably successful, having been ported from its original Macintosh version to Apple ][, PC, Atari ST, and Amiga. More importantly, it became one of the earliest good examples of what we now sometimes call Serious Games, (or what I have called Persuasive Games).

There are a number of things worth noting about Balance of Power. The first matter of interest I'd like to share is one I've only begun to think about recently: this was a game that produced an impressive journalistic discourse about its topic.