One question we've been asking in the course of this research is as follows: in what circumstances might videogames serve as a better medium for news than print, image, video, etc. Each medium has certain properties that make it more and less useful in different circumstances.
One of the possible benefits of games is their ability to reconstruct experiences rather than just describing them. In some cases, the experience characterized by news has to do with events and how they took place, for example, where and when the recent terrorist attacks in India occurred. But in other cases, experience means something much more abstract: the emotional sensation of an event, for example, what did it feel like to cower in fear for hours in a Mumbai restaurant or hotel room.
The important payload of a news story might thus come from the aftermath of an experience itself, whether that experience is one of joy, fear, desperation, or loss. Indeed, if citizens were to be better able to feel the sensations of experiences through simulation rather than description, account, or retelling, perhaps they would better connect such joys, fears, desperations, or losses to their own lives.
Today I read a short article that ran on the AP wire, Woman swept to sea during proposal on Oregon coast. It's a sad, horrific account of a Filipino woman's tragic death by water as her would-be husband attempted to propose in a dramatic, distinctively Oregonian locale.
As it stands, the piece acts as soft-news, as human interest vignette that does little more than paste the private misfortune of others onto a mortifyingly public wall. In cases like this, the who ("Leafil Alforque, 22; Scott Napper, 45"), what ("a wave swept her out to sea"), when ("December 4, 2008"), where ("at a spot near Neskowin Beach"), why ("Scott Napper planned to pop the question") and how ("caught by the receding waters") are far less important to the reader than the sensation of desperation and then loss that we must intuit ourselves--the initial confusion, the panic upon realizing a wet mobile phone couldn't call for help, the quickly-dashed hope of a waving red jacket on the beach below, the thunderbolt of realization that she was gone. For me, feeling those sensations are what the story should be about.
Imagine if you could play through such an experience. It wouldn't even have to be exactly that of Scott Napper and Lefil Alforque, but rather one about man, woman, sea, and the tenuous relationships between all three. This sort of news game would be much more like art, much more like poetry than eyewitness account--perhaps Jason Rohrer's games offer lessons in this regard.
Journalism is supposed to synthesize ideas and information for the benefit of citizens. The AP article about Lefil Alforque's death at sea fails to do this because it concentrates only on facts, making no effort to ask how that story might inform the lives of others. It will run in print because it is sad and curious enough to draw eyes. But what might readers learn from it? Perhaps Oregon residents might think twice before proposing on said rock, but such an outcome is a soulless answer to this doleful tale.
On first blush, perhaps the very notion of a journalistic game about human tragedy seems as absurd as the idea of a journalistic poem. But as I've suggested before, photography might serve as an inspiration for newsgames as well. And in the case of the story of a tiny bride lost to the wine-dark sea, a photograph still can't capture the experience itself like a videogame might do.
Ian,
This question is rather predictable, but would this kind of game-art-journalism hybrid be so different than including a painting, animation, or song with a news story? Your point seems to be that games can reconstruct rather than just describe, that a game might offer something about the bride when a photograph cannot.
That's a tough question, so perhaps the more fair question would be: can you give us a concrete hypothetical example of such a game, in the case of the lost bride? A game that offers something the photograph cannot? For me, the proof is in the pudding...
It would be similar, but also different, because the player could take the role of an actor (in this case, I'd say Scott Napper is the right one). This wasn't a design post, but if you can imagine a design that produced, in sequence, the synthetic experiences described above, that's what I'd have in mind.