January 2009 Archives

In keeping within the spirit of my infovis-related posts (see here, here and here) and being inspired by Ian's BusinessWeek Arcade post, I thought I'd mention some online infovis apps and, in particular, point to some examples of how infovis is being given larger contexts (i.e., devoted sections) within major news sources.

Open data sets and online visualizing apps are most often geared towards and most used by designers, scientists and statisticians. Information Aesthetics has a good list of some of the most popular of these apps in the first sentence of this post. But more examples are starting to creep into major news sources. Both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times have introduced new datavis sections in the past year that are aimed at allowing their readership more direct access to data sets.

Jason Rohrer's Crude Oil is a two-player game/prototype about the recent controversy over whether to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).

Before the economy collapsed, ANWR stood out as one of the key issues of the election. You might remember, for example, chants of "drill baby drill" at the Republican National Convention.

Crude Oil, which is not only multiplayer but overtly political, represents a significant departure from Rohrer's more famous games. For our purposes, the game is relevant because it provides a quirky solution to the problem of journalistic transparency. In doing so, Crude Oil also offers a somewhat different spin on the notion of procedural rhetoric.

Earth 2100 is a crowdsourcing and future forecasting project - somewhat similar to Jane McGonigal's Superstruct - in which "players" view video summaries about the state of the world in 2015, 2050, and 2100 before making videos based on the possible conditions presented by those scenarios. The best submissions make it into a 2-hour primetime special on ABC.



Superstruct and Jane's other games all deserve their own posts at some point, so I won't go into an in-depth analysis of McGonigal's design here; however, I will make some comparisons between Earth 2100 and Superstruct in order to contextualize the former. Superstruct is a future forecasting ARG (alternate reality game) focusing on multiple different scenarios in the year 2019: famine, pirates/raiders, disease, mass immigration, and war. Superstruct considers all of these possible scenarios as encapsulated alternate futures, while Earth 2100 takes a holistic approach by asking players to imagine what would happen if multiple conditions such as these converge over time; therefore, Superstruct tends to have many well-developed storylines for each possible future, while Earth 2100 stands more as a random scattering of entires.

(***EDIT: Please note, I use the example of a "tabloid" or exploitation game about Steve Irwin in this article not as a model that should be pursued but as an example of timeliness, the subject of this post. Please see any of our other posts on Newsgames or the Development Process for examples of newsgames that we actually admire. Thank you, GameSetWatch readers! 2/10/09***)

Every once in awhile, I struggle with the idea of the breaking newsgame. How could a newspaper, or an independent game developer, possibly make a game on the fly that was both "worth playing" and directly relevant to the news of the day? The makers of newsgames have, for the most part, freed themselves from worrying about this problem by dealing mainly with ongoing, long-term public issues; however, I constantly have the nagging feeling that these games need to become quite a bit more timely before being attractive as a regular feature for a news source. Let me share the story of a recent flurry of ideas exchanged on this subject.



We recently had a demo day here at Georgia Tech. Sitting in the corner of the room at our News Games booth, I watched (with a twinge of jealousy) Raph Koster and some dudes from the EVE Online team celebrate the accomplishments of some of my classmates on a board game they'd been working on all semester. None of the famous folks were coming up to ask me about my thoughts on the crossroads of news and gaming. Maybe this just isn't something that has a direct impact on their work? Just when I thought I wasn't going to be having any good conversations that day, a middle-aged man shuffled toward me and asked, in a British accent, if I had anything interesting to show him. It took me a few moments to spy his name tag. 

The inauguration of the 44th President of the United States Barack Obama was commemorated in many different ways. One new digital tool that captured the moment President Obama took the oath of office was Photosynth, a project from Microsoft that stitches together 2D photographs to form a navigable 3D space. This kind of technology is reliant on mass contributions--the more viewpoints the better the image. Photographers were told to "Take one photo of the moment when Obama takes the oath... take three photos (wide-angle, mid-zoom, full-zoom)" and email their photos to an address. Microsoft's software stitched these photos together and the resulting product, "The Moment," was displayed on CNN.com.

Can we apply this kind of user-contributed data to develop game spaces for news?

In The Elements of Journalism Kovach and Rosenstiel call it the "Awareness Instinct," that basic human drive to know something about what's going on beyond our direct experience. Sure, the gold standard for journalists is to give people the information they need to make the decisions that are important to themselves, their families, and their society, but in our attention starved culture can we settle for something less grandios? Where deep understanding and time-consuming sensemaking of an issue can't be achieved there is still awareness; a recognition of the issue. And this awareness facilitates the human need to build common ground and community by allowing us to talk about news events with others. That is, common ground around a shared awareness of news allows us to build social connections with others in the community, to relate to others through a shared understanding. So, while some may think that merely being aware of a news event is paltry in comparison to really deeply understanding it, it does indeed carry with it great value. How do we enable awareness for news information?

Storytelling is one way to take information and make it interesting, relevant, and engaging to an audience. A way to make the significant matter to people. A way to raise awareness for a deeper issue by telling a good story. Another approach is to take raw data or information and to make it engaging through interaction. Games, information visualization, and other interactive data driven applications fit into this latter area. In this sense, the journalism of awareness can fully embrace new media as a vector for raising awareness for issues in the news, even if this new media falls short of that gold standard of journalism.

Here are some examples of what I mean by the Journalism of Awareness:

The spectacular crash of US Air flight 1549, along with the remarkable, safe rescue of all passengers and crew aboard, has captured the imagination of the public this week. Since 9/11, air disasters have taken on so many different meanings in our culture, and to have such a "successful" one occur in New York offers not only a chance to celebrate real heroism, but a dose of symbolic remedy as well.

One of the questions we can always ask about disasters is this one: "What would it have been like to be involved?" In most cases, it's a question we direct at victims or survivors. But in the case of US Air 1549, the stand-out figure is the pilot, Chesley Sullenberger, whose masterful and exacting water landing has earned him all measure of praise, not the least of which includes dozens of Facebook fan pages.

"If you're a former ballet dancer with a hot temper and nine and a half fingers, you're probably glad to see that this Rahm Emanuel fellow came along. If he can make it, so can you! Emanuel also has two brothers, Zeke and Ari, with whom you might have more in common than you might think. Take Wonkette's Official Emanuel Brother Diagnostic Personality Test and find out!"

Is how The Wonkette Quiz begins and, with it, an interesting approach to news quizzes.

The intersection between games and journalism does not only entail newsgames.

Here at JAG, one of our key realizations has been that interactive infographics already have game-like qualities, and might have something to learn from traditional game design wisdom. Adam, for example, has written about Martin Wattenberg's NameVoyager, pointing out that its users frequently interact with the dataset by setting their own goals (e.g. which of my friends has the most old-fashioned name?)

Interactive infographics should interest us because they are already so widely used in online journalism (just think back on all the interactive demographics maps that were deployed during the 2008 Presidential Election). To be honest, my own personal suspicion is that game-like interactive infographics ultimately make more sense than so-called newsgames - at least for many types of news stories.

In this post, I'd like to compare and contrast two similarly minded, game-like infographics (or rather, data exploration apps) about natural disasters.

By the time I'd reached the sixth chapter of Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel's The Elements of Journalism, my mind was cluttered with all of journalism's clichés: clacking typewriters, late night phone calls, loosened collars and ties, teeth-gnarled pencils, paper trails, shoe leather. With a litany of trenchcoated, mustachioed men marching through my mind (with notepads in hand), I began to think these two subjects, videogames and journalism, couldn't be more incongruous...

Games are a decent starting point for seeing how mechanical transparency is addressed in computer interfaces since many times simulation games are built around the concept of optimizing some state of the game (resource use, growth, or simply just score etc.) based on decisions the player makes. Here I illustrate how games are approaching some of the facets of mechanical transparency I introduced before.

Sitting in a McDonald's the morning after I had stayed up until 2am playing Molleindustria's McDonald's Game, I was more angry at McDonald's for switching out their breakfast menu at 11:00 am­ than for corrupting my youth. Something that Molleindustria never mentions is the fact that all McDos have free wireless internet. This is perhaps not worth noting if you live in a concret­e jungle or have enough money to pay for internet service at Starbucks, but in smaller towns McDo and Dairy Queen are some of the only places people can go to get free web access. What I'm implying is that an Ivory Tower attack on McDonald's will likely ignore the value of low prices, speed, and convenience (of location and amenities) to people without abundant resources. I'm sure the intellectual attitude against McDonald's is amplified in Europe, where American fast food has been invading the turf of locally-owned creperies or trattorias. This is what a McDonald's looks like in Europe:

As you will see below, I don't think Molleindustria's game is a bad one by any stretch. It does what it sets out to do remarkably well, and I wouldn't go into such depth to analyze a game if I didn't love it in many ways. 

Back in September, my friend Brendan and I made a game-like website about Sarah Palin (speaking for myself, I was trying to blow off some angst). We called it PalinSpeak.

I think the "game" and our process failed on a number of levels. But it was a learning experience, so I thought it would be worthwhile to reflect on the production process. Here are some lessons.

In this post I'll continue trying to glean knowledge from the study of transparency of interactive systems in HCI, which I began in an earlier post.

Back in the mid 1990's there was a flurry of activity in HCI in trying to understand the explainability and transparency of interactive systems. Paul Dourish published extensively in the area and is known for his book, Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction, which (among other things) connects ideas from ethnomethodology with those of technology and system transparency.

A key concept studied in relation to ethnomethodology is that of accountability, meaning "observable and reportable" or able to be made sense of in the context in which an action arises. It addresses not just the result or outcome of an action but also includes how the result was achieved. Dourish sums it up thus, "Put simply it says that because we know that people don't just take things at face value but attempt to interrogate them for their meaning, we should provide some facilities so that they can do the same thing with interactive systems. Even more straightforwardly, it's a good idea to build systems that tell you what they're doing."

Fantasy Sports have grown to become a major part of both sports fan culture and, more importantly, as a significant portion of sports journalism. The Fantasy Sports Industry has grown to $800 million dollar industry with approximately 30 million players in the United States and Canada. In print, television, and especially online sports journalism, fantasy sports are referred to and used as talking points for upcoming games. The history of fantasy sports should provide a background for further study of the fantasy model as outlined by Bobby Schweizer.

As was mentioned on the blog a couple weeks ago, Comedy Central used its Indecision 2008 brand to release a number of election-related games on the web. I wrote that these games are in a unique position to make commentary because of their Comedy Central context. They lay somewhere in the middle of a serious news game and an irreverent editorial game. A handful of the games are actually quite good. Most are at least competent, illustrating the issue in a moderately effective way though weakened by poor design or ineffective commentary. A few are even just plain bad. But by examining each game in brief we can understanding where they succeed and fail and learn about designing these kinds of games in the future.