(***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.
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.
This was Richard Bartle: one of the early online gaming movers and shakers, and architect of my ten long years of MUDding (I played Gemstone and Mihaly's Achaea). This man was a personal hero of mine, sure, but did the old Wizard have any tricks up his sleeve when it came to thinking about newsgames? As it turns out, he did. It also turns out that he was only talking with me for so long to avoid the pesky necessity of leveling his warlock up to 80 in WotLK (joking). Perhaps all the little esoteric niches within the critical gaming community were closer together than I'd previously thought. After some polite conversation on the nature of our research, I shared with Bartle some of the roadblocks we'd been coming to. On the subject of the absence of the breaking newsgame, he had this to say:
"Well, we all know the Queen is going to die someday. So we could make a game about it today, and release it when she does."
This seems like such an obvious partial answer to the problem - one which Ian hints that he already might have been thinking of - but it's one that we really hadn't talked about in discussions of the topic before. At first I thought making such "predictive" games might somehow violate journalistic integrity; however, it turns out that this would fall squarely within the practices of most news outlets. There are a few different manifestations of this. First is the article on something one knows is going to happen once. Obituaries for famous people are commonly written long before their actual deaths, and they are constantly updated as these people continue to survive and add to their accomplishments. The second case is when one knows that a decision or outcome will fall in only a small number of ways. One such example of this is the tradition of pre-making two headlines for the two possible resolutions to a presidential race. And then there's the pre-making of material for events that are known to occur cyclically: weather, economic activity, politics, etc.
When we start looking for examples of games that might fit this predictive mold, we run into some initial hiccups. Take, for example, the "obituary games" dealing with Steve Irwin's death by stingray. How could one possibly have predicted that he would die this way, let alone made a game about it beforehand? This isn't as big of a hitch as one might initially think. You simply have to choose which information you can be most sure about. For example, Paul Newman was pretty old when he died. You wouldn't have had to predict exactly what he would die of to be able to make a great video game where an old man surrounded by salad dressing bottles fantasizes about his early days as a cowboy or Cool Hand Luke. In the case of Steve Irwin, it was likely that he'd die playing with dangerous aquatic animals. Despite being unable to know which animal would manage to penetrate his catlike reflexes, one would still be able to create most of the underwater gameplay mechanics, placeholder art, and sound bytes before the actual event occurred.
For the second case, that of pre-making a news story that will assuredly break in one of only a few possible directions, I'd like to take a look at some of the media surrounding Obama's recent election. When it comes to biting, timely satire on a public issue, nobody can really hold a flame to Comedy Central's Daily Show and South Park. The night after polls closed South Park aired an episode (click on "About Last Night...") wherein Obama wins the election, liberals get drunk and riot in the street to celebrate, and conservatives fear for the end of the republic while locking themselves away in a fallout shelter. Now, it's possible that Parker and Stone have such an ace team on their hands that they were able to make this episode in one night's time. But it's more likely that they'd pre-written the shows for either decision (and had of course already prepped the art for both).
To my knowledge, there weren't any games that addressed the public hype over this event - probably because we were all celebrating or cursing the event in "real" life. But that's not to say that such games wouldn't be enjoyable and interesting to experience. We've talked a lot about how great it would have been if the CNN "holograms" on election night had simulated for viewers the experience of being in Grant Park that night. It wouldn't have been too much of a stretch for somebody in Second Life or There.com to have recreated this space inside a virtual world for people to experience in real time (please drop a comment if this was actually done in some way). Of course, it is an incredible asset for virtual worlds that they can play host to post-election celebrations and grumbling drunken escapes in ways that the South Park episode did. Doug Wilson is planning a series of posts on our explorations into the world of Kuma Games and their re-creation of current and historical war zones. They do some decent work toward trying to allow players to "take part" in actual military encounters (like the capturing of Saddam's sons, for instance). It wouldn't be too much of a stretch for such a company to make the kind of predictive leaps in game development that I'm talking about here.
Finally we come to the idea of games about cyclical events. Doug is also planning a post on hurricane and meteor-strike calculator "games." Such simulators, which allow users to input various sorts of data about the size and location of storms or extraterrestrial objects in order to see the amount of havoc they might wreak, could easily be expanded into games about actual events. We've played some games that retrospectively look back at the events in New Orleans during Katrina, but there's no reason that such games couldn't have been made on a "breaking news" deadline: "Try to rescue survivors from rooftops... but beware, some of them will shoot at your helicopter as you attempt a descent!" On the subject of the cyclical nature of the economy, we have the fact that most everyone knew we were headed into a recession many months (or years) before feds actually announced that we'd officially landed in one. Newsgames about the recession and its impact on various sectors of the corporate and public world could have easily been pre-made for this event.
Now, it's one thing to come up with the stories and core mechanics for games such as these before the event strikes, and it's another thing to have the art and assets ready and up-to-date when the final details are reported. Bartle also addressed the subject of content creation for breaking newsgames. Advocating a Farmer & Morningstar-style approach (introduced in their Lessons from Lucasfilm's Habitat), he asserted the fact that the core game mechanics should be separated from the graphical content should there be a technological leap in the latter before the predictive breaking newsgame can be published. He entertained my idea of multiple news sources outsourcing the work of creating newsgames to an independent company supplying the lot. This is probably the only conceivable way that a newsgame developer would have the fiscal security and size to hire the amount of people required to make games on a regular or breaking news schedule. If the people who pioneered info-visualization in newspapers and their websites (Alberto Cairo is our preferred source of information on the subject) could figure out a working model for their work, then there's probably a solution to this problem out there in somebody's head as well. What I've written here is only a tentative first step in that direction.
We wrapped up the conversation by talking about (non-video game) journalists and their standing disdain for games as trivial. Bartle seemed to think that this was the largest obstacle toward making games a common sight on news websites. We can only hope that more journalists will pick up on the potential for video games to address serious or personal issues, following the odd example of the BusinessWeek Arcade that Ian posted about. One disconnect here might be the fact that a reporter has to work on strenuous daily deadlines and sometimes pull all-nighters to bring a story to print, while most makers of newsgames have no such deadlines and can therefore be seen as pronouncing judgment from a temporally distant Ivory Tower. Perhaps the availability of breaking newsgames might interest or satisfy journalists in a way that current such games do not.
"Well, we all know the Queen is going to die someday. So we could make a game about it today, and release it when she does."
This seems like such an obvious partial answer to the problem - one which Ian hints that he already might have been thinking of - but it's one that we really hadn't talked about in discussions of the topic before. At first I thought making such "predictive" games might somehow violate journalistic integrity; however, it turns out that this would fall squarely within the practices of most news outlets. There are a few different manifestations of this. First is the article on something one knows is going to happen once. Obituaries for famous people are commonly written long before their actual deaths, and they are constantly updated as these people continue to survive and add to their accomplishments. The second case is when one knows that a decision or outcome will fall in only a small number of ways. One such example of this is the tradition of pre-making two headlines for the two possible resolutions to a presidential race. And then there's the pre-making of material for events that are known to occur cyclically: weather, economic activity, politics, etc.
When we start looking for examples of games that might fit this predictive mold, we run into some initial hiccups. Take, for example, the "obituary games" dealing with Steve Irwin's death by stingray. How could one possibly have predicted that he would die this way, let alone made a game about it beforehand? This isn't as big of a hitch as one might initially think. You simply have to choose which information you can be most sure about. For example, Paul Newman was pretty old when he died. You wouldn't have had to predict exactly what he would die of to be able to make a great video game where an old man surrounded by salad dressing bottles fantasizes about his early days as a cowboy or Cool Hand Luke. In the case of Steve Irwin, it was likely that he'd die playing with dangerous aquatic animals. Despite being unable to know which animal would manage to penetrate his catlike reflexes, one would still be able to create most of the underwater gameplay mechanics, placeholder art, and sound bytes before the actual event occurred.
For the second case, that of pre-making a news story that will assuredly break in one of only a few possible directions, I'd like to take a look at some of the media surrounding Obama's recent election. When it comes to biting, timely satire on a public issue, nobody can really hold a flame to Comedy Central's Daily Show and South Park. The night after polls closed South Park aired an episode (click on "About Last Night...") wherein Obama wins the election, liberals get drunk and riot in the street to celebrate, and conservatives fear for the end of the republic while locking themselves away in a fallout shelter. Now, it's possible that Parker and Stone have such an ace team on their hands that they were able to make this episode in one night's time. But it's more likely that they'd pre-written the shows for either decision (and had of course already prepped the art for both).
To my knowledge, there weren't any games that addressed the public hype over this event - probably because we were all celebrating or cursing the event in "real" life. But that's not to say that such games wouldn't be enjoyable and interesting to experience. We've talked a lot about how great it would have been if the CNN "holograms" on election night had simulated for viewers the experience of being in Grant Park that night. It wouldn't have been too much of a stretch for somebody in Second Life or There.com to have recreated this space inside a virtual world for people to experience in real time (please drop a comment if this was actually done in some way). Of course, it is an incredible asset for virtual worlds that they can play host to post-election celebrations and grumbling drunken escapes in ways that the South Park episode did. Doug Wilson is planning a series of posts on our explorations into the world of Kuma Games and their re-creation of current and historical war zones. They do some decent work toward trying to allow players to "take part" in actual military encounters (like the capturing of Saddam's sons, for instance). It wouldn't be too much of a stretch for such a company to make the kind of predictive leaps in game development that I'm talking about here.
Finally we come to the idea of games about cyclical events. Doug is also planning a post on hurricane and meteor-strike calculator "games." Such simulators, which allow users to input various sorts of data about the size and location of storms or extraterrestrial objects in order to see the amount of havoc they might wreak, could easily be expanded into games about actual events. We've played some games that retrospectively look back at the events in New Orleans during Katrina, but there's no reason that such games couldn't have been made on a "breaking news" deadline: "Try to rescue survivors from rooftops... but beware, some of them will shoot at your helicopter as you attempt a descent!" On the subject of the cyclical nature of the economy, we have the fact that most everyone knew we were headed into a recession many months (or years) before feds actually announced that we'd officially landed in one. Newsgames about the recession and its impact on various sectors of the corporate and public world could have easily been pre-made for this event.
Now, it's one thing to come up with the stories and core mechanics for games such as these before the event strikes, and it's another thing to have the art and assets ready and up-to-date when the final details are reported. Bartle also addressed the subject of content creation for breaking newsgames. Advocating a Farmer & Morningstar-style approach (introduced in their Lessons from Lucasfilm's Habitat), he asserted the fact that the core game mechanics should be separated from the graphical content should there be a technological leap in the latter before the predictive breaking newsgame can be published. He entertained my idea of multiple news sources outsourcing the work of creating newsgames to an independent company supplying the lot. This is probably the only conceivable way that a newsgame developer would have the fiscal security and size to hire the amount of people required to make games on a regular or breaking news schedule. If the people who pioneered info-visualization in newspapers and their websites (Alberto Cairo is our preferred source of information on the subject) could figure out a working model for their work, then there's probably a solution to this problem out there in somebody's head as well. What I've written here is only a tentative first step in that direction.
We wrapped up the conversation by talking about (non-video game) journalists and their standing disdain for games as trivial. Bartle seemed to think that this was the largest obstacle toward making games a common sight on news websites. We can only hope that more journalists will pick up on the potential for video games to address serious or personal issues, following the odd example of the BusinessWeek Arcade that Ian posted about. One disconnect here might be the fact that a reporter has to work on strenuous daily deadlines and sometimes pull all-nighters to bring a story to print, while most makers of newsgames have no such deadlines and can therefore be seen as pronouncing judgment from a temporally distant Ivory Tower. Perhaps the availability of breaking newsgames might interest or satisfy journalists in a way that current such games do not.
(***EDIT: Upcoming follow-up post to address the technical-aspect concerns of commenters Kriss and elle, to be published on Friday, February 13th.***)
I've got a feeling that humans are getting more psychic as we evolve. No, don't laugh! There are way too many coincidences around I feel. Plus most of the things you talked about would very hard to come up with.
Then again things like that might just be a fluke or luck perhaps...
You do understand that the main reason news games exist is to ride the popularity of keywords and gain traffic?
Basically spam.
That's it.
They are generally no more interesting than seeing valentine themed games at valentines day.
I mean, spammy "throw a snowball at your friends" facebook apps are news games.
I blame game hating writers like yourself for only wishing to celebrate the parts of games that can be written or be perceived as written.
Let me break this down for you, as a writer. It's exactly like writing a book and then discovering that the only part that generates any interest is the cover which is poured over and over by cover artist after cover artist whilst the words inside are ignored as unimportant. Maybe if it had more pictures inside it would be relevant.
This news game is for you and your kind and was made in disgust as what now passes for innovation in the world of gaming http://pief.wetgenes.com/
Games on predicative events should steer clear of exploiting their nature - playing games about someone who just died? About a disaster? Tread carefully or the audience, likely those most emotionally affected, will revolt. A lot of those Irwin games were made by people who weren't fans, and were repulsive to those who were. You want that associated with your news publication, where fans are likely to turn for information?
48-hour game jams like last week's global jam show you can get games done without much lead time. Fast-prototyping languages and platforms, like XNA and Gamemaker, give you a foundation and even some basic assets. Built a stock library of known and likely items - world leaders, local figures, etc. - and make the rest as it goes.
"a reporter has to work on strenuous daily deadlines and sometimes pull all-nighters to bring a story to print, while most makers of newsgames have no such deadlines"
Maybe newsgame makers should. Non-news game makers do.
That Katrina example is just ignorant and insulting, btw, just reinforcing how wrong the media was about what was actually happening in New Orleans. How would you handle a game that gets based off what later turns out to be an inaccuracy?
@ elle:
There are two parts to your comment, so I'll address them in turn. About rapid prototyping: yes, you're right about Game Jam. And you're right, newsgame makers do gain a lot more attention to their work when they make them on a foreshortened deadline. We don't disagree on any of these points. I've written other blogposts about all the possible rapid prototyping toolkits that even non-programmers could use to make a quick newsgame should they desire it.
As far as the sensitivity of the audience to newsgames about a crisis goes, yes - we should be careful not to make exploitative games such as the Irwin ones. I don't actually advocate making exploitation games, I just note that there's one example of a quick rash of obituary games and suggest a hypothetical example of one that could potentially be more tasteful (Newman fantasizing about his early days as a bandit in film, etc.).
On the other hand, history has so far shown that warnings such as yours are often a bit overblown. Take the example of 9/11 Survivor. Your character is in the Tower, flames all around. You can choose to try to run down an immense number of floors (with the high possibility of being caught by flames), or you can jump out an open window.
So, when this came out everybody commenting on the Internet said it was exploitative and evil. Then it turned out that the family members of people who died on 9/11 who played this game absolutely cherished being able to virtually put themselves in the shoes of their perished loved ones.
This of course wouldn't happen every time someone puts out a newsgame dealing with a touchy subject, but it shows that with careful thinking and consideration it can be done - no matter the conventional collective wisdom of Internet commentators.
@ Kriss:
I believe what you are referring to is what we're calling "tabloid games" at our studio. Yup, the Irwin games are exploitative crap. I didn't suggest otherwise - just noted it in passing as an example of the concept of the "obituary game." Other examples of tabloid games would be the Sarah Palin games or the Drunk Mel Gibson games.
If you're suggesting that newsgames such as Frasca's September 12th or the games made by Paolo at Molleindustria are there solely for page hits, I'm going to have to disagree with you based on what I've read by them and experienced while playing the games. I see the value in your cynicism, but I think it's misplaced if you're attempting to compare these to the "tabloid games."
As far as my being a "game hating writer" goes - you probably didn't read very many of the other posts on this blog, or read about who we were, or what we were doing. This is a newsgames-specific project studio, at a technical university, led by one of the most vehement supporters of the "process intensity" approach to game studies and development. I'm not a news writer - I'm a games researcher planning on finishing my graduate studies, buffing up my programming skills, and becoming a game designer. I don't plan on making Steve Irwin games, or spam games, or anything of the like.
This blog post is one of many on this site, and it deals specifically with the narratological side of things. This doesn't mean I'm not thinking about how to improve newsgames by researching tighter coupling between mechanics and rhetoric. It means that this is a blog post about one compact idea, and not every possible related idea (that would be called an academic paper).
So, if you ever read this and reply to it, then I hope you see that you completely misunderstood the context of this post and have seen the error of your venomous wording. At that date I will play your art protest game. Thanks for visiting the blog and contributing to the educational dialogue.
Many news organization feed off anniversaries and annual events. How refreshing it would be to see newsgames developed on these subjects that deserve some coverage but the coverage is often trite and uninspired. As for breaking news, I firmly believe that even avid gamers want the breaking news facts first. The more contextual and educational journalism can follow within days in the form of news games.