February 2009 Archives

The day after Chesley Sullenberger miraculously landed an Airbus A320 in the Hudson, Ian wrote about the BBC News simulation of the emergency water landing using Flight Simulator X. The main criticism of this was that they used a game to make a video, as opposed to something playable by the reader. It didn't take too long for US Air Flight 1549 games to appear, however. Hero on the Hudson, Double Bird Strike, and the French game Hudson's Crash are all Flash games about landing a plane on the river.

I believe these games follow the trend of the news media's coverage of the event: because a disastrous situation was averted, we don't have to exhibit the reverence and mourning of a tragedy. In terms of media coverage, this means focusing on the feat that was landing a plane with no engines safely in a river along the largest city in the United States. While some attention has been given to why the flight went down (discussions of migratory patterns of Canadian geese), the story that most people have taken away was that "Sully" miraculously landed an airplane and everybody was okay.

On the one hand, given the attention that is usually given to tragedy in the news (the old 'if it bleeds it leads' mentality), this was a welcome change of pace. However, the situation was complicated by the Continental Airways flight that crashed outside of Buffalo, NY a mere month after a major disaster was averted. These two events, when compared, illustrate major differences in reporting. They also reveal some of the difficulties of creating games about current events and suggest the possible journalistic roles of a game. Putting these events in game form forces us to ask questions that aren't the heart of the traditional media's story.

I've been trying to get a handle on how interactive software such as games can be made more transparent, and perhaps more trustworthy. As suggested in The Elements of Journalism, transparency signals a respect for the audience and reaffirms a journalist's public interest motive, the key to gaining credibility. "The willingness of the journalist to be transparent about what he or she has done is at the heart of establishing that the journalist is concerned with the truth" (p. 92). I've begun the process of teasing apart understandings of transparency in journalism, which encompass a number of different notions including:

(This post was prepared by Bobby Schweizer and Sergio Goldenberg)

The Global Conflicts games, which include Palestine and Latin America, is a PC game series produced by Serious Games Interactive, a company from Copenhagen, Denmark. The games position the player as a journalist in the middle of a regional conflict looking to discover information. In 2007's Global Conflicts: Palestine, Serious Games Interactive focused on position the player amidst the Israel-Palestine conflict as a journalist who needs to conduct interviews of both sides so as to gain information needed to write a newspaper article. 

January 19 was the second anniversary of the murder of the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink. Two years ago he was killed by a 17 year old nationalist who believed that Dink was insulting Turkishness by openly rejecting the official Turkish policy on the events of 1915. Dink believed that during the First World War the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire became victims of a state run massacre, genocide. He was not the only one. Today officially 21 countries and 42 of the 50 U.S. states recognize the events as genocide. On the other hand the official history of The Turkish Republic rejects this allegation. According to many Turkish historians not only Armenians but also thousands of Turkish civilians died during course of war and there was no genocide.

After almost 100 years later, with its many layers, the recognition or denial of the events of 1915 as genocide is one of the controversial issues of the history and politics. In Turkey the issue evokes distrust and anger especially among nationalists. The ethnical nature of the conflict and Turkey's recent terror problems with ethnical routes also solidify these feelings.

Games and Journalism both evoke their own cultural images; the Ramen and Dorito stained gamer on one hand and the hard nosed, gum shoe journalist on the other. It's not immediately obvious that oil and water can mix, nor am I going to argue that they should. But there are some interesting opportunities here, both for games to fill functional gaps in journalism and for games to come closer to journalism by adapting the cultural values of  news institutions. How can games fit into the sociology of news and journalism?

I started by reviewing "The Sociology of News" written by Michael Schudon, a sociologist at UCSD. If you haven't read this book I would recommend it, not only for its concise definitions of terms like "news" and "journalism," but also for its in depth description of the American culture of journalism.

One of the discussions we had during project studio led us to ask a question about modeling three-dimensional game spaces in which journalism could take place. In his article "What Should You Show in a Graphic?" Alberto Cairo discusses the depiction of 3D space in the flat graphics of print or the computer screen. One of the difficulties of this space, he points out, is that news editors often want them to be dressed up to have more visual appeal. The problem is that this often means making up details of a scene that might be inaccurate or at least irrelevant. What I would like to address is what happens when the space rendered in this graphic is turned into a 3D space like those in games.

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To ground my hypothetical thoughts in some realistic manor, I'd like to consider a relatively specific space that could be modeled in a graphics engine like Valve's Source (used for Half-Life 2). As we are students at Georgia Tech, news on the campus is relatively important to us. Because this news is tied to a geographically specific region that remains relatively static, some intrepid students at The Technique have enlisted the help of their game-savvy friends to build the Georgia Tech campus using the Source engine. That way, any time a story hits, they have a pre-made map in which to set the elements of the story.

I've put off writing about Dead Rising in the context of journalism and games for awhile. It pained me to think of the negative review I might have to give a game that I enjoyed so much. Luckily, in the past few weeks Capcom has released some information that helped get my ball rolling: Dead Rising's port to the Wii (Dead Rising: Chop 'Til You Drop) will not feature the ability to take snapshots with Frank's camera. Cue Chris Hecker sound byte about the Wii's processor not being able to handle a virtual camera (also, the Wii won't be able to render nearly as many zombies in one location as the 360 could).

This news begs the question: does the exclusion of the photography mechanic in the Wii version of Dead Rising change anything about what the game says about photojournalism as a practice? Let me first explain what the game is.

"EA SPORTS Virtual Playbook is born out of our deep football heritage at EA SPORTS and our drive to expand the impact of our innovative sports technologies beyond gaming," said Peter Moore, president of EA SPORTS. "Telecast on ESPN, EA SPORTS Virtual Playbook marks the future of sports production by allowing television analysts to highlight, critique and dissect on-field action more intimately than ever before. EA SPORTS Virtual Playbook brings an entirely new level of excitement and realism to football analysis to ESPN viewers this NFL season."

So goes the Press Release by EA introducing the feature to ESPN's football coverage this past September. The feature has garnered positive remarks by other sports news outlets, but what does the system offer sports journalism and how is it bridging the gap between games and journalism?