March 2009 Archives

One of the Elements of Journalism described by Kovach and Rosenstiel is that it  "must strive to make the significant interesting and relevant." This is something that we haven't really addressed directly on this blog, perhaps because this seems like a no-brainer: how do we make this news piece interesting? Well, we'll just make a game about it! The problem with this is that many newsgames continue to alienate both gamers and nongamers alike. We shouldn't just take the value of newsgames for granted. I think they satisfy this element of journalism, but I'd like to preempt those who might not think the same.

If it's true that there's a disconnect between these games and their players, then either the shortcoming is in the games or in the public (likely, it's both). It doesn't make much sense to demand outright that the players adjust themselves to the games. The standard indie developer response of, "Who the hell cares if they like the game?" doesn't carry over here (if this is your attitude, then there's probably no reason for you to read this). If you're making newsgames, its likely that you have some passing interest in raising awareness or influencing public opinion. Playing devil's advocate and assuming that it's the newsgames that need an attitude adjustment, we can tackle the problem from three angles provided by the Elements: significance, relevance, and interest. I recognize that this is not a completely accurate parsing of the element, but I'm using it as a working model.

Be a Reporter: Interactive Journalism Game is an online experience that is offered as a free online course in the NewsU.org training site, wherein people can assume the role of a reporter of a fictional town called Medina. As their official description says, it "helps users understand some of the basics: how journalists probe, clarify, verify and race against a deadline." This game was produced in conjunction with the Interactive Museum of News (Newseum).

The goal of the game is that the user reports and writes a story for a local media company in the city of Medina. The game starts with the editor's briefing, which explains to the user the issue that he needs to report about and reminds him about some core elements of a journalistic practice. The user needs to go around the city to collect the information needed to create a story by selecting different buildings or sites from an overview map of Medina. Each location contains information that can be gathered (such as news paper clips from the library) or has people that can be interviewed. Every once in awhile the editor pops up in a video screen to urge you to finish the story timely or to suggest you to go to a specific place to gather more information.

Everybody knows now that eBay and Craigslist did a number on newspaper revenue. We're told that newspaper producers were caught completely off guard by these online classifieds. One thing we wanted to know is: what would happen to the circulation of a newspaper if its game-playing constituency also migrated to the Internet?

This leads to a tacit first question: what number of newspaper-subscribers buy the paper just for the puzzles? There are some difficulties acquiring statistically significant numbers here. First, most newspapers don't do regular surveys of their readers to actually find out why they're buying the paper. Will Shortz at the New York Times shares an interesting figure - he does after all have a lot at stake here as the world's current Dean of Crossword Puzzles. In a 2004 interview Shortz discussed a survey from earlier in the decade that found 27% of newspaper readers playing the crossword occasionally. That numbers isn't particularly compelling for our purposes, but there is one other number dropped by Shortz that does carry some weight: 1%. That's the percentage of Americans who named crossword-solving as "their favorite activity in the world."

How are people interacting in news games? What kinds of decisions are they making? And what game elements and relationships are players most interested in? These are the types of questions that an observant journalist might answer, or at least pose, if they began to think of games as informal sources of information.

In their 2004 textbook, Behind the Message: Information Strategies for Communicators, Kathleen Hansen and Nora Paul write, "Informal sources include observations about audiences, messages, and the environment in which the communicator operates, as well as networks of supervisors, colleagues, clients, neighbors, and friends the communicator deals with every day."

John King has been called the "magician" because of his fluent use of the "Magic Wall" since the last primary elections. Today, the CNN presenter uses the wall every Sunday in his new show "State of the Union". However, the usage of the interactive screen has been reduced again just to a cool gadget in spite of its enormous potential to be used as a tool to show scenarios, models, simulations, predictions, and collaboration.

Historiography

his⋅to⋅ri⋅og⋅ra⋅phy   [hi-stawr-ee-og-ruh-fee, -stohr-]
1. the body of literature dealing with historical matters; histories collectively.
2. the body of techniques, theories, and principles of historical research and presentation; methods of historical scholarship.
3. the narrative presentation of history based on a critical examination, evaluation, and selection of material from primary and secondary sources and subject to scholarly criteria.

We rarely consider the difference between news and history. After all, isn't a two-day old newspaper similar to a history textbook? They both chronicle information that has passed, yet clearly there is a significant difference in their format. Yet in the same way the Global Conflicts games can be seen as teaching journalistic practice, they are also teach the practice of researching and understanding history. This makes perfect sense, considering Serious Games Interactive's focus on school-curriculum and the accompanying literature. In the course of discussing the Global Conflicts games in the Newsgames project, we have questioned why the games are packaged as classroom tools. Was it a part of the original scope of the design process or was it a marketing-driven afterthought; a way to sell a niche game in bulk. In either case, we can dissect the games, the teaching materials, and student guides to analyze the game's representations of historiography.

The ethics of care is a moral system devised by feminist philosophers who wanted an ethics based on a more "relational" mode of thought. Their basic criticism of typical ethical systems is that philosophers premise them on the idea of the light of reason - a fundamentally Western, male construct. Instead, they develop a system for ethical decision-making based on casuistry and storytelling (what Socrates would probably deride as a kind of "sophistry" because of its close relation to expressive rhetoric). First let me explain what is meant by casuistry and storytelling here; then, I'm going to suggest how this field might help develop a different kind of newsgame in the future.

Casuistry is more legal practice than ethical philosophy. Instead of deriving right or wrong from moral absolutes, it takes into account every detail of a situation before making a final decision. Under an ethical system such as Kant's categorical imperative (one acts morally if one wills that the maxim of her actions be enacted as universal law), one cannot kill another in self defense - doing so would require that you willed that all rational creatures took violent means to defend themselves. In legal proceedings, one admits to killing in self defense and then details the situation in an effort to convince the jury that the use of lethal force was warranted. 

Philosophical systems are just that - regulatory processes that work in a top-down manner. Casuistry embraces the unit operational approach proposed by Bogost: right and wrong here are determined through the conscious selecting and synthesizing of individual laws, precedents, and situational details.

The Interactive Museum of News (Newseum) in Washington, D.C has a couple of computer simulations that are available for the public to put them in the shoes of a reporter or an editor.

Both interactive applications are mainly tailored for kids. The first one is a game which is available in numerous computer stations ready for the young-want-to-be-reporters. The goal is to make the kids aware of the journalistic practice, how reporters work in the street, and teach them broadly what makes good journalism. The graphics are completely computer generated, and look like cartoons, which seem a fair choice taking into account the audience. Also, the way that the game addresses their users is more from a teaching perspective where the editor explains and instructs many of the standards of high quality journalism. For example, if you interview someone and the responses sound like a rumor or an opinion, the always-on virtual editor on the corner of the screen will remind us that those inputs are not good quality information and that we should keep digging.

Introduction and Game Analysis by Simon Ferrari
Video Analysis and Impressions by Douglas Wilson
Based on a joint play session and discussion

Kuma War presents one (apparently) sustainable model for regularly-released "play the news" games. Kuma produces 3D shooters running off of what appears to be the same version of the Source engine used for the original Half Life. Not only do they act as content creators, but they also feature a download client that makes them something of a micro-platform. Alongside mainstream entertainment fare such as dinosaur hunting and cops-and-robbers games, they release playable versions of military engagements ripped from news headlines. Kuma features literally hundreds of these scenarios on their website. Notable examples of this are the capturing of Saddam's sons during the early days of the Iraq war and the subject of this piece - John Kerry's Silver Star mission.