June 2009 Archives

Today we take a slight detour from our series on editorial games to celebrate an editorial machinima of exceptional quality, produced by everyone's favorite editorial game creator: La Molleindustria's Paolo Pedercini.

It isn't easy writing about thinking, talking, or writing about machinima. One of my professors (Michael Nitsche, who I just found out is heavily cited on the Wikipedia entry on the subject) is hopelessly obsessed with augmented reality and digital performance, so last semester he dragged us through the "serious" machinima canon in an effort to inspire us into creating cinematic experiences within the 3D prototype worlds we were creating. I can honestly say that I don't remember a single one of them, except perhaps the fact that many featured Half Life 2's G-Man. Comedy is there, as evidenced by the broad popularity and honing of craft achieved by Rooster Teeth's Red vs. Blue, but I've yet to see a dramatic or serious piece that worked for me.

Continuing the thread on editorial games from my history, part one.

Author's note: While I was finishing up this piece, Ian forwarded me an upcoming DiGRA paper by Michael Mateas and Mike Treanor of UC Santa Cruz on *roughly* the same subject (though they focus much more on further defining the shared qualities of both genres). It thus became difficult to round off the article without seeing almost every claim as an argument made against their position. I'm not going to reply directly to any of their assertions, nor am I going to include any further insights into the subject that I may have gleaned from reading their piece. When their paper is presented at DiGRA, I hope you'll take the opportunity to contrast my definitional stance with theirs. We will be incorporating and replying to their article directly, and in long form, much later on down the road. Thanks for reading!

The line between "newsgame" and "editorial game" is fuzzy no matter how you slice it. Basically, our suggestion is that most games called "newsgames" don't have the same intentions or goals as traditional reporting, or "the news," but rather those of the op-ed piece: to persuade; therefore, we should label these digital opinion pieces as "editorial" rather than "news." Most people are probably inclined to ignore the possible distinction, because there doesn't seem to be enough proof that we need one in the first place (we can't exactly place a finger on what a "properly journalistic" newsgame would look like, as Paolo Pedercini has pointed out to us before). By the end we will (hopefully) have a slightly better understanding of the relationship between editorial and newsmaking, as well as a firmer grasp on how procedural rhetoric is used in editorial games.

The history of the editorial game began not with a bang, but with three. The first (the Big Bang of editorial games, as well as a couple other genres, so to speak) was the wide adoption of Flash in the creation of casual webgames. We can date this as sometime around August 2000, when Macromedia released Flash 5 with ActionScript 1.0, XML functionality, and SmartClips (an early form of components). Flash 5 and Flash MX were instrumental in the popularization of gaming portals such as AddictingGames.com (which we will return to near the end) in late 2001.

The second bang occurred on September 11th, 2001. Al-Qaeda's attack on American soil plunged the country into what seems today to be a perpetual war, becoming the most visible public issue (until, perhaps, our most recent economic downturn) both in the United States and abroad. The war on terror is a polarizing issue, leading to an explosion of opinion-based publishing on the Internet. Opinions are cheap, and we're quick to form them. Flash isn't incredibly cheap unless you're a student, but it is relatively easy to quickly make a game with it if you have any knowledge of keyframe animation or basic object-oriented programming.

Finally, the prior currents converge in late September of 2003 (I'm now finished with the "bang" metaphor): Gonzalo Frasca launches newsgaming.com with a controversial "toy world" entitled September 12th. Frasca had casually created a political game called Kabul Kaboom during a transcontinental flight at the beginning of the war in Afghanistan, and the game's unexpected viral popularity led him to develop September 12th--an elegantly simple game about the dangerous assumptions of tactical missile strikes on terrorist pockets--over the course of the next few months. It employs an early example of what Ian Bogost calls "the rhetoric of failure"--a game that can only be "won" by not playing it at all. September 12th became wildly popular, gaining mainstream media attention and inspiring almost a decade of political Flash games (recently winning the Knight Foundation's Lifetime Achievement award for newsgames at this year's Games for Change).