August 2009 Archives

Imagine this: a warm early summer's day. The sky looks cloudy, rain is immanent. Suddenly, the atmosphere takes on a green tinge. Is it your eyes? The wind picks up. And, without warning, pellets of ice begin falling from the heavens.

Hail. Effing hail. Is my car okay? This is so weird. Is my aluminum siding okay? (Why am I worrying about aluminum siding?) Woah, hail! Golf-ball sized pellets of ice in the middle of summer, piling up outside my front door. Effing hail!

Effing Hail by Jiggman and Greg Wohlwend of Intuition Games is a Flash game that looks like an infographic. It's an isometrically positioned diagram of the atmosphere sliced into fictionally named sections (the cleverly labled Aiesphere through Effingsphere). The player's mouse click acts as a strong updraft of wind that can lift falling precipitation back into the upper atmosphere to form large chunks of hail with which to pound the defenseless buildings on the ground. The goal is to make either an array of large hailstones or army of smaller hailstones to pummel an increasingly stronger set of buildings and objects in the sky within a time-limit.

In the red desert of Mars I placed five remote mines on my truck, drove at high speeds toward an EDF roadblock, leapt from the vehicle roughly 300 yards from my target, and detonated the truck as it crashed through the gate. This destroyed a booth containing a turret emplacement, three lightly-armed EDF soldiers, and a civilian vehicle stopped at the checkpoint. A meter on the lefthand side of my screen showed that I decreased EDF "control" over the territory by three points for destroying the building; I was docked three "morale" points for killing the civilian. Red Faction: Guerrilla has been out for a few months now, but I just got my hands on it last week. The supposition that this game may be a commentary on the war on terror has been so widely covered that, unless you've never read about it before, the above description of my actions shouldn't surprise you much.

Parents need to know that this third-person action game tackles the difficult subject of wartime insurgency and terrorism. Players take on the role of a reluctant freedom fighter who uses his expertise in demolitions to help defeat a corrupt, militaristic occupational force. The violence, while more or less constant, is often directed at buildings rather than people, and players are encouraged to avoid hurting civilians whenever possible.

Many enthusiast reviews of the game conclude that any possible connection to the actual conflict in Iraq is most certainly in bad taste. This is an unfortunate misstep for those reviewers; the recent controversy and subsequent discourse surrounding the failed IP Six Days in Fallujah shows that many are ready for games that explicitly tackle contemporary tragedies such as the Iraq insurgency. Critical gamers welcome the chance to experience and interrogate the anti-American mindset through gameplay. Should your 12-year old play this game? Probably not. Should you support Volition with a purchase, then carefully analyze the game's construction while you play? Most definitely. Read our analysis of how Red Faction: Guerrilla proceduralizes insurgency after the jump.

An infographic titled "How Different Groups Spend Their Day," produced by the New York Times, recently circulated around the Internet, earning acclaim from casual news-readers and the multitude of Twitterers who passed the link around the net. People claimed they liked the infographic, which depicted how different population groups spend their day, because it was interactive, deep, multi-dimensional, and fun to investigate. People also spoke about the results of the quantitative information depicted: claiming that the results were fascinating, identifying trends and specific instances, and even noting some of the peculiarities (the unemployed spend less than 1% of the day working!).

There are at least two aspects of this New York Times infographic I'd like to explore, neither of which relate to the actual data itself. The first question I'm interested in is what it is about the graphic that, despite its flaws, people found so interesting? This relates to a larger question we've been exploring about "cool" infographics and chartporn—depections of data in which people are more interested in the graphic design than its utility. The second question criticises the graphic, examining what could have been done to actually make it live up to the commendations of its blog-sharers, Twitters, and Digg-ers.

One of this project's alumni, Nick Diakopoulos, spent the past summer working in California as a journalism research fellow. While working with us, Nick brought his journalistic experience and work in human-computer interaction to bear on a discussion of transparency in reportage, computer interfaces, and videogames. In the past month Nick created an interactive map for the Sacramento Bee--the purpose is to visualize the distribution of federal stimulus money to various counties throughout the state. We can see that he applied many of the ideas we had spoken during our research: transparency of construction, directed activity for infographics, and process journalism. Please check it out now, along with this "quiz version," then read our analysis after the jump.