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.
Though the game is not intended to teach the meteorological phenomenon, it (imprecisely) uses the process that builds hail in the atmosphere as a physics mechanic and indirectly (and again imprecisely) educates the player. This "educational facade" is in large part a result of the infographic aesthetic. It is not only the type of design one might find in a popular magazine or Earth studies textbook, but also what we might see in a newspaper article about a recent storm. A hail infographic, in fact, could be a very useful thing!
A freak summer hailstorm is big news, especially if it caused any damage. And the formation of hail is certainly not common knowledge (I will admit to visiting Wikipedia to get my facts straight). A hailstorm--or weather events in general--make for easy infographics because they are basic processes that can be broken down into steps chronologically and geographically. Every hurricane infographic begins over the water, explains the steps which led to the formation of the storm right before landfall, and then the path of the storm as it affected people along the coast.
Basic processes like these should be easy to put into code, and adding a game-like layer on top of it with goals (like we saw with the Hurricane Maker) could be an easy way for online news organizations to attract readers while elaborating on recent events.
At the beginning of the semester, Ian asked us to brainstorm a basic idea for a game that would address some area of the news in one of the formats we've discussed here on the blog (such as infographic, documentary, editorial game, puzzle). Since I spent my summer thinking about infographics, I decided to do something with an infographic I recently came across.
"Why do freeways come to a stop?" is a graphic by Stephen J. Beard and Rich Exner created for Cleveland's The Plain Dealer. It addresses a frustration most drivers experience on a regular basis: why in the world are we coming to a stop in the middle of the highway when there's no problem in sight? The effect, as described, is the result of drivers breaking for breaklights. Since we don't wait to get to the point ahead at which the driver in front of us breaked, we send a shockwave of breaklights down the highway.
The graphic does a pretty good job of depicting this, but not as well as a simulation could. In my theoretical simulation (which looks like a bird's eye view infographic), the user chooses a position in a long string of cars and either causes or responds to traffic backup. Having this overview is important because it counter-acts our normal driving experience in which we are the center of the world. As the driver of the front car, perhaps they slam on their breaks to avoid a retread in the road. They could see the shockwave effect in action behind them--the much-needed depiction of the consequences of their action. As a driver in the middle of the pack, you could see how the cars ahead of you are reacting and think about how your breaking patterns will affect the drivers behind you.
The idea is to bring to light the reality that a single driver's action on the road affects everybody else and it might even serve to have drivers think about their highway habits. It could also be used to simulate real highway events: "why did I come to a crawl on I-20 east out of Atlanta today?"
This infographic would take us beyond the simple representation of traffic use in the news today (red-line on map bad, green line good) and the depiction of accidents and backup as something we cannot do anything about. Really, it is my benevolent way of encouraging people to be better drivers through games and simulation. You may call me selfish, but you probably won't disagree!
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