In looking at games and their intersections with the entire news ecology, we have so far in the main assumed a specific model of the designer-consumer relationship. Ferrari's "History of Editorial Games, Part One," for example, traces the history of one specific brand of news games as the history of exceptional individuals or groups who, in possession of a pre-determined set of information, construct games for the purpose of communicating that information to an imagined public in need of persuasion.

The remainder of the history of news games as we have so far considered it bears out the centrality of this metaphor. That is, the games are produced by a dedicated class of design practitioners, usually in the form of named authors and studios that create artifacts for the benefit and edification of a separate class of individuals called news or information consumers. Even when an individual crosses from the latter class into the former (e.g., citizen journalist, amateur game designer), the producer and consumer classes themselves remain undisturbed.

In this way, games stand in for the traditional news story, editorial cartoon, or flat information graphic. They enact a one-way flow of knowledge or ideas from the knowledgeable to the ignorant, from the journalist to the reader. In allowing the game creation process to escape our scrutiny, our critical focus shifts largely to the mechanics of game play, and all the learning is presumed to take place on that stage of play. Missing from this equation is the process by which the game design itself encodes a body of knowledge with the concomitant question of how that body of knowledge may itself be altered by the design process.

The July issue of Wired magazine featured an article titled "Cutthroat Capitalism: An Economic Analysis of the Somali Pirate Business Model" (pdf available), in which they attribute the rise in piracy on the Somali coast to economic factors. The print article features eight pages of text, infographics, and illustrations which have a distinctly game-like aesthetic. The article graphics are colorful and use rounded-edged pixel art to abstract the images of boats, people, and maps. It is divided into section, the different steps of an attack, and each of these sections is supported by some sort of infographic and text description.

The infographics in the article take the forms of fever charts, bar graphs, pie charts, organization charts, and a full-page map. The article also uses an unusually high number of fonts, generally to the effect of punctuating the different "economic" formulas laid out in the article, creating the illusion of action and dynamism.

This illusion of an on-going process is important to the article because it's supposed to convey the timeline of a highjacking and ransom attack. It calculates the value propositions of each of the steps of the attack (from the pirate, crew, and naval point of view as appropriate) and serves to explain the low-cost, low-risk, high-reward system of ransom based piracy.

It, of course, is no accident that the aesthetic of the article is game-like. The article is paired with a web-based component--a Flash game with the same name, which Ian briefly wrote about when it was released. Not only does the game use many of the same assets, but it operates under the mathematic logic of the article to support the conclusions of the piece. It takes the rhetorical stance of facts-in-action, creating a capture and negotiation simulation. Perhaps simulation is too strong of a word, as many of the concepts have been abstracted for emphasis, but it does operate under the same assumptions of the article about the piracy process.

Visceral Games, a subsidiary of Electronic Arts, is currently hard at work on a game inspired by Dante Alighieri's Inferno. The videogame itself does not seem to be a procedural translation of the source work in any meaningful way, instead falling back on a tried-and-true ludic method of engaging with famous literature through hacking-and-slashing. This is a shame, because there is reason to believe there are employees at the Redwood branch office of Electronic Arts who are committed to crafting truly innovative games. For some strange reason, these gifted game designers aren't necessarily working on a development team but in EA's marketing and publicity department.

OurCourts.org states, "A growing body of research shows that games have extraordinary potential for promoting learning and civic engagement," but do the games released by Our Courts live up to this potential? In this article I will review Do I Have A Right? (hereafter referred to as DIHAR) and discuss how the elements within the game promote learning and civic engagement. This is accomplished through a few methods, but what appears most effective is that the game builds civic literacy by harnessing the natural process of learning that takes place when a player first picks up a new game.

Borut Pfeifer, a friend of the blog and Georgia Tech alumnus, recently left his job as a lead AI Programmer at EA Los Angeles to strike out as an indie. While many in his position would probably be worrying primarily about their fiscal security, hoping to cash in on the massive interest in small-scale downloadable games with a quirky art style and a few novel mechanics to drive the experience home... Borut has decided to make a political game. More specifically,  he's making a documentary game about the riots in Tehran following Iran's most recent election. In order to fund the project, he has turned to Kickstarter. This website allows one to set a funding goal and enumerate a number of tiered rewards for specific levels of contribution. Potential patrons are only charged if the campaign goal is met by the end date.

Borut, like many other indies using Kickstarter, offers producer credits and an in-game likeness of the patron at the highest tiers of contribution. The lowest-tier offering, perfect for impoverished students such as myself, is $10 for a preorder of the game. Presales, if you remember, were one of the two key methods by which African Americans were able to fund their first independent film projects. It's exciting that people like Borut are trying this for games, especially for a documentary game that has the potential to define the genre if it succeeds. Here is an article by Pfeifer at Gamasutra on the process of creating a Kickstarter project. Clicking on the widget above will take you to the project site. Please consider helping him out!

Contains LIFE-ENDING SPOILERS for a relatively new game.

Discussions of Arkham Asylum thus far have rightly focused on two aspects of the game's rhetoric: "being Batman" and the spectre of the institution. The reason I think an analysis of Arkham Asylum falls under the purview of this blog is that it problematizes incarceration while proceduralizing the ethics of non-lethal force adhered to by law enforcement personnel--including its risk and reward. Of course, actual police officers bear firearms and have the right to use them in compliance with professional rules of engagement, but we're allowed a little romance when we're talking about Gotham.

Being Batman means having access to x-ray vision, knowing the fault in every structure and the status of every enemy. Guns glow red under Batman's cowl, just as they do in the "runner vision" of Mirror's Edge. Faith, the protagonist of ME, has a choice to pick up and fire the weapons dropped by her foes; however, doing so limits her natural parkour abilities and thus the unique pleasures of playing that game. Batman has no such choice. I personally have no patience for the ridiculous lengths that Jedi and some superheroes will go to in order to preserve the lives of mass murderers, but this is the ideal proceduralized here: even though firearms are coded as an object that enemies can pick up off the ground, the player does not have the option to interact with them.