Newsgames: Georgia Tech Journalism & Games Project

The Frightening, Real-World Strength of Channel 4's 'Sweatshop' Game

2011-07-28T16:43:19Z

Originally published on PBS's MediaShift Idea Lab on July 27, 2011.

Sweatshop is a new browser game, developed by Littleloud for Channel 4 Education, in which players fill the role of a factory floor manager in a developing nation. Taking design cues from the tower defense genre, the game tasks you with placing skilled workers and child laborers along a conveyor belt. It's also one of the most compelling and effective political games I've seen in recent years.

Orders for different kinds of garments -- including hats, shirts, bags and shoes -- come down the line, and laborers assemble these products at varying speeds according to their specialty (or lack thereof, in the case of the children). For each completed garment, the player receives a small amount of cash that is then reinvested into hiring more workers or purchasing support items such as water coolers, fans and portable toilets. Some support items increase the speed or profitability of workers within their zone of effect, while others are required to prevent their inevitable exhaustion and (later in the game) bodily harm.

Over the course of 30 stages, players are scored on the efficiency and, ultimately, character of their management decisions. This is reinforced by a trophy system, a karma meter, and a version of the classic shoulder angel/devil duo: a pitiable Child working in the factory and the comically inhumane Boss.

The Child, who is always placed on the line for free at the beginning of each stage, explains how new support items can be used to help keep workers safe. In between stages, the Child presents brief factoids on sweatshop labor around the world. The Boss harangues players at the beginning and end of each work day, only taking a break from shouting and spewing his bad-taste humor to take phone calls from the pompous fashion industry moguls who send in orders.

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A full-featured political game

Littleloud and Channel 4 previously worked together on Bow Street Runner and last year's The Curfew. The latter was essentially an interactive drama that depicts the dangers of a potential future police state in the U.K., written by comics author (and game journalism alumnus) Kieron Gillen. Because The Curfew only featured mini-games tangentially related to its full-motion video acting, I didn't know what (or how much) to expect from Sweatshop. What I found was one of the most subtle and full-featured political games that I've come across in the past few years.

For American readers who aren't exactly sure how Channel 4 works, it is a state-owned broadcaster established in the United Kingdom (UPDATE: corrected misunderstanding that it was the "fourth" UK state-owned broadcaster). Channel 4 commissions all of its programming from external companies, meaning its content has often been eclectic and cutting-edge, and over the years it has established the "4" brand as a significant name in culture and entertainment.

Channel 4 Education, the department that published Sweatshop, is primarily tasked with providing entertaining pedagogical content to U.K. teenagers. Each year, C4E picks themes especially relevant to contemporary teens and invites indie games developers from around the United Kingdom to a pitch session.

"Sweatshop was Littleloud's pitch for a game about the fashion industry, one of the key topics suggested by the broadcaster for its 2011 slate," said Simon Parkin, the game's designer, writer, and producer. "As young people generally have limited disposable income, they are likely to buy cheap, fashionable clothes from high street retailers who drive down their prices by employing sweatshop labor."

During the first five to ten levels of the game, play isn't particularly difficult enough to raise any obvious alarms about the unfair labor practices that become necessary evils in sweatshop economics. As Parkin explained, "There's no leap of abstraction to view workers as 'towers' working on targets when they enter their 'area of effect.'" (In fact, the pairing of theme and play here is so strong that you might not even notice that it's a tower defense game at first.)

But that isn't the extent of the game's argument. For this early phase of Sweatshop, the factoid text bubbles at the score screen deliver most of the crucial information about sweatshop practices. If the game stopped here, it would be comparable to PETA's Mama Kills Animals; the latter doesn't actually encapsulate its social message about the inhumanity of factory farming in play itself, relying on external links and short documentary clips.

Increasingly complex

But Sweatshop is a game that, in accordance with the genre conventions of tower defense, becomes gradually more and more complex to control over time. As its play deepens, so too does its procedural rhetoric.

The first thing players will notice is that, in order to attain gold medals on each stage, they must almost constantly run the conveyor belt at double speed. At this pace, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep on top of worker fatigue and a proper mix of skilled labor for each type of garment.

My first "a-ha" moment came when I realized that I could nab a gold medal on many levels -- and minimize the amount of clicking and thinking I needed to do -- simply by covering the belt in child labor, rather than planning for and maintaining a large force of skilled workers. These workers are cheap and replaceable, meaning they also contribute to build speed and a high "money saved" score at the end of a level. Of course, you'll still end up scoring closer to 100 percent if you replay a level many times to figure out the ideal build order for skilled workers. But why would you, if you can attain a satisfactory score with so much less effort?

The next layer of the game's rhetoric unfolds more slowly. The fact is that you can't really convey the extent of the hardships faced during a long, underpaying shift on a factory line in any medium. (You could craft a time-accurate simulation, but it would be difficult to rope many into playing it.) Instead, Sweatshop's strategy is to pull you into the antagonist's mindset; it forces you into the cold logic of sweatshop management and leaves you to reflect on your own descent into it. In the design of Sweatshop, Parkin and the others at Littleloud struck upon what Ian Bogost calls "tight coupling." According to Parkin:

It was one of those rare cases where the mechanics and the message seemed to align neatly, and once we began speaking to experts in the field of sweatshop labor it became clear that there was a huge amount of relevant content that we could bake into the game mechanics.

Baking in real-world content

Essentially, the game begins as a cartoon sketch of factory labor. You don't need to worry about worker fatigue, safety and morale. But Littleloud gradually "bakes in" more and more of this real-world content. By the end, you need to keep the floor stocked with water coolers, repairmen and fire marshals to keep your workforce alive.

And then, if you're taking the game seriously, you really start to hold it against them. You cut corners, gambling on the low odds that one or two workers outside the repairman's safety zone might harm themselves. Instead of blaming yourself for demanding too much from them, or for not planning ahead in your support item infrastructure, you get angry at your sim-workers for getting tired at the most inopportune times. It is this reduction of human beings to numbers, pesky weak flesh in the way of the profit, that is Sweatshop's frightening strength.

Of course, not everything about Sweatshop works as well as it could. For instance: radios, fans and portable toilets all contribute in some way to worker productivity. While we can certainly see the case for radios increasing morale and fans reducing fatigue, one of the game's factoid texts explicitly critiques many sweatshops for not allowing workers to use the restroom in order to maximize productivity. The support items are so helpful that, at the end of any given level, your floor is likely to look a lot more hospitable than most actual sweatshops would be.

But incongruities such as this are only a minor problem. The biggest obstacle I see is that, because it is so full-featured and modeled after commercially viable tower defense games, Sweatshop's rhetoric burns so slowly that many players might never encounter it. Even if you play to the end, it really requires a desire to attain gold medals on your part for much of its skillful mental manipulation to take effect.

That said, Sweatshop's many animated cut scenes and factual texts will arguably hit harder for the intended teenage audience than they did with me. There's not as much of a direct causal link between the game and the practice of buying cheap clothes (the stated target of the project) as one might like, but it's a huge step in the right direction for Littleloud as a studio.

Although Parkin couldn't provide details on the game's budget, he did offer a timetable for the game's production. It was pitched to Channel 4 last summer, but it didn't enter production until January. The development cycle lasted around six months with a small team of four, though other members of the studio provided ongoing support. These rough numbers attest to the thoroughness and determination of both Littleloud and Channel 4, showing what can be done when one waits until a game is fully realized before pushing it to press.

Spent's Exercise in Empathy

2011-06-12T21:40:06Z

In February, Urban Ministries of Durham (a faith-based, non-proselytizing aid organization) and McKinney (an ad agency reportedly working pro bono) launched a webgame called Spent about the hardships of poverty and unemployment. It puts players in the shoes of a single parent who has recently been put out of a job, has lost one's house to debts, and has only $1000 left in savings. The goal of the game is to make it through a month without going completely bankrupt. In many ways this game is similar to Positech's Kudos series, which tasks a player-character in his or her late teens to build a career and a social life without succumbing to bankruptcy, illness, or depression. Both games stack the odds of success heavily against their players in order to prove a point, yet neither is completely unfair, random, or reliant on the rhetoric of failure. While Kudos strives for a more complete simulation of the daily struggle to survive, Spent is more about providing a light, casually playable experience driven by current research on the costs of living.

Spent is a game about short-term personal finance, or the daily need to pinch pennies just to keep food on the table and provide a small levee against emergencies. Although the game's loose causal chain between decision and consequence (coupled with the emphasis on text-based delivery of information) provides a less pure procedural rhetorical model of poverty, it is nevertheless effective given an assumed target audience of middle-class teenagers and young adults. For many this game will merely serve as an exercise in sensitivity to the plights of the less fortunate (a balm to relieve conservative semantic engineering), perhaps inspiring a small donation at the end of the game. Instead of seeing Spent as a "call to action," it might be okay to settle for the more feasible--yet no less daunting or important--goal of educating young adults who are about to make decisions about whether to take out loans to go to college, keep an unwanted pregnancy, drop out of high school, or enter the job market. ]]>

From the outset, one of Spent's obvious strengths is its graphic design. The presentation is slick, transitioning beautifully between days, factoids, and mini-games. It might sound uncouth (or obvious), but attractiveness is ridiculously important for the retention of most casual players of webgames. While the content of the game might be seen as dry, its design and provocative textual rhetoric ("are you up for the challenge?") do a lot to pull one into the experience. Spent's opening decision is one that will be familiar to many recent high school--and, increasingly in recent years, college--graduates: wait tables, work in a factory, or temp? While the first two options serve as an introductory lesson in the trade-offs between a steady salary and tip-based labor, selecting the temp agency option surprises players with a typing proficiency test similar to one that would confront a real-life job seeker.

Spent asks its players to make a number of difficult decisions, mostly centered around family responsibility (paying for a child's advanced placement classes, school lunches, and trips to the museum) and ethical gray space (paying for a fender-bender or hitting and running). There are also a couple of choices, such as whether to get dental care for a root canal, that leave constant reminders of delinquency in the form on threatening icons above one's current funding. Unfortunately, many of these decisions have no direct feedback into the system. I've played through a number of times, and my failure to pay for the root canal or the bumped fender never came back to haunt me. Many of these decisions, such as whether or not to smoke a cigarette to relieve some stress, simply open up factoid screens that give insights into how people enter into unhealthy living or get themselves into legal trouble--they're disguised trivia questions rather than actual choices.

That said, many choices become more powerful (as if by placebo effect) through one's constant focus on the dwindling amount of money ever-present on the lefthand of the screen. Even when I know that failing to attend the funeral of a loved won't tangibly effect some kind of "sociability" or "morale" meter, I find myself more likely to bite the bullet and lose a day's worth of pay if I find myself with excess funds following a recent paycheck. Similarly, I won't think twice about denying my child an ice cream cone when I've got less than a hundred dollars left in my pocket. Spent's most interesting tradeoffs emerge from its virality model, by which players can ask their Facebook friends "for help" on key decisions. By this point, most conscientious Facebook users feel a bit of shame whenever they ask their friends to click links for help in a game; therefore, this is a decent simulation of the real quandary one faces when risking losing face or favor to ask for help in real life emergencies.

One of the weaknesses of a highly context-specific simulation of decisions that many young adults deal with already is that the available choices might contrast with one's actual experience. For instance, a Canadian friend of mine contested the game's insistence that a player own a car and deal with inefficient public transit when it breaks down. Because he had lived in bike-friendly cities with efficient train systems, this forced economic burden broke the system for him--that said, it did serve as a lesson in how differently people live in many larger cities of the United States. In my case, I'd lived for a long time in a college town where waiting tables, biking, and living on a $400/mo. rent was a perfectly feasible way to raise a child, pay off debts, and live comfortably. Of course, there are a number of reasons why it isn't easy to uproot oneself and move to a friendlier town, but it is frustrating nevertheless to be unable to customize one's play session to suit one's own local conditions. It's also somewhat strange that the game assumes that people in such situations can't take second or even third jobs (presumably having a child to care for discourages this, but there are real-world workarounds for this that are ignored).

But Spent's strengths far outweigh its shortcomings, especially compared to other newsgames that are essentially trivia exercises disguised as simulations. One screen, faced when making the decision on how far to live from a city center in order to balance rent against gas costs, is reminiscent of more complex gamey infographics such as the Buy/Rent Calculator. The game ends on a somewhat dark note--even when one avoids bankruptcy, it reminds players that rent is due the next day--and then provides an easy link for a modest donation via PayPal to help support the Urban Ministries of Durham. The only way to feel really secure by the end of the session is to have asked for help from friends every time it's an option, making Spent a procedural rhetorical argument about the intense importance of having some social connections to draw on in times of difficulty (which in turn reinforces the importance of organizations such as UMD, which gives aid to those who have no such social safety net).

The Truth in (Mostly) Black and White

2011-06-03T16:36:05Z

You Shall Know The Truth is a timed hidden object game developed by Jonas Kyratzes for the Wikileaks Stories project. You play a spy sent by the U.S. intelligence community to retrieve leaked documents and biometric data on an unnamed Wikileaks employee from his or her apartment. It's a difficult game, not in that it's particularly trying to find all of the mission-targeted data before the timer runs out but because it adds a dark, humorous edge to a genre of casual games that traditionally has no ideological bent. It is also contradictory and perhaps difficult to take seriously at times, but, taken as a whole, it's a complex work with a novel take on the intersection between politics and play. Check it out before reading on, because there are spoilers ahead.
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You Shall Know The Truth is a twisted fantasy. The apartment where the game takes place is sparse and messy. There's a creepy tinge of voyeurism to the exploration of the space, your cursor slowly scanning back and forth over living room, office, kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom. At times the line between real-world intelligence worker and cartoonish TV spy becomes blurred; the text on non-mission-critical items constantly undercuts the competency and rationality of the CIA, and it's hard not to imagine the player-character foaming at the mouth and cackling while combing the apartment's every carpet for biological material. Because the player is sent to retrieve information that we already know to have been leaked, we understand that, in some way, our mission is doomed to fail.

The game's timer is set to 999 seconds, and, though I might be wrong here, this means that it's long enough to allow the player to process every object in the apartment without running out of time. This also means that the game is dropping hints for us that it isn't actually about finding hidden objects. Nevertheless, you don't know that the first time you play it. Every object in the room has a different progress ticker, and you feel a decent amount of pressure while waiting for the ticker to slowly count off. This waiting screen briefly describes the object you've clicked on and justifies why you'd want to look at said object. You Shall Know The Truth is currently the only Wikileaks Stories game that actually includes information about specific leaks, paraphrasing their content during the verification process of mission-targeted items.

It's a clever way to weave this information into the game, giving you something to read while the progress counter ticks off. One could criticize the game for not making this text permit any other interaction besides cold reading, and it's certainly possible to stare at the progress counter instead of engaging with the content, but we can assume that anyone who might take the time to play a Wikileaks Stories game would care enough to take a look. I'm an impatient gamer, especially when a mission clock is involved, but it worked for me--I learned about a good number of leaks that I hadn't read about in other media sources (and the cable codes are included, making it easy to Google for more information elsewhere).

The game gives you additional information that helps you succeed in the mission, including a checklist of required items and even a walkthrough for the location of all of them. We can assume that most people, the first time they play the game, will complete the mission objectives and proceed toward the corresponding ending. Leaving the apartment to make your dead drop, you roam darkened streets, the walls covered in graffiti. Most of this stuff is your typical milquetoast "critical of the government" fare, defaced posters of Obama and anarchy signs. But some is specific to gaming, including an advertisement for the America's Army recruiting/training game franchise with the words "they are lying to you" scrawled through the center.

As you continue toward the designated rendezvous, voiceover that exposes a number of liberal politicians as hypocrites begins to play. The arrows that only a few moments before led directly to relevant locations become fragmented and confused, the rest of the UI flickering on and off. You experience a paranoid breakdown in a turn-based, first-person manner through the manipulation of the interface. This spiral into disarray is effective, but it wavers somewhat at the climax. At the very end, you're faced with a dark screen asking whether what you've heard is "the truth." You've got a choice, yes or no. I chose wrongly, not knowing exactly what I was supposed to be assessing (was it asking me whether what happened in the game was the truth, whether the buffoonish voiceover testimony of the politicians was the truth, or whether the content of the leaks was the truth?), and it kicked me back to the beginning screen.

The second ending I reached can be accessed by leaving the apartment before completing the mission objectives. It's not nearly as developed as the "canon" playthrough of the game, and it seems to be slightly at odds with the way that the game weaves in the content of actual leaks. If we simply leave the apartment for the "good" or righteous ending, then we're never exposed to any of the documents. Perhaps it is simply assumed that few players will attempt this course through the game without first playing through according to the mission. On attempting to exit, we're presented with a series of screens that caution, threaten, or poke fun at our decision. One states that "this is just a game" and that we shouldn't be taking ourselves so seriously, perhaps a nod toward September 12's famous tagline, "this is not a game." Another screen implies that, by abandoning our mission, our families may be in danger of retribution from the government.

Once we finally click through the many warning screens, a labor that ends up becoming more annoying than threatening, we're presented with a baffling quest into nature accompanied by cheesy guitar. To end the game, we've got to click through a number of screen describing how those suspected of treason are treated in the U.S., culminating in the presentation of an inspirational quotable. This segment didn't work for me, perhaps because I didn't personally feel scared enough by the text screens or the rest of the game to feel any relief while walking through the forest and into flower-filled fields. In contrast, I can remember the palpable sense of danger (perhaps in the form of enemy attacks or diminished resources) when double-crossing one of the two mission-giving organizations in Deus Ex: Invisible War. But in a short webgame such as this I've got no personal investment in my player-character, nothing to lose but a few minutes of clicking.

My last playthrough involved starting the game and then waiting for the mission timer to run out. At the end you're presented with a single fail screen. Its contents are somewhat disturbing, a brief explanation of the best way to cover an assassination by making it look like an accident and then pretending to be a "horrified witness" when police show up to investigate. Text at the bottom tells us that we were forced to find "an alternate method of silencing our enemies," and we are led to assume that the Wikileaks employee returned home only to be promptly murdered by the player-character. A quick search shows that this text is taken directly from a 1953 CIA document, titled "A Study of Assassination," that was released in 1997 in compliance with the Freedom of Information Act.

This incorporation of declassified information is a simple, lovely touch, but the very fact that this was information released in accordance with a highly detailed (and constantly modified) piece of actual legislation clashes with the singular, hasty manner in which the Wikileaks cables were themselves disseminated. That said, there may be a tacit argument here against the Obama administration's own modification of the FOIA. Their 2009 executive order 13526 permits the government to retroactively declare information as relevant or sensitive to national security. This means that a document can be withheld on a case-by-case basis even after it has legally passed into the mandated time period for availability and has been explicitly requested by a citizen, with minimal and opaque justification.

There are a lot of little things to love about You Shall Know The Truth, like the fact that you turn right out of the apartment when you complete the mission and left when you've chosen to ignore it--it isn't every day that we see a metaphor embedded into a binary choose-your-own-adventure. Those little shortcomings that I've already addressed aside, the game's primary ambivalence stems from the underdevelopment of its endings. The experience of its play, especially on one's first try, is heady, educational, and unsettling. Yet in its quest to explicitly endorse one ending as "responsible" or good, the game hurries a player-character we haven't quite come to feel empathy or understanding for to an unsatisfying and preachy conclusion. But maybe that's to be expected from a game that curiously borrows its title from John and demands the ultimate text-based sacrifice from its player-character. Is this the truth?

Wikileaks Blues

2011-05-24T17:56:19Z

We've been somewhat remiss in our coverage of the Wikileaks Stories series of games here on this blog. One reason is that the project has been somewhat well-covered elsewhere, and we try to focus on games that aren't being looked at by other sources. Another reason is that sometimes we've got to ruminate on how newsgames work and what they mean before we're ready to explain how they fit into the work we do. And, to be honest, we still probably don't entirely understand what the project represents, how it's different from newsgames projects we've seen in the past, or what it will mean for the future.

Obviously it's wonderful to see indie developers who haven't engaged with the genre in the past sticking their toes in the water (or their necks on the block), but it's impossible to ignore that the most timely and nuanced entry in the series thus far has come from Paolo Pedercini, a grizzled veteran. That boy has had to roll his eyes through enough of my insufferable critiques in the past, so we'll only be looking at the latter two this week and next. If you're unfamiliar with the project, Joel Goodwin's blog Electron Dance is a great place to start for links to all the games, brief analysis and comparison, and a lengthy interview with Jonas Kyratzes (one of the two Wikileaks Stories project coordinators).

Damian Connolly's Wikileakers is the most recent of the three currently-extant Wikileaks Stories games. It's clearly the most accessible, and it has, perhaps, been written off as overly simplistic. And we can see why: it's more cartoonish than the previous Wikileaks Stories games, it uses Internet slang ("pron"), marijuana jokes, and cheap one-offs at the President, and it hinges on a somewhat conservative score-chasing goal structure. There's no gray area here: Assange is our hero (as pointed out by Goodwin, it's the only game that features him as the player character), and the "propaganda model" media is trying to keep him down.

Players control a pixellated Assange as he runs back and forth in what appears to be an FBI lobby, dodging lasers and bombs. The former represent corrupt media sources, while the bombs drop from a crane ominously labeled "PR" (the bombs themselves alternately accusing the man of being a terrorist and sexual deviant). Lasers constantly track Assange, stopping briefly to intermittently fire. Players can mouse-click to place single a block labelled "free press" that will obstruct exactly one laser shot before disappearing. While the first two media lasers bear American flags, Swedish and Australian media sources are added as the player's score increases.
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The game's argument becomes apparent in the fail-state ending screen: "What (x number) of cables? Everybody focus on Assange. Pron fiend!" Throughout the play session, the Assange avatar is constantly tossing little pieces of paper around that represent leaks. But the lasers never target the leaks themselves, always "focusing" their fire on the man himself--the pieces of paper representing the leaks are left to disappear a few milliseconds after they spawn. So the message here is that the media has chosen, for whatever reason, to distract public attention away from the content of the leaks by unfairly dogging the personal (purported) shortcomings of Assange himself.

What's most interesting to me is the source of this political skinning: I keenly remember similar auto-tracking lasers from the number of times they've killed me in my favorite masocore platformers, N+ and Super Meat Boy. What's different here is the size of the level and the acrobatic capability of my avatar. In SMB, lasers and rockets can be avoided because of their placement inside narrow corridors filled with blocks to hide behind. In N+, while the levels might be rectangular and open, I can slide and jump off of walls and blocks at high speeds to throw off the lasers' tracking.

Even though Assange is our hero here, the game recognizes that he is no superhero, no ninja. The man is only human, and his ability to dodge attacks from the media is suitably, metaphorically limited. And the precious "free press" shield is hardly any help at all--after a few attempts at the game I found the most success by just ignoring it and focusing on my dodging. As with many editorial games, curious micro-rhetorics arise through accident or, perhaps, clever design: here, I found that the husks of dropped PR bombs would actually protect me from half of the lasers if I jumped over them at just the right time. I enjoyed the idea that botched attempts at slander would end up shielding Assange in the future.

But what does it say that, in Wikileakers, Assange is essentially trapped in this tiny space with so little room to breathe? It might be read as a spatial metaphor for the intense amount of public scrutiny the man has attracted. But couldn't there be a cynical counter-reading? I found myself unable to ignore thinking of the box that even Assange's supporters have placed him within. In order to maintain the idea of Assange as unalloyed hero, we're forced into a kind of tunnel vision that prevents us from accepting that any of the nasty rumors about his personal life, or questions of his ethics more generally, might in fact have some truth to them.

The game is difficult to beat. I doubt we're looking at a typical rhetoric of failure here, because that wouldn't exactly mesh with the reality of Assange's success in distributing the cables, but I definitely didn't have the patience to stick with it and reach a happy ending screen. That said, the score itself is a matter of concern for me. It seems to imply that the Wikileaks cables would stop flowing were Assange taken out of the picture, which we know to be quite untrue. Again we see this somewhat absurd notion that Assange is an Atlas of sorts, upholding truth alone, unaided by a perfectly capable staff---itself seeming like a capitulation to the very overexposure of Assange that the game hopes to critique.

Disconnected from the time of its release and the purpose of its umbrella project, this game is as capable a playable editorial cartoon as any. In fact, it's more polished and enjoyable to play than most (sporting the social media integration that we're coming to see more and more of in newsgames). But this is the kind of game we'd expect to see a week or two after the announcement of the Wikileaks Stories project. How are "democracy and truth served" by such a simple game, once we'd had three months to read and reflect on the issues that Wikileaks and Assange had raised? We must take seriously the question whether or not just any game made about Wikileaks should be considered a proper part of the Wikileaks Stories project.

Perhaps just keeping the issue on our minds is the goal, and to that end it succeeds. Yet, staring at the rotting, electrified body on the game's failure screen, I wait in vain for a text bubble that might display some modicum of self-consciousness:

"If we clap real hard, you think he'll come back to life?"

An Introduction to Micro-Rhetorics via Minecraft

2011-04-19T15:20:41Z

As a part of our work on a newsgame authoring tool, the newsgames team has been working on ways to dissect and analyze the raw components of classic videogames. One term we've used to describe the fundamental dynamics of game-player interaction is the "micro-rhetoric," which can be described as a discrete impression created by the smallest possible aspect of a mechanic or object parameter. For example, enemies moving according to a slow and predictable displacement rule will result in pattern-driven play, producing a micro-rhetoric of "routine," whereas enemies with quick and unpredictable movements will require twitchiness from players and create an impression of danger.

Even the simplest video games have the potential for numerous micro-rhetorics depending on factors such as movement speed, firing patterns, numbers of lives, and scoring variations. The classic Atari title Kaboom, which has served as a Rosetta Stone for our ludic deconstructions, contains at least 16 micro-rhetorics.

One thing that we quickly learned during our deconstructions is that individual micro-rhetorics are rarely unique. Variations on enemy health, movement, and attack speeds result in different shades of aggression and evasion while different scoring and reward structures reinforce or discourage certain patterns of play. It is the various combinations of these existing micro-rhetorics that produce unique procedural arguments. There are rarer mechanics that are particularly expressive, however. The neutral zone in Yar's Revenge has a number of rhetorical applications. It can be a shelter, or a place to hide. Retreating to it can be considered an act of cowardice or an intelligent tactical move.

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As a means of testing out our terminology and seeking out similar unique micro-rhetorics, we thought it might be productive to search for micro-rhetorics in contemporary videogames. One modern title that has won several hearts among the newsgames team is Minecraft, an independent PC game that is currently in development. The current paid beta edition of the game places players on an island populated by animals and monsters with nothing but their bare hands to keep them alive.

Unlike most videogames, which feature either a scoring system or a narrative to structure gameplay, a Minecraft player is simply left to experiment and explore the randomly generated world she finds herself in. Rhetorically, this makes the game something of a cipher as a video game's victory or scoring condition is usually central to its procedural argument. Instead, we must interpret the game's micro-rhetorics based on the potential experiences it can offer.

The player can break apart the world's terrain to receive blocks of material which can then be used to build structures or craft items. Through crafting, a player can create weapons and armor as well as various tools such as mining picks, work benches and ovens, which allow for further crafting. As a player digs deeper into the terrain, she will find more valuable materials that allow her to create more durable and complicated tools, though these valuable materials are rare and difficult to mine.

The game's main source of tension is its monster spawning system, which causes hostile creatures to appear in dark areas. When night falls in the game world, monsters appear rapidly and continuously. Most of the hostile masses die away at dawn, however, as sunlight steadily burns them. There is no limit on the number of times a player can die and re-spawn, and there is no way to permanently defeat the swarms of enemies that appear in the dark.

The relatively simple mechanics behind this premise are rhetorically rich. Monsters move swiftly, have a large amount of health, and cause considerable damage to the player with each attack even when she is protected only by rudimentary armor. Night establishes a micro-rhetoric of being menaced. Consequently, the best survival strategy is to build a shelter and wait for daybreak. There is something of Yar's neutral zone in constructing a house, though there is also a great deal of potential for artistic expression.

Players have built mansions, castles, and even scale replicas of cities in other videogames. In fact, a player could construct an impressive dwelling out of dirt, stone, and wood without ever exploring the depths of the game's randomly generated caverns. If the player hopes to obtain the most complicated items (like a jukebox with a diamond core), she will have to brave the darkness and risk losing track of daylight as she digs deeper into the ground. This establishes a straightforward dynamic where risk increases in a nearly direct correlation to potential rewards.

There are more specific, situational micro-rhetorics that arise in gameplay as well. Green monsters known as "creepers" wander the world and explode upon close proximity to the player, doing catastrophic damage to the player and destroying most nearby terrain. While it is possible to kill a creeper with melee weapons, nine times out of ten, they will explode before the player can deal a coup de grâce. The preferred method of dispatching creepers is a bow and arrow, though ammunition for such weapons is sparse and creepers can sustain quite a beating before dying.

The player can hide from creepers for a time, but, unlike most monsters, they are immune to sunlight, all-but ensuring an eventual confrontation. There are wrinkles to this scenario however. If the player is building a house or other structure, she will be motivated to prevent the creeper from detonating near her construction project. This situation transforms the creeper into a threat to the player's creativity, producing a micro-rhetoric of suppression, or censorship.

It is worth noting that Minecraft can be set to a "peaceful mode" where monsters vanish from the game world and hazards such as lava do not damage players. What remains is a platform for building and exploration, not unlike Legos. While peaceful mode Minecraft does has ludic potential, it is no longer a game so much as an elaborate toy, or a virtual world. Even in this state, Minecraft does exert something comparable to a micro-rhetoric on users. An unexplored, randomly generated frontier makes a strong appeal to players' curiosity, urging them to seek out the unknown.

In many respects, this argument for exploration is "purer" than most other titles featuring similar micro-rhetorics of exploration. The horizons of massively multiplayer role-playing games such as World of Warcraft will have inevitably been discovered and charted by other players, beta-testers, and developers. Similarly, the unexplored world maps in games like The Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy are identical from cartridge to cartridge. Furthermore, while players are required to explore these worlds to slay dragons and rescue princesses, they generally exert very little change on the environment over their quests. Indeed, it is the player's ability to alter the land she discovers that sets Minecraft apart from other games with randomly generated levels. It is not only a micro-rhetoric of exploration, but one of settlement.

Inventive as it is, this micro-rhetoric does not obviously translate to newsgames. Such a complicated system could not be easily applied to current event or reportage games, which strive for timeliness, and by extension simplicity. The subjectivity of the system also places itself at odds with editorial games or tabloid games which strive to impress a clear and concise opinion on players. Many video gamers are perplexed by the lack of a clear objective or system of progression and topics such as "I don't get Minecraft," or "What is the point of Minecraft?" are a frequent sight on gaming news sites and message boards. That said, the sense of immersion that Minecraft's randomly generated worlds offer might be a highly desirable trait for documentary games.

Quit Smoking: Comparing Image and Interaction

2011-04-13T16:13:09Z

A few months ago, the above image by the artist ReClark Gable made its way around the internet. Note that this is not a screenshot. ReClark authored it as a still image.

This image communicates without interaction nor gameplay. Instead, visual parallels imply a mapping to components in the classic game Breakout, with lungs in the place of bricks, and a cigarette taking the place of a paddle. The idea of the picture is clear enough: smoking destroys the lungs, and the reader/player is instructed to "Quit Smoking." Through association with a classic videogame, it might even be read as suggesting that smoking is fun, or (drumroll please...) addictive.

Although this isn't the first appearance of the concept - this version by Piercey predates ReClark's by 3 years - something about this latest attempt resonated with people in a way that previous attempts didn't, with the image receiving over 350,000 pageviews within a few weeks.

Piercey's take, for comparison, received roughly 1/100 as many views per year as ReClark Gable's received each week. Gable's looks more like a playable game. The bricks fit tightly together. The ball's trail suggests its movement. There seem to be enough bricks there to play for awhile.

What if it did exist as a game? To answer this, I made a playable version.

To be clear: the goal of making this playable version was not to entertain, nor to persuade, but instead to better understand the role of interaction in the communication and interpretation of meaning. (We like to assume when we researching games with meaning that it's significant that the artifacts studied are actual games, and not just static images.)

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Implied Gameplay Changes

There are a few changes to gameplay, which, though not derived directly from the image, seemed more consistent with the image's message than the standard Breakout conventions:

Without a lives display, an interpretation of one life/play (reset bricks each ball) and infinite lives/play (never reset bricks) would be equally consistent with the image. The latter design was selected, to represent permanent damage to the lungs. The former would seem to suggest that quitting smoking results in immediately undoing any damage done, as opposed to only ceasing the cause of further damage.

Traditionally, destroying all bricks a game like this one results in victory, advancement, or even just another set of bricks to be broken for points. However, an anti-smoking game (an unambiguous reading thanks to the "Quit Smoking" text in the corner) should not treat smoking until the lungs vanish as "winning at smoking." Instead, the player can win by dodging the ball when the game starts - winning at smoking, according to this implementation, means not starting.

Numerous other mechanics from Breakout were stripped because they seemed tangential to image or its message. Among them: paddle shrink upon hitting the back wall, bricks worth variable points based on depth (scoring, in general), ball speed increases due to depth reached or number of consecutive hits, and discrete (rather than continuous) paddle angle segments.

To find out what people read into the image-as-a-game, rather than the game-as-an-image, I posted the game to Kongregate and Newgrounds. For comparison to responses and discussion over the original image, the Reddit thread is a decent starting point.

Player Assumptions

Many responses did not display an understanding of the nature of the work done here, suggesting that particle effects, power-ups, and so on would help make it a better game. This is of course partly a function of audience (self-identifying videogame players), and largely a matter of context (anyone at a Flash entertainment site is in the mood for entertainment, and likely to interpret their experiences through that lens).

This is somewhat unfortunate, because it means that many players, rather than interacting with the game in search of meaningful interpretation, set about to achieve the traditional goal of clearing all blocks, like so:

That takes nearly 40 minutes to do.

Not particularly evident in the original ReClark Gable image is that drawing lungs at this fidelity requires a lot of bricks: 994. Compare that to the 104 bricks in Atari 2600 Super Breakout (8 rows of 13). Many of the comments noted the game's length, either as a criticism of the game ("too long"/"boring") or within the context of the game's message ("Man it takes FOREVER to kill yourself by smoking"). Curiously, "FOREVER" here seems to be based on comparison to other online gameplay experiences, rather than real-time; if cigarettes made our lungs completely disintegrate after 40 minutes, that would be quite fast indeed.

Players that went for a cleared board also noted that, eventually, images took shape that look nothing like lungs. Here, I'm tearing away at what appears to be two island nations:

That point is correct: the longer the game is played, the more the concept seems to break down, or fall into the background. Does this mean that the opening set up - effectively, the still image - is doing the work, and playing only interferes with the message?

On the other hand, understanding the intended meaning of a game with a message often involves winning at it. The longer someone plays this particular game, the more certain it is that they are not winning and have not caught on to the point. This was especially an issue in this situation since the feedback on player direction is delayed, subtle, and contrary to clear convention.

The original Breakout has an on-screen score display demonstrating that each brick removed represented progress, with bricks closer to the back wall awarding more points. In this way, the player gets coaxed toward hitting the back wall, which initiates a breakout in the classic game. (Achieving breakout by hitting the back in Breakout causes the ball to only bounce upward, instead of only downward, until it next touches the paddle. This mechanic was dropped for QuitSmoking as tangential to its message.)

Because score tends to demonstrate incremental advancement toward some greater reward or goal, including a rising score would not have made sense here anyway. However an increasingly negative score, going down with each lung brick broken, could have spelled out more clearly and immediately to players that the goal of the game isn't to destroy all bricks. Without any score numbers to provide granular feedback, players acted on the assumption that what they previously learned through score reinforcement in similar games fits here too: brick removal means forward progress.

A Series of Generated Images

The longer the player keeps the ball in play, the more bricks get knocked away, producing a series of images, one of which (in theory) could be the exact same arrangement in ReClark Gable's original depiction. However even if that exact same brick configuration appears, is it experienced the same when we're the cause of it? If nothing else, there is surely a difference between the image being one of many passing states, vs the totality of what is ever presented.

Also worth consideration is that the player has a purely subtractive effect on bricks. They can be taken away, but never added nor moved. A side effect of this is that only subsets of the starting bricks are possible images - combinations of the 994 bricks being either present or destroyed. Naturally, physical collision mechanics make many of those theoretically potential configurations less likely than others (or impossible, such as a hole in the center of a thick ring). The lack of precise control over the ball tends to yield uneven edges.

Were a more geometric or clean figure hidden deliberately in the bricks, as say a key or a smiley face, even a few imperfections or incorrect hits could disturb the image. However since the hidden image in this game is the crispy, tar-destroyed lungs picture that we've seen in so many anti-smoking campaigns, any image of lungs with the bottom and edges unevenly carved away produces a similar enough image to recall the intended memory.

Missing Metaphor

As a quick aside: is the ball in this game "poisonous smoke"?

It is kept between the lungs and the cigarette, and it is what does damage to the lungs, so in terms of its role, the ball being smoke functionally makes sense. Representationally and behaviorally, however, the ball looks and acts in no way like smoke.

Does it matter whether it's smoke, or pure abstraction that steadily delivers damage to the lungs from the cigarette?

Attacking

The sensation of playing ball-and-paddle games is not so much like attacking, as it is like juggling. To this point, the original static image suggests a more direct attack than playing the game does. In the constructed snapshot it's on a one-way course for the lungs, though in play it's a constant back-and-forth.

Attacking isn't necessarily only shooting, Pinball games - digital as well as analog - have long contained enemies to be "shot" or "hit" with the ball. Because pinball paddles rapidly accelerate a ball, it seems more like an attacking mechanism than simply keeping the ball in play. Here, in Super Pinball: Behind the Mask on SNES, the Wizard board contains an enemy that can be "shot" (top-right):

Perhaps an anti-smoking game modeled after pinball, with cigarettes for paddles and lungs for bumpers, might hint at a more aggressive and direct attack on the organs than this Breakout metaphor.

Closing Thoughts

When Alleyway came out on Game Boy, and there were levels arranged to mimic the sprites of classic characters, did we think of the activity as killing Mario or Koopas? At some basic level, we of course realized that the part we were breaking corresponds to his leg, or his head, as when eating Animal Crackers, or biting into Ninja Turtles heads purchased from the ice cream man. Though there is a dramatic differences between recognizing some part as represented, and thinking of the representation as the part represented.

Did any fan or player of Super Mario Land ever refuse to advance in Alleyway, on account of not wanting to hurt Mario, or out of concern that doing so might cost a life?

CheneyStar: This is Not a Newsgame

2011-04-11T16:35:02Z

"Is this a newsgame?" isn't a question that comes up too often in our project studio meetings. In Newsgames: Journalism at Play, Bogost, Ferrari, and Schweizer clearly outline the various categories and qualities of different newsgames, and it's usually easy to identify new newsgames through their classification system. At the same time, it can be difficult to take stock of a title with newsworthy elements without playing it.

So when I heard about CheneyStar, a downloadable title available on Xbox Live's Indie Games Channel featuring the likeness of Dick Cheney, I decided to investigate. The strange thing I played is definitely not a newsgame. It isn't even about the news, save for the fact that it features the pixelated face of a controversial ex-Vice President as its primary antagonist. It is a useful example, however, of what the border between newsgames and other games can look like.

The game is based on the arcade classic, Sinistar, which plays similarly to Asteroids in that you navigate a space-ship through a 2-dimensional space while destroying asteroids and enemy fighter ships. The twist is that you also have to destroy a roving robotic battle station. In CheneyStar said battle station resembles Dick Cheney's head re-imagined as a terminator.

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After you defeat the CheneyStar on the asteroid map, you must defeat him again in a vertical scrolling section. Mechanically, this is a more complex affair than a typical political flash game or an interactive editorial cartoon. The graphics and sounds, including 3D assets, are also elaborate and polished.

These mechanics could have easily supported a newsgame. Cheney is a polarizing political figure whose comments, behavior, and politics have placed him in the crosshairs of the media many times. Presenting him as a demonic, floating battle station cut from the same cloth as Star Wars' Deathstar may be construed as an accusation of imperialism and evil, but that's as far as the metaphor goes.

The sprite for the player's ship could have been a political figure with opposing viewpoints, and the player's gunfire could be represented as legislation Cheney opposed. The asteroids could be represented by logs for republican business interests, and the other enemy ships could be represented as other members of Bush's cabinet. But CheneyStar does none of this. Save for Cheney's propensity for profanity (the CheneyStar constantly abuses the player while floating around the map) and professing his hatred for liberals, the developer does nothing political with its source material.

There is supposedly a sound-bite about shotgun shooting to be heard, though I never encountered it. The asteroids are rocks, the bullets merely bullets, and the floating robotic head of Dick Cheney is just the floating robotic head of Dick Cheney.

In defense of the developer Johnny Death Games, they never present CheneyStar as a newsgame or announced their intention to make any kind of editorial or political point with the title, and randomness pervades the entire experience. The first time the player starts up the game, rather than receiving any kind of tutorial or even seeing a traditional title screen, I was prompted to "kill the gringos!" in a horizontal scrolling shooter where I played as a bikini-clad Venezuelan woman firing a machine gun. After several rounds of this, the disembodied head of Hugo Chavez flies by the screen restoring my health, and then CheneyStar appears and kills me. You are then prompted to play the actual game.

Again, this is imagery with political potential, but it is presented without any arguments, and the bizarre experience that results is like a botched punch-line.

Being the Zangief Kid

2011-04-06T14:21:48Z

There's a single reason Casey Heynes commands our respect. It's not for what he did, even though what he did is what rechristened him in the waters of the Internet--anyone who's spent a little time on the wrestling mat knows how trivial it is to pick up someone half your own size, even if it's deadweight. No, our respect comes from what Casey didn't do. He didn't kick or spit on the bully while he was down, he didn't threaten the cameraman, and he didn't pump his fists triumphantly in the air at passersby. After his momentary, violent outburst (perhaps a necessary evil of adolescence), the Zangief Kid walked away.

Zangief Kid - The Game is a fairly sophisticated work of tabloid game flame-bait, reasonably well-integrated into Twitter and Facebook and sporting its own rankings board. Built in Unity, presumably because the subject demands a schlocky presentation in low-poly 3D, the game presents players with a short stretch of recycled school hallway and a horde of scrawny bullies to wade through. It's not an accurate spatial recreation of the outdoor area where the confrontation took place, and it ignores the important contextual detail of fellow students walking by to witness the event. It's side-scrolling brawler boilerplate.

And this certainly isn't the first time we've seen school violence captured in videogame form. As in the case of Super Columbine Massacre RPG's derivatives, we can't deny the "commentary" or satire that's at least nominally intended by its creators. And their right to creation is equally undeniable, even if, as Gonzalo Frasca has written before, we must always interrogate our decision to make a game about an event such as this one. It also makes sense to view Zangief Kid - The Game as a conceptual polar opposite of Jordan Magnuson's recent notgame Loneliness, which deals directly (if weakly) with the general social alienation that we can assume to be much more prominent in Casey's life than momentary episodes of bullying.

On a surface level, the game's procedural rhetoric is clearly stated on its title screen "warning" label: "You can only hit after you get hit. That's the bullying retribution rule." The Zangief Kid can only attack once his "health bar" is depleted by three punches from a bully, at which point the space bar will execute a signature pile-driver. When players reach an arbitrary end to the school hallway zone, they are lauded for "crush(ing) the bullies with a sense of vengeance." If this were the game's sole rhetorical move, as the game's creators seem to believe, then we could safely file this newsgame away as teaching us nothing new about the genre.

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One aspect of the game, however, requires further examination. Like any reasonable arcade-style game, it has to calculate the player's score in some way. Here the creators chose to keep the somewhat bizarre equation completely transparent, recalling the algorithmic openness of Rohrer's Crude Oil:

Score = {time left on the 90-second clock} + {(bullies attacked x 7) - (times punched)}

When one considers the combined facts that one must eat three hits to kill a bully, spend half a second in slow-motion "recovery" mode, and burn roughly over a half second for the pile-driver animation, it becomes clear that attacking bullies can, optimally, only net the player two points per takedown.

It's possible to attain a fairly high score, in the 40s, by playing the game as a pacifist (giving the lie to the end screen's celebration of "vengeance"). For all but the most dedicated players, it makes the most sense to simply dodge the enemies and make a bee-line for the level's exit. The leaders on the ranking boards, however, have cracked the game's possibility space to attain an optimal score, somewhere around 51 seconds (by my estimate, this entails a near-constant horizontal motion punctuated by exactly five bully takedowns). What do we do with information like this?

Scoring has been a near-constant thorn in the side of our research studio during the (ongoing) development of The Cartoonist. It's not entirely clear if and when a game's score should be considered part of its procedural rhetoric or something ancillary, when it should be ignored or even removed, or how to judge (or abstract) its design and integration into a game's goal structure. Scoring is certainly constrained by explicit rules that can be analyzed and critiqued, but it nevertheless often feels arbitrary. Playing "for score" is different from playing to "survive," "finish," or "win." What percentage of a game's players actually pay attention to score, and does that percentage vary by depth, genre, or the presence of multiplayer functionality?

We can certainly say that the scoring in Zangief Kid - The Game makes it an entirely more interesting artifact, but might it not chafe against how the rest of the game feels or how we feel about its modeling of the real-world event? The more we think about the algorithm, the less sense it makes as a simulation. Being the Zangief Kid isn't about optimizing a ludic reward system. It's not about vengeance or dodging the never-ending swipes of a flood of scrawny bullies. Being the Zangief Kid is about a momentary lapse in judgment, brought on by the dual gazes of a camera and passing girls, resulting in a dangerous act of retaliation that we instinctively recoil from in discomfort and concern while understanding completely.

The invocation of "just fun" on the game's opening screen isn't the defense of a speech act. It's an excuse, one for being completely incapable of capturing even a sliver of Casey's experience. The lesson to be learned here is that Frasca's initial questioning of whether or not to make a game about a violent, personal event can be taken even further: the design of a scoring system in a procedural rhetorical or newsgame context is also a matter of taste and judgment, not to be taken lightly.

The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves

2011-02-28T17:31:55Z

Corporation, Inc. is a SimTower-inspired game published by Armor Games. It positions the player as a CEO, with power not only to hire, fire, and promote but also to build and upgrade the office building floor by floor. In the current media climate's skepticism toward the merits of big business - between bailouts, unemployment, corruption, and political influence - what might this game have to say about business as usual?

The game begins by tasking the player with 32 objectives, which serve a tutorial function. The completion of each task earns free money, with the tasks ranging from "Use WASD to move the camera" to "Add a new elevator" or "Build 15 floors." These training objectives seem neutral enough, except to note that they impose massive growth - it's not really an option for the player to run a tiny 4-8 person start-up, or a smaller mom and pop shop, without giving up a ton of free money and being continually pestered to advance in the objectives.

The business simulation is fairly straightforward. Hire workers to increase cash flow, hire supervisors to increase worker efficiency, and hire janitors/IT to maintain the building. Additional roles such as researcher (decreases wait time before gaining access to new promotional ranks), HR worker (improves happiness, keeping workers in the office longer hours), and Accountant (increases financial value of every worker) give the office more diversity. But, without time pressure, these merely become a way to slightly optimize how quickly the player progresses towards an unclear, undefined goal.

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That HR workers improve happiness, and that happiness has real financial value in the workplace, similar to the function of office decorations in the game. Adding plants, paintings, and (classified as decoration) water coolers or coffee machines produce consistent boosts to employee morale. For every 20 employees, a cat can curiously be added to the office, also boosting happiness (I know of small companies that share the office space with a cat, but this seems to run counter to the litigation-shy decision-making typical of a big company).

It's worth wondering: "How does hiring each accountant increase the cash flow of every employee?" Are they saving employees from wasting time keeping their own books? Perhaps they are rethinking and optimizing cash flow within the business, or making smarter decisions about company investments? In a darker reading, the accountants could be cooking the books, or perhaps strategizing about overseas tax shelters. At no point during play was I able to find information to make this clear, and their animation onscreen of mindlessly jamming on a keyboard didn't help.

There's no opportunity to select nor determine through gameplay the type of business that the player's corporation is in. It's a one-size-fits-all, could-be-any-company generic work environment filled with "Workers" that are working. Though this is most likely an abstraction adopted to free the developers from per-industry nuances, leaving details to player imagination, as a stretch it might be interpreted as reinforcing the idea that all corporations are indistinguishable from one another.

The artwork, done by Flash animator Jimp, seems to have more to say than the game's mechanics. People working at computer terminals rock back and forth, jamming on keys, and as they do paper flies out the back of the machine into a bottomless trashcan behind the desk. Their work seems wasteful, and it's not clear what, if anything, they're doing or producing of value. When supervisors stand behind employees to motivate them, they don't offer encouragement, but rather go through an animation beating the employees over the back with a black baton.

Presumably - although the exact effect is hard to read through the busy action and interface - the beatings would reduce employee happiness; however, since that is the only employee efficiency number depicted, the beatings are likely increasing worker happiness. The art, which seems blatantly critical of the business world, seems functionally disconnected from the fairly neutral game mechanics and fiction.

In the long run, the way rooms of employees get upgraded to help employees of a particular type encourages placing employees of similar kind in the same room, although this seems more a side effect of a game-simplifying contrivance than a message about business. As with any game involving cash flow, the player has to take a hit to the day's earnings to increase money in the long run, although the way it's presented here - especially with lack of competitive or time pressures - there's really no way to not get this right just by obeying the tutorial objectives.

What is the game like after the objectives? Unfortunately, the game breaks too frequently for me to offer any answer to that question at this time. Every one of my play attempts ended with the game state getting trapped in a tight loop, an elevator getting stuck above the building, and/or a background graphic not updating. Frequently, mouse control would cease working for onscreen the buttons, requiring clicking to and from other windows to regain control over the menus. This breakage is an unfortunate reminder of the complexity in software development, and that when a company outpaces what it can do correctly, the message or meaning can get buried beyond consumer reach. There is arguably a meta reading to the game's technical failures, though: did the company not have enough HR workers and office decorations to keep the developers happy?

Perhaps there were there not enough supervisors beating them?

Brainstorming Games for Wikileaks Stories

2011-02-22T15:32:36Z

The treatment of Wikileaks by the American press has been troublesome on many levels, but the most saddening fact is that -- among all the commotion -- the actual content of the leaks has been largely ignored. Whenever Wikileaks is discussed, what gets the most attention is simply that it exists, that it embarrasses the United States government, and the question of whether Julian Assange is a sex offender.

Video games on the topic to date have underscored this: the most popular game, Wikileaks: The Game, simply depicts Julian Assange stealing documents from President Obama, without any apparent interest what those documents contain. It's a tabloid game, focused entirely on the colorful personalities involved (in this case, a shadowy Assange and a Barack Obama literally sleeping on the job).

Another popular game of the same stripe is Uncle Sam vs. Wikileaks, in which the player, as Uncle Sam, must punch Wikileaks servers to destroy them while blocking projectile-like "classified documents"; when the player is hit with a document, a jokey headline appears onscreen ("Wikileaks: Uncle Sam Doesn't Wash His Hands After Using the Bathroom"). The fact that no actual leaks appear in the game strikes me as a tremendous missed opportunity, and indicative of larger coverage of the Wikileaks story. The revelation that, for instance, the United States is actively undermining international action on climate change, is almost completely ignored and unreported in the American media, with the unfortunate result that -- at least in America -- Wikileaks' efforts have largely been in vain. For all the persecutions that it suffers, its work has so far failed to meaningfully engage the American people.

Wikileaks Stories, a new initiative from the gaming blog Gnome's Lair and indie designer Jonas Kyratzes, proposes to change this. The main site touts itself as a place "where independent game designers use their artform in the service of freedom and democracy, transforming the information revealed by Wikileaks into computer games." It's a powerful idea, and one that could potentially demonstrate some of the unique capabilities of newsgames.

Unfortunately, video games take a long time to make, so we're unlikely to see much quality content before several months (editor's note: excepting Leaky World). Luckily, Wikileaks seems poised to remain relevant in the news for some time, not least because only a small fraction of its roughly 250,000 diplomatic cables have been released. At least a handful of games for the initiative appear to be under development, at least one of which will be interactive fiction, but we'll have to wait to see the full extent of Wikileaks Stories.

In the meantime, I'd like to propose a couple of ideas for future games based on Wikileaks' revelations. These ideas range in genre and scope, but they're all primarily designed to get players thinking about the actual facts that Wikileaks has uncovered, and not simply the controversy that surrounds the organization. Given a little imagination, virtually any one of the leaks can be turned into a meaningful newsgame, and with any luck we'll be seeing more indie developers working with the Wikileaks Stories initiative in months to come.

]]> The U.S.'s Secret Bombings in Yemen:

The Leak: the President of Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh, claimed responsibility for the military actions against Al Qaeda forces that were actually carried out by the United States. While Saleh has claimed bombings as his own and taken advantage of U.S. military intelligence, he has refused to allow U.S. ground forces into his country. At least one of the bombings killed a large number of innocent women and children along with Al Qaeda fighters, and the media had suspected that the United States was involved.

The Game:
Half tactics, half real-time strategy. Reminiscent of a cross between Gonzalo Frasca's September 12th and the old Syndicate games.

You see a top-down view of a city, not dissimilar to September 12th. However, the game world is much larger, extending far beyond the boundaries of the screen (you scroll across the world with a mini-map and scrolling screen edges). A large number of people are milling around -- some unknown percentage of whom are terrorists. The terrorists are not visibly distinct in any way. If left to their own devices, they will eventually begin launching attacks -- both against the United States and the government of Yemen.

You play as President Saleh, the Yemeni leader. You are managing two variables: money and credibility. You must run counter-terrorirst operations against Al Qaeda before they can carry out destructive attacks. Specifically, you must carry out intelligence operations to identify the terrorists (making them visibly distinct on your map for a certain period of time), and attack operations to destroy them. However, your own capabilities are limited, and you lack the resources to carry out many operations alone. Hence, there are two types of operations you can execute: those of the Yemeni military, and those of the U.S. military. Each type of operation has a range of options, from a single cruise missile to a full infantry assault. Selecting a military operation causes the mouse cursor to become a targeting reticule. Click an area of the map to launch the operation, either killing anyone in the way (an attack) or revealing the terrorists in the area (intelligence).

Using the United States military to attack Al Qaeda doesn't cost you any money, but it can cost you credibility if civilians are killed in the operation. Using your own military is expensive and less effective (due to the lower-tech equipment), but comes at no cost to your credibility. Your credibility and money will both recharge slowly over time, although any successful attacks carried out by Al Qaeda can severely damage either.

You must eradicate all of the Al Qaeda terrorists. If your credibility is low, there is a chance that the full story will leak out at any time, cementing your reputation as an American puppet and dooming your chances of re-election.

Shell's Grip on the Nigerian Government

The Leak: Oil giant Shell, in its maneuvers to sweeten Nigeria's then-upcoming Petroleum Industry Bill, offhandedly mentions to the U.S. Ambassador that it has inserted staff into all the main ministries of the Nigerian government. Shell also trades intelligence with the U.S. government on the activity of Nigerian militants, who have engaged in damaging sabotage operations and kidnapping.

The Game: A turn-based strategy game, with heavy influence from the Grow series.

You see a cross-section of the Nigerian government, with each ministry and legislative chamber arranged in a hierarchy. The Petroleum Industry Bill is slowly working its way through the government, one ministry or chamber per turn. The petroleum bill contains some aspects that are positive (for you, at least), and some that aren't. The positive and negative elements of the bill are represented by red and green halves of the bill: the thicker the green part, the more positive the bill is for you.

You play as Shell, trying to make the Petroleum Industry Bill as positive for you as possible. Luckily, you have a contact at almost every level of the Nigerian government, as well as the U.S. embassy. Each turn, you choose which of your contacts to call on. Your contact does something to help you, but the effects of this help are often unpredictable. As in the Grow games, the effects vary depending on your timing and the actions you've taken thus far. For example, when you call the U.S. Ambassador, he will contact the Nigerian President, who will in turn pressure the Nigerian Speaker of the House -- a potentially powerful move, provided that the House hasn't already passed the bill. A good move can drop negative aspects of the bill and add positive ones, while a bad move can have the opposite effect. You have eight turns, and you are scored on your level of success in the end.

An unpredictable factor in the game is the outside presence of militants, who can launch attacks and reduce your score drastically unless they are pacified early in the game (you need to have called the U.S. embassy and the Nigerian Defense Ministry, a powerful combination). Other contacts you can call on include the House, the Senate, the Ministry of Petroleum Resources, and the state-owned Nigerian National Petroleum Company.

The game is only slightly less trial-and-error than the Grow games, as you can see which chamber/ministry is currently considering the Petroleum Industry Bill and act accordingly. For example, it wouldn't make much sense to influence a legislative chamber that's already passed the bill -- unless you know that it can have effects elsewhere.

Spying on the UN

The Leak: This was one of the better-reported leaks in the diplomatic cables. Under Secretaries of State Condoleeza Rice and now Hillary Clinton, the State Department has been asking diplomats to collect information on UN personnel -- everything from contact information to email passwords, credit card numbers, and frequent flyer numbers.

The Game: An educational ARG (alternate reality game) that will involve real-world research, sending emails, and "hacking" into email accounts.

You're a young diplomat with a shaky grasp of world history. You receive an assignment from Hillary Clinton, asking you to gather sensitive information on a (fictitious) United Nations representative from a (real) country. You're given several contacts, reachable by email, who can help you find the information you need. One contact is a computer hacker, another is a gossip-monger, another is an expert on local history, etc.

In reality, of course, sending an email to one of these "contacts" simply sends it to a keyword-search program, which replies with pre-written responses to your input. It also happens that the UN representative you're researching has a long, complex career that is intimately bound with the recent political history of his/her country.

To walk through a short example:

You're investigating a UN representative from an Eastern European country with a history of instability. You email your hacker contact to ask about email passwords. Your contact replies that the government networks are extremely well-protected, but that, if you can find details of your target using an unsecured network during the last few years, you'll have a better chance of finding something.

You do some independent research and discover that, due to rioting in 2007, much of the government was forced to flee the capital. You can't figure out where the government went during this time, however. You ask your historian contact, who tells you that many members of the government, including your target, relocated to a small town a few hundred miles from the capital. You send this location, along with the relevant time period, to your hacker contact. Using this information, the hacker is able to find a login and password for your target's personal Yahoo account.

The account, naturally, was created specifically for the Wikileaks Stories game, and contains a number of historically-relevant "personal emails" from the relevant time period. You can actually log into this account -- though you can't change anything -- and find other personal information hidden among the historical data there. In particular, you find extensive correspondence with the (fictitious) personal assistant of a (real) former minister who resigned amid corruption charges. Your target and the assistant seem to have had a bitter falling-out. You ask your gossip contact for more information, and you learn that the assistant has been writing a blog with embarrassing personal details about his former colleagues. You can read the blog, of course, and you may even decide to email the assistant directly...

The investigation can go on like this, with any number of other possibilities. The trick is that "spying" on somebody requires a fairly deep understanding of his or her life and history. Combine this with the illicit thrill of snooping on real email accounts and sending real emails to unknown, possibly unfriendly contacts, and you have a strong basis for an educational game. Additionally, the fact that playing the game feels so unethical will underscore the seriousness of what our diplomats are really doing (though in a less dramatic fashion).

Super Mario BP Oil Spill

2011-02-15T15:07:20Z

Super Mario BP Oil Spill is a flash game whose title exactly describes its content. It is also an example of the importance of timeliness with newsgames, as upon its release in early December 2010 on Newgrounds, many online reviewers immediately pointed out that the game was "so six months ago." Nonetheless, the game attempts to recontextualize the BP Oil Spill of 2010 as one of the many problems that only Mario can solve.
]]> The game's visual style is an effective recreation of Mario in an underwater level as seen in 1985's Super Mario Bros., blocky pixels and all. The difference of course is that there are Mario-style pipes spewing oil from the sea floor to the surface, and it's up to Mario to plug the pipes. Thus, the metaphor is complete. The fact that pipes and plumbing figure largely in both the oil spill situation and in the world of Mario is enough to make the visual pun work, and so the oil spill being translated into a Mario game has obvious thematic resonance. After this point, however, the game begins to break down.

The connection between the spill and Mario is one that could be easily made by a single panel cartoon, and, in fact, it had already been made before in the form of a YouTube video. So what does SMBPOS add to the equation, after being translated into an actual game? The mechanics of the game require Mario to avoid living fish (Cheep-Cheeps, in Mario parlance), until the fish are killed by the oil. Mario may grab dead fish and then use them to plug the spewing pipes. The other conceit of the game is that BP is out to stop Mario. BP-emblazoned helicopters, submarines, and trident-wielding divers all seek to destroy our hero. This system results in a lightly fun game.

However, while the concept of fixing the BP oil spill by stuffing the pipes with Cheep-Cheep corpses is hilarious, the game does not have much to offer thematically after the initial visual pun. The central issue of the BP oil spill was the fact that it took a months for BP and the US government to come up with a way to stop the flow of oil into the ocean - a concept that is ripe for reinterpretation as a puzzle game. The conflict of SMBPOS, though, is that Mario must simply avoid being destroyed by the villainous BP, who apparently would like to see the world drenched in oil, rather than the real world BP who were desperately seeking an end to a PR nightmare.

So while the game is reasonably fun, as an aspiring newsgame SMBPOS's only merit is the derivative visual rhetoric that is entirely summed up by the game's title screen, if not the title of the game alone. The entrance of BP and the disaster into the thematic world of Mario is interesting, but no procedural techniques are used to further the rhetoric and nuances of this metaphor. All this on top of this fact: in the world of online news, the BP oil spill was ancient history.

UAV Game: Differing Interpretations

2011-02-11T18:47:29Z

A couple of nights ago, I received a call from Remy Karns, a student at UC Berkeley. He had a 3-page design document (uav-designdoc.pdf), but needed help with implementation. Seven hours later, I had UAV Game [Play in Flash] implemented according to his spec.

The short time frame matters here because it means that after the document hand off, he and I had minimal communication, except to confirm resolution to ambiguity and conflicts in the plan. We didn't have time for iterative feedback, nor mock-ups and meetings to unify vision. Remy and I weren't necessarily on the same page.

(Disclaimer: although UAV Game bears resemblance to the newsgame September 12 by Powerful Robot, it serves a different rhetorical function. Remy hadn't seen or heard of September 12 until I mentioned it after implementing his design.)

All three parties - Remy as designer, myself as developer, and the players (shared via NewGrounds, Kongregate, and social networks) - have different ideas about what the project means.

Remy's intent as designer was to "allow for player driven narrative to take place," based on the idea that "targets and followers don't denote any type of specific individual, save for their function within the game... The context of the game is left open to the player." From his design document:

"UAV is not a game with a moral or a message - it exists solely as a game entity... Identifiers for NPCs are left neutral to allow player driven narratives to emerge. Targets are targets, which do not denote their occupation... Therefore, the player may just as easily interpret the game as an American UAV eliminating a leader of a religious terrorist organization in the middle east, or as a secret spy plane used to quell a political uprising in a foreign country, or a disillusioned and guilty UAV pilot hoping to right his wrongs by killing the corrupt commander who had blatantly committed war crimes."

However, everyone who has played this game and spoken with me about it has assumed that the target was a terrorist.

I suspect that the designer's expected interpretation is lost because we typically treat assumptions as true unless definite contradiction arises. We don't hold as equally probable what seems likely (the UAV is a US military aircraft attacking terrorist targets in the Middle East, since this has been its most publicized deployment) and what could possibly be without a violation of consistency (UAV turned on its own forces). The latter is how plot twists and detective novels surprise us - so that while a less obvious role could be revealed to the user on the end screen, without doing so the possibility is likely ignored.

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As the developer, I thought that the meaning would be interpreted based first on instructions given, followed by what is learned about the scoring over multiple plays. During the first round the player would act only on the stated instructions, looking for the red target then shooting at it when fewer civilians show up in the scanner. After being surprised by the end screen asking for a report of casualties, I figured that the user would think the goal was to correctly estimate casualty numbers. That the user's casualty number guesses are shown next to the actual figures, on the same screen as the overall score, suggests that those numbers are tied to score.

(One classmate correctly guessed the exact number of Civilians killed one round and was surprised to have an overall negative score - at which point I noted that Civilian casualties are still a bad thing, even when they're accurately tallied.)

Since there is a timer on the screen, I also figured that players would feel rushed.

My expected interpretation broke down due to the complexity of the scoring system - there are too many numerical effects to be casually inferred from the resulting score - and a lack of symbolic milestones for clear non-numerical comparison between rounds (gold/bronze, "Great"/"Weak", A/B/C/D/F, etc.). Further, either time seemed to go unnoticed by players, or it was not recognized that the amount of time remaining could positively impact score.

I thought that if a player only came away with one idea from playing this, it would be that accurately reporting casualties is a challenge, because it isn't what media sources focus their attention on during conflict. This is consistent with @realnob's interpretation via Twitter ("totally wasn't paying attention to civilians at first, underestimated their casualties by a large factor."), although no one else, either in person or in online comments, noted this same interpretation.

Naturally, player responses varied.

Although much of the feedback was centered on gameplay feature requests - desire of upgrades, story, and levels - palgrave on Kongregate derived meaning from the blast radius being larger than the targeting scanner, replying "I particularly like the idea behind it, highlighting the inaccuracy of such real world UAV strikes" (the inaccuracy and collateral damage of missile strikes was central to September 12).

Jake Eakle contacted me to share his goal, one he was able to achieve after several attempts: "I decided early on, before really understanding much at all about the game, that my goal would be to get 0 civilian deaths, as it seemed that a) it would be very challenging, b) something interesting might happen, either because it was scripted or because the scoring function had an asymptote, and c) figuring out what it took to do it might reveal interesting moral conclusions."

Jake also noted in discussion that, despite numerous replays, it was not apparent to him from the interface or instructions that there was a time limit, that acting faster could yield a higher score, or that Civilians became Followers over time. A comment by resterman on Kongregate referenced the 300 seconds - some players noticed the timer - however it was unclear whether any connection was understood between time remaining and overall score (see Remy's design doc for complete scoring details: uav-designdoc.pdf).

Lastly, Jake discovered on a high score run that he was able to get a much higher score by waiting until Followers greatly outnumbered the Civilians. This is the highest score that has been reported, and he earned it after 140 seconds out of the 300 maximum, even though the scoring system penalizes every second taken:

Presumably, a higher score in a newsgame is likely to reflect that a player is doing what is intended. However in this case, due to the population density, blast radius, and rate at which Civilians convert to Followers, finding the target as soon as possible then firing soon after is not the most successful strategy, despite being the intended behavior.

The points lost for waiting out half of the round can be more than made back by there being so many fewer Civilians in the cross fire, since most of them will have converted into Followers by then. This was an emergent, unintended meaning, though it's consistent with the gameplay. The moral of it might be interpreted as akin to: "If we just wait for the corruption to spread, we can bring the whole system down with fewer innocent casualties."

There are four main takeaways on where and how meaning was interpreted from this news game:

1) Moral messages were discerned from the design and gameplay; however, in many cases they were not the same messages that the designer intended, nor that the developer expected.

2) Basing game elements on real-world elements that have mainstream associations, then stripping them of their labels, doesn't necessarily afford flexibility to interpretation of identities so much as it makes the identities seem more abstracted.

3) Relative mechanics tuning - something as simple as making the blast radius larger than the scope size, or something so unassuming as world map size (consequently, crowd density) - can guide and define certain interpretations, more so than what the scoring system rewards or penalizes.

4) Scored questions after and outside of the gameplay sequences were able to affect the player's thinking about the gameplay, and changed strategy in subsequent plays. These momentary reflections upon the act just done, unusual for conventional videogames that are intended primarily as artifacts purely for entertainment, introduced a hint of classwork quiz feel to the overall experience.

Channel 4's 1066 as documentary

2011-02-08T16:35:36Z

The story of William the Conqueror and the Norman Conquest, like so many other stories from Medieval England, is so narratively rich it's a wonder there aren't more books and games that cover it. 1066, a free Flash game from UK's Channel 4, engages the story with a tactical simulation of its major battles. Taken on its own merit as a tactics game, 1066 is a solid experience. As a documentary game, however, it never engages deeply enough with its history to make a meaningful impact.]]> Representationally, the game feels great: combat is appropriately brutal, and everything looks dirty and blood-smeared (increasingly so as your battles wear on). The Englishmen of the period were closer to Vikings than anything we imagine as "English" today, men with names like Tostig and Aethelred who fought with heavy axes -- think Beowulf, basically. Melee combat was more visceral, but it was also more personal, and the game gets a lot of details right about the period. Screaming insults is a major component of gameplay, for example, and you really hear the impact of arrows on flesh and bone.

Even a brilliant tactician won't be able to avoid losing hundreds of men, but the real struggle in the game is over morale: lower your opponent's morale through archer assaults, insults, and hand-to-hand combat, and their forces will slowly begin to peel off and flee. Kill their leader, and the battle may turn into a rout. This is a procedural documentary of medieval warfare: you play through the rules of an unfamiliar system, eventually making connections that reveal its hidden workings.

The moment-to-moment gameplay, however, is less authentic. There's a primary tactical component, in which you move your units around a map, but you're also asked to enact the combat, and this is where the game missteps. Each part of the battle -- the archery, the cavalry charges -- is performed by playing an arbitrary mini-game. When two units engage it melee combat, it becomes a rhythm game for you. Charging your enemies? Button-mashing. Archery? That's Tanks. And the insults, perhaps strangest of all, are Typing Tutor: the faster you can type the insult ("Puny potlicker!", "Low-born orc!"), the more devastating a blow it will be to your enemy's morale.

These mini-games distract from the otherwise-strong historical immersion of 1066, and from the central tactics game. I understand the intent: an archery volley, for instance, was a difficult endeavor requiring skill, and the developers want to express that difficulty. However, abstracting the action -- having its success determined solely by unit statistics and morale -- would have been more effective than distracting players with a mini-game.

The other problem is that 1066 works best as a straightforward medieval combat simulator, and not necessarily as a re-creation of the Norman Invasion. The story is communicated primarily via skippable cut-scenes, and the battles themselves are not well differentiated. The actual history is amazing stuff (basically, the new king of England, Harold Godwinson, faced near-simultaneous invasions from the Vikings and the French Normans on opposite ends of the country; his army repelled the Vikings, marched all the way across England, and came within a hair's breadth of defeating William the Conqueror), but very little of this history comes across in the course of gameplay. Fighting the Vikings doesn't feel like fighting Vikings, but simply fighting a team that has more slow, powerful units. The Battle of Stamford Bridge, where a single Viking warrior supposedly held the bridge against forty Englishmen, is operationalized as a map with a narrow-ish passage in the middle.

In short, 1066 works fine as a tactics game (albeit with some unnecessary mini-games), but less so as a documentary game. It comes close, at times, to representing the procedural reality of medieval war, and for that alone it's worth a look. But the story of the Norman Conquest is still awaiting its great game adaptation.

Downing Street Fighter

2011-02-02T16:00:01Z

Tabloid games that mock political leaders are nothing new, and T-Enterprise's 2010 game Downing Street Fighter is a prime example of putting political figures into a ridiculous game environment, presumably for the sake of laughs. The game was made before the 2010 general election in the United Kingdom, and features the foremost three candidates for Prime Minister thrust into a fighting game that pits them against each other and finally against a bizarre character named the Blair-Witch, an ogre with the heads of Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher.

While the game falls well within long-established tropes of tabloid games, it also features a written press release that explains the game's purpose. The press release states that the game was made specifically to fight political apathy in the UK, and "... is completely unbiased as the three main characters are balanced in terms of their abilities so you simply have to choose the one you want to win. It is therefore only a political tool as far as its use to promote the election is concerned rather than favouring any particular party." The press release goes on to assert that the game is especially targeted at youth who remember Street Fighter, the classic video game series. These are ideals that attempt to present Downing Street Fighter as more than a simple tabloid game.
]]> Though the press release might argue otherwise, it is difficult to describe the actual game as an unbiased political primer for the young and apathetic. Each of the three PM candidates has a brief bio on the selection screen, each with a link to an unflattering news story about the candidate (i.e. Gordon Brown's bio features a link to an editorial about the former PM's anger management problems), but this is the furthest extent of the characterization of the presented subjects other than the caricature animations on screen.

The depiction of the three candidates is far less nuanced than the elements that recall early fighting games - much of the visual style of Street Fighter is successfully emulated, along with a few references to Mortal Kombat and Final Fight. This raises the question: does framing an issue well within a famous video game's structure make it more relevant? I would argue that this game does not have enough material about the candidates - the game is enjoyable for those who already have a bias, in that one can duke it out as his or her preferred candidate and enjoy the resulting catharsis, but because the game simply cuts and pastes the likenesses of the PM hopefuls without much differentiation it does not meet its intent to reach young people politically as well as it could.

One interesting angle the game could've taken is in differentiating the three candidates in terms of gameplay. Fighting games are often judged by their ability to create many characters that are each unique and interesting in terms of play style, and each character's play style is often their defining characteristic. As a game, Downing Street Fighter could be more interesting if each candidate played differently - for example, as the game links to Brown's anger problem, perhaps one of Gordon's abilities should be some sort of rage-enhancement. If the goal of the game is to introduce people into the political fold, the game must take every opportunity it gets to characterize the politicians presented. Rousing the apathetic to political opinion can be difficult, but presenting three identical characters within a game does not help to differentiate them to a young gamer.

Gapminder: Unveiling the Beauty of Statistics

2010-12-09T05:00:33Z

When I was watching documentation Journalism in the Age of Data, I was amazed by all the fantastic examples visualization researchers mentioned in their interviews. Among all of them, I was most impressed by Gapminder after I played around with some demographic information. Some raw statistics--like the distribution of poverty, in different regions of the world, over time, would bore you to tears. The web graphs here--dynamic, colorful and clear--are extremely compelling.

Gapminder is a Swedish non-profit dedicated to utilizing visualization software to help make the world's most important trends accessible and digestible for the general public. It describes itself as "unveiling the beauty of statistics for a fact-based world view." Hans Rosling, Gapminder's creator, is known as a statistician and global health expert at Sweden's Karolinska Institute. He is probably also one of the only academics who can make dry statistics dance like musical theater stars while revealing startling facts about the world and debunking preconceptions. These are more than clusters of pretty, digital dots; Gapminder software makes data visual both on maps and charts by using color, size and position to indicate relative quantities. It's really fun and entertaining to browse and play with.

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Reaching the Masses

From the beginning, Gapminder has been trying to make its visual tools available to the broadest crowd possible. And they've worked to create software that allows others to create their own visual presentations of the data. Accordingly, Gapminder has been developing a program called Trendalyzer that works from the data itself, rather than a fixed graphical presentation. It turns a boring series of development statistics into attractive moving graphics.

The software imports data from Excel and shows moving graphics on the screen, as exported Flash files or as images in Powerpoint and other formats, allowing users to create animations derived from hundreds of different variables. The site is invaluable for policy analysts needing to interpret voluminous data and for students of data visualization, although seasoned statisticians might find the pacing too sluggish.

All in all, the intended audience is not only laypeople, but also researchers, civil servants, journalists, and activists who will then present their graphical analyses to a broader public. In 2007, Gapminder collaborated with the PBS investigative-journalism series Frontline to create statistical animations for an episode on HIV. By linking Trendalyzer to existing database languages, Gapminder-style illustrations could even be created from global financial data.

Multiple ways to interpret and explore data

Another feature worth mentioning is that, this tool involves computation and user manipulation of underlying information. To borrow the description from Newsgames: Journalism at Play,

Genuine digital infographics make interation a part of understanding: analog infographics are read, whereas digital inforgraphics are operated. (40)

The interactive nature of the graphs lets users' curiosity lead them to more discoveries about the data, but it's not going to guide the reader through a dynamic data set toward a conclusion synthesized beforehand by a journalist or designer.

For example, you might want to click on one or two dots representing countries and all the other country dots fade in the background. You can then compare the life expectancy and income per person of Asia and North America. You'll be surprised about how fast Asia is developing compared to North America and Europe--the speed is twice as fast. The income distribution in Korea, for example, is less dispersed than in Sweden; there are fewer gaps. And you'll have multiple ways to draw your own conclusions about all these dramatic changes.

It is common knowledge that we have a hard time picturing certain things: long-term consequences, global trends. For better or worse, our brains evolved to understand the immediate, "middle-sized" world that confronts us daily. Gapminder is a combination of extraordinary interactive graphs that help us visualize complex global trends. They're worth a look--not only for their particular content but for the possibilities presented by this marriage of technology, information, and participatory design.