Newsgames

FantasySCOTUS is a free online game that allows users to predict the outcome of every case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court. It has enjoyed two years of ever-expanding popularity, beginning its second "season" this past October. In all of the game's presentation and media coverage, a tie to fantasy sports is exhaustively emphasized; for example, CNN's story about the game is entitled "Frustrated with Fantasy Football? Try the Supreme Court."  

From the late 1970s until the economic downturn in the Soviet Union during Perestroika, Soviet military factories produced a series of arcade games alongside more commonplace military products. Because the production period is very sharply defined - once the Soviet government no longer provided the funding for the factories, game production was scrapped - an extremely distinct period of game production results. To a Soviet gamer of the time, the fact that the U.S.S.R. did not allow foreign games to be imported compounds the sharp definition of this era. This moment in time was resurrected in 2007, when a professor at Moscow State Technical University and two of his students tasked themselves with finding and repairing as many of these arcade machines as possible.

The result of their project is a called the Museum of Soviet Arcade Machines, which is essentially a basement converted into an arcade inside of a time capsule from the early 80s, albeit one that has been shaken around and mussed with, as not all the games are playable and many of the games do not run consistently. On their website, the herculean efforts of the Museum's curators is merely hinted at, but it is easy to perceive the difficulty of making these games function as many are mostly mechanical, half of them owing as much to puppetry and cardboard cut-outs as they do to a digital screen. Only a couple of the many machines have been preserved in emulators or other digital formats, and since the games' production ended long ago, most of the games and artwork on display in the Museum are profoundly rare.

This excerpt appears in the upcoming Newsgames book.

As game scholar Espen Aarseth has observed, all games require "non-trivial effort" to play, as player interaction is required for a game to operate at all. But community games require a different kind of labor, one that involves even greater personal effort and investment, one that goes beyond manipulating tokens on a board or characters on-screen. In addition, these games ask players to put themselves on the line, in public, often in front of strangers. This is a type of community involvement that community activism rarely accomplishes, let alone local news.

So far, just one example of this kind of community game exists. Picture the Impossible, developed jointly by the Lab for Social Computing at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, is a game situated in a specific geographic location. The website describes the game's mission:

The game engages members of the community in exploration of the City of Rochester, and encourages both creativity and charitable giving in the community. Players participate in a range of activities, including casual web-based games, games that bring players out to events and locations throughout the city, and games that involve the tangible aspects of the Democrat and Chronicle newspaper itself.

Alternate Reality Games have gained in popularity largely as a result of the infrastructural possibilities provided by the Internet. In games like World Without Oil, Superstruct, and Aftershock, players were geographically distributed across not only the United States, but the world. In the case of World Without Oil and Superstruct, the scenarios constructed for the game took on a global scale. In one regard, the popularity of these games can be ascribed to their broad audience: a tiny fraction of the population is a lot when your possible audience includes everyone with an Internet connection. So what happens when you take the Alternate Reality Game model and translate it locally?

We have used the term Community Games to mean something broader than the Alternate Reality Game genre that has developed. Community games need not have fantastic plotlines and an unfolding story to ensnare their participants. Instead, they need to provide a way for people to engage with local subjects. The local community game is a relatively untouched area. It needs a low barrier to entry so as to appeal to a large party of a relatively small audience, make local material relevant, and provide incentive to play. We have two examples of this type of game, the first of which is Knight News Challenge winner Beanstock'd Game.

Alternate Reality Games have gained in popularity largely as a result of the infrastructural possibilities provided by the Internet. In games like World Without Oil, Superstruct, and Aftershock, players were geographically distributed across not only the United States, but the world. In the case of World Without Oil and Superstruct, the scenarios constructed for the game took on a global scale. In one regard, the popularity of these games can be ascribed to their broad audience: a tiny fraction of the population is a lot when your possible audience includes everyone with an Internet connection. So what happens when you take the Alternate Reality Game model and translate it locally?

We have used the term Community Games to mean something broader than the Alternate Reality Game genre that has developed. Community games need not have fantastic plotlines and an unfolding story to ensnare their participants. Instead, they need to provide a way for people to engage with local subjects. The local community game is a relatively untouched area. It needs a low barrier to entry so as to appeal to a large party of a relatively small audience, make local material relevant, and provide incentive to play. We have two examples of this type of game, the first of which is Knight News Challenge winner Beanstock'd Game.

Earth 2100 is a crowdsourcing and future forecasting project - somewhat similar to Jane McGonigal's Superstruct - in which "players" view video summaries about the state of the world in 2015, 2050, and 2100 before making videos based on the possible conditions presented by those scenarios. The best submissions make it into a 2-hour primetime special on ABC.



Superstruct and Jane's other games all deserve their own posts at some point, so I won't go into an in-depth analysis of McGonigal's design here; however, I will make some comparisons between Earth 2100 and Superstruct in order to contextualize the former. Superstruct is a future forecasting ARG (alternate reality game) focusing on multiple different scenarios in the year 2019: famine, pirates/raiders, disease, mass immigration, and war. Superstruct considers all of these possible scenarios as encapsulated alternate futures, while Earth 2100 takes a holistic approach by asking players to imagine what would happen if multiple conditions such as these converge over time; therefore, Superstruct tends to have many well-developed storylines for each possible future, while Earth 2100 stands more as a random scattering of entires.

In The Elements of Journalism Kovach and Rosenstiel call it the "Awareness Instinct," that basic human drive to know something about what's going on beyond our direct experience. Sure, the gold standard for journalists is to give people the information they need to make the decisions that are important to themselves, their families, and their society, but in our attention starved culture can we settle for something less grandios? Where deep understanding and time-consuming sensemaking of an issue can't be achieved there is still awareness; a recognition of the issue. And this awareness facilitates the human need to build common ground and community by allowing us to talk about news events with others. That is, common ground around a shared awareness of news allows us to build social connections with others in the community, to relate to others through a shared understanding. So, while some may think that merely being aware of a news event is paltry in comparison to really deeply understanding it, it does indeed carry with it great value. How do we enable awareness for news information?

Storytelling is one way to take information and make it interesting, relevant, and engaging to an audience. A way to make the significant matter to people. A way to raise awareness for a deeper issue by telling a good story. Another approach is to take raw data or information and to make it engaging through interaction. Games, information visualization, and other interactive data driven applications fit into this latter area. In this sense, the journalism of awareness can fully embrace new media as a vector for raising awareness for issues in the news, even if this new media falls short of that gold standard of journalism.

Here are some examples of what I mean by the Journalism of Awareness:

It's not really worth going into, but suffice it to say this post is not engaging the argument of videogames as escape or play as isolation. We now know that the only true anti-social media are heavy metal music and comic books.

All kidding aside, the notion of videogames as escapist practice has been repeatedly debunked. Too many comment threads have been sacrificed to the topic. In this post I'm taking the stance that games are inherently social activities. That said, I'm most concerned with how videogames generate or supplement discourse and how they might even serve as platforms for discourse.