Newsgames

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.

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.

Conflict: The Middle East Political Simulator is a political strategy game designed by David J. Eastman that was published in 1990 for MS-DOS, Atari ST, and Amiga computers. The game is a fairly good example of a complex turn-based strategy game, but what makes it far more interesting as a historical artifact is its armchair depiction of Middle East politics and the scope of events that the game predicts based on the player's input. The chosen subject matter and the violent predictions that the event generator is inclined to generate would make the game nearly impossible to reproduce in 2010, so Conflict also marks a time when games were not as culturally observed (and Middle East politics were not as controversial) as they are now.  

Upon starting a new game, a series of newspaper headlines establish that the player is the new premier of Israel, freshly instated after the assassination of the previous premier. The date of January 1997 is shown, projecting 7 years after the game's release. The player is tasked with managing relations with 7 other nations: Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, and Syria. Representing Israel, the player may interact with other nations in a number of ways, ranging from peaceful diplomatic gestures to nuclear war. The game is turn-based, and on each turn the player chooses how to interact with each nation. Other concerns include dealing with the "Palestinian problem" within Israel, managing Israel's development of a nuclear arsenal, and purchasing arms from a list of suppliers including the United States.   Once a player makes all the decisions desired, the turn is ended, a month passes, and a new series of newspapers are displayed reporting the events that the last turn has caused.

By now you've likely read about the Berlin Wall game 1378(km). Drawing the title from the length of the border between East and West Germany, German university media-arts student Jens Stober designed the game to inject choice into the recreation of the space in a videogame. Stober's blog notes that the purpose of using a game to tell this story is because "I personally have the control over my behavior and my reactions, which take place in real time and in changing situations." To this end, Stober allows the player to experience both sides of the story: as an escapee in one and a wall guard in the other.

This is not the first time we've discussed the Berlin Wall on the Newsgames blog. The Berlin Wall map for Garry's Mod we examined last year served as a depiction of a physical space without tackling the operational of procedural realities of a living space. That is likely why it never created any controversy. You can only play as an East Berliner and it is quite easy to run right through Checkpoint Charlie because you're allowed copious damage resistance thanks to its roots in Half-Life 2. While 1378(km) is also based on a Source mod, it appears (from the video) to be tuned differently. We of course cannot know how it plays until it is released, but we can imagine that as a university project the designers would pay attention to this reality.

Even before its release, which was to coincide with the anniversary of the unification of Germany, the game sparked heated debate as the families of victims killed while trying to cross from West to East Berlin learned of the game. Dietrich Wolf, spokesman for the Federal Foundation for the Reconciliation of the Communist Dictatorship, called it "an ego-shooter game" and said it was "unacceptable given the historical context." A member of the Association for Victims of Communist Tyranny said it, "makes a mockery of the victims." These comments should sound familiar to those who know Super Columbine Massacre, JFK Reloaded, Six Days in Fallujah, or the many other controversial games that have touched on real events.

The response illustrates the age-old problem of documentary and current event newsgames involving violence: audiences do not have the videogame literacy needed to understand these works and producers do not have the tools to adequately demonstrate their importance. While claims have been made about the lack or presence of maturity in videogames as a medium, the fundamental issue in play with 1378(km) is not related to the game industry, but rather to journalism as a profession.

Remembering 7th Street: The Virtual Oakland Blues & Jazz game was developed by UC Berkeley journalism professor Paul Grabowicz and architecture professor Yehuda Kalay. Grabowicz, who had been a reporter for the Oakland Tribune, was interested in finding a new way to tell the story of the Oakland jazz scene, which flourished after World War II but was forced into decline only two decades later. In the Fall of 2006 and Spring of 2007, the architecture and journalism departments formed project groups to recreate Oakland, CA not only as a 3D model, but as a game.

You play as a musician looking to make it big in Oakland. The game, built using Torque, recreates the block of 7th Street using models created by the architecture students in 3D Studio Max. The neighborhood is populated with non-player characters who tell bits of the history of the area and send the player on basic quests. The game's script was written by the journalism students and arranged in the familiar fashion of a branching dialogue tree. After talking to "the right people" and buying a special guitar, the player is ready to break onto the scene.

Remembering 7th Street: The Virtual Oakland Blues & Jazz game was developed by UC Berkeley journalism professor Paul Grabowicz and architecture professor Yehuda Kalay. Grabowicz, who had been a reporter for the Oakland Tribune, was interested in finding a new way to tell the story of the Oakland jazz scene, which flourished after World War II but was forced into decline only two decades later. In the Fall of 2006 and Spring of 2007, the architecture and journalism departments formed project groups to recreate Oakland, CA not only as a 3D model, but as a game.

You play as a musician looking to make it big in Oakland. The game, built using Torque, recreates the block of 7th Street using models created by the architecture students in 3D Studio Max. The neighborhood is populated with non-player characters who tell bits of the history of the area and send the player on basic quests. The game's script was written by the journalism students and arranged in the familiar fashion of a branching dialogue tree. After talking to "the right people" and buying a special guitar, the player is ready to break onto the scene.

Supreme Decision is the second game produced by OurCourts.org with the intention of better informing middle school students of the inner workings of the judicial system, as well as their civic rights and responsibilities. Like its sibling game—Do I Have a Right?—this game has been endorsed by (former) Supreme Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and is touted for using the driving force behind 'new media' as a means of educating its target audience. 

The game attempts to portray the decision-making process within the Supreme Court in all its complexities, while simultaneously teaching children about the First Amendment, particularly as it relates to students in a school environment. The OurCourts.org website also provides a teacher's guide that accompanies the game, which explicitly emphasizes the difficulty of settling court cases like that depicted in the game. The question to ask here is not whether a game is the most effective medium for this message, but whether or not this message is conveyed effectively through this particular game.

Contains LIFE-ENDING SPOILERS for a relatively new game.

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

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

Today we take a slight detour from our series on editorial games to celebrate an editorial machinima of exceptional quality, produced by everyone's favorite editorial game creator: La Molleindustria's Paolo Pedercini.

It isn't easy writing about thinking, talking, or writing about machinima. One of my professors (Michael Nitsche, who I just found out is heavily cited on the Wikipedia entry on the subject) is hopelessly obsessed with augmented reality and digital performance, so last semester he dragged us through the "serious" machinima canon in an effort to inspire us into creating cinematic experiences within the 3D prototype worlds we were creating. I can honestly say that I don't remember a single one of them, except perhaps the fact that many featured Half Life 2's G-Man. Comedy is there, as evidenced by the broad popularity and honing of craft achieved by Rooster Teeth's Red vs. Blue, but I've yet to see a dramatic or serious piece that worked for me.

Pictures for Truth is a newsgame funded by Amnesty International, produced using Microsoft's XNA software development kit. You play an American journalist in China just prior to the Beijing Olympics. You have a date to meet with a Chinese journalist covering poor living conditions at a toxic electronics dump. When you arrive at your hotel, you receive a call informing you that your friend has been detained by authorities at the dump.

A police officer at the dump confiscates your camera and hauls your friend off to jail. You must find a new camera, interview people at the dump and outside a jail, and take pictures to accompany the "stories" generated by the interviews. You write three stories: about the health issues surrounding the dump, the working conditions of those living near the dump, and about China's municipal system in regards to the death penalty (this story is unlocked by completing the first two).

Garry's Mod, a modification and customization tool based on Valve's Source Engine (used for Half-Life 2) has become a way for players to create three-dimensional environments that take advantage of the physics and object handling engine as well as existing (and new) assets. In Fall 2008, a Berlin Wall "mod" was released to the public by an independent creator. The creators of the map describe it as:

"This is the Berlin Wall singleplayer map for Half-Life 2: Episode Two. After a huge anticipation for almost 2 months, the little sketch by Stene was soon made real by a group of talented modders. As the story goes, you are a citizen of the East Berlin, and tired of the evil communist government. You dream of living at the West Germany, and you are about to find a way there somehow. There are many routes you can find and take, maybe you want to roam through dirty tunnel, or have a little gunfight with the guards. The buildings on the map are based on those of real-life, such as Checkpoint Charlie and the death strip."

As a proponent of the potential of three-dimension game spaces as informative experiential sources, the Berlin Wall mod caught my attention. In a landscape mostly void of what we have termed "documentary games," the Berlin Wall mod seemed a welcome addition. This kind of game represents an historical issue through exploration, the conglomeration of factual sources, and a presentation style akin to our common notions of the documentary in film and television. I downloaded it, gave it a go, and was severely disappointed. Though it has a documentary quality in its presentation it doesn't make much of an attempt to tell a story. Though it may have modeled some of the physical landscape, the mod lacked any of the qualities that would have represented the social and political tensions of the era.

In looking for proof-of-concepts for the success and creation of documentary and editorial games, I came across a historical movement in country music that I think bears exploration. Country music became popular music in the United States after World War II, because so many training camps were located in the South. Soldiers from around the country were introduced to the genre then, and they brought it home with them when they returned from war. An accompanying reason for the meteoric rise of country music was the "saga song" - a prominent sub-genre in the 40's and 50's that openly explored tragedies such as war and murder.

The ethics of care is a moral system devised by feminist philosophers who wanted an ethics based on a more "relational" mode of thought. Their basic criticism of typical ethical systems is that philosophers premise them on the idea of the light of reason - a fundamentally Western, male construct. Instead, they develop a system for ethical decision-making based on casuistry and storytelling (what Socrates would probably deride as a kind of "sophistry" because of its close relation to expressive rhetoric). First let me explain what is meant by casuistry and storytelling here; then, I'm going to suggest how this field might help develop a different kind of newsgame in the future.

Casuistry is more legal practice than ethical philosophy. Instead of deriving right or wrong from moral absolutes, it takes into account every detail of a situation before making a final decision. Under an ethical system such as Kant's categorical imperative (one acts morally if one wills that the maxim of her actions be enacted as universal law), one cannot kill another in self defense - doing so would require that you willed that all rational creatures took violent means to defend themselves. In legal proceedings, one admits to killing in self defense and then details the situation in an effort to convince the jury that the use of lethal force was warranted. 

Philosophical systems are just that - regulatory processes that work in a top-down manner. Casuistry embraces the unit operational approach proposed by Bogost: right and wrong here are determined through the conscious selecting and synthesizing of individual laws, precedents, and situational details.

Introduction and Game Analysis by Simon Ferrari
Video Analysis and Impressions by Douglas Wilson
Based on a joint play session and discussion

Kuma War presents one (apparently) sustainable model for regularly-released "play the news" games. Kuma produces 3D shooters running off of what appears to be the same version of the Source engine used for the original Half Life. Not only do they act as content creators, but they also feature a download client that makes them something of a micro-platform. Alongside mainstream entertainment fare such as dinosaur hunting and cops-and-robbers games, they release playable versions of military engagements ripped from news headlines. Kuma features literally hundreds of these scenarios on their website. Notable examples of this are the capturing of Saddam's sons during the early days of the Iraq war and the subject of this piece - John Kerry's Silver Star mission.

By the time I'd reached the sixth chapter of Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel's The Elements of Journalism, my mind was cluttered with all of journalism's clichés: clacking typewriters, late night phone calls, loosened collars and ties, teeth-gnarled pencils, paper trails, shoe leather. With a litany of trenchcoated, mustachioed men marching through my mind (with notepads in hand), I began to think these two subjects, videogames and journalism, couldn't be more incongruous...

I know you've already looked at the title and exclaimed: "Cinema Envy!" Well step off it for a moment, because I'm not going to sit here and lament how newsgames "aren't as good" as documentaries. Rather, I'd like to take a look at the various sub-genres of documentary in order to identify some room for new types of newsgames that we might not have seen yet. Along the way, I'll make some  comparisons between works in both media. I promise not to analyze them using the same standards or theories. I'll also try to avoid stepping on Ayo's toes here, because she's planning on upcoming post on the value of transparent bias and reflexivity in film and games

Journalism sees its first obligation as telling the truth by assembling verifiable facts.  Photojournalism, sometimes referred to as documentary photography and street photography, has historically served as a supporting player to this guiding principle.  While this profession has dwindled in the digital age as more stock photography and amateur photographs are being used along with photojournalists being pushed into video production, what has not changed is the belief that the "camera does not lie" and that a photograph provides evidence of the truth.  Odd that we are never expected to trust words just because they are words. This belief in a mechanical instrument's ability to capture the truth was profoundly challenged with the advent of digital cameras, which from the beginning, was vehemently unwelcomed by the journalism community.  The thinking was, and still is, that a camera does not lie, but a digital cameras can, (with its inherent mutability), and will.  It is as if every image by a photojournalist must be prepared to go to court to testify.

The cause for concern is around image manipulation, which was and still is synonymous with deception.  Any photographer will tell you how important it is to know the tools of your trade.  Considering a camera, this means that you must know how to manipulate its features to make (not take) the photograph that you desire.  So you manipulate the shutter speed, aperture, the sensitivity to light and other technical variables.  Manipulating these elements changes the outcome of the look of photograph as well as its feel.

Can poetry act as a form of journalism?

On Election Day, The New York Times published a series of election themed poems in the Op-Ed section. Even Stephen Colbert picked up on this oddity, making fun of the newspaper on his show this week.

Even if these poems aren't journalistic in themselves, The New York Times seems to be suggesting that other media forms and genres might usefully complement traditional journalism.

Or, restated in terms of our own project: whether or not games can function journalistically, they still might have a useful role in the larger news media "experience."

Despite the relative age of documentary and reportage photography, a tradition that can be traced back a century, photojournalism is often seen more as an extension of print journalism than a practice in its own right. Yes, photojournalists publish in glossy magazines as well as in dailies; Yes, Pulitzer prizes are awarded for the practice; yes, journalism schools train photojournalists as specialists within the field; and yes, the photojournalistic essay stretches back over a hundred years, at least to Jacob Riis's 1890 collection How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York.