Category: Game Analysis

Crickler is a crossword-derived digital puzzle game named for its creators, Michael and Barbara Crick. Crickler puzzles retain the verbal clues and one-word responses of crosswords, but they explode the layout of the puzzle into a list rather than an interlocking grid. When players type an answer, letters from one response automatically fill certain cells in other responses down the page, mimicking the way a crossword's answers provide clues for orthogonal responses. On their website, the Cricks explain why this arrangement makes for a better puzzle:

Traditional crossword puzzles are incredibly successful but they have several serious drawbacks: (1) They are difficult to construct, (2) Most words are short and often silly--chosen only because they fit, (3) Matching clues to numbers is a distraction, and (4) A given puzzle is usually either too easy or too hard. Cricklers solve all of these problems while retaining the essence and feel of a traditional crossword puzzle.

Prepared by Cinque Hicks and Tanyoung Kim.

You be the Reporter: Ethanol as Fuel! was developed by the Institute for New Media Studies (INMS) at the University of Minnesota by Nora Paul and Kathleen Hansen. It was one of two games developed under the Institute's "Playing the News" umbrella and supported by the Knight Foundation's 21st Century News Challenge grant. Along with other format variations based on the same topics, this game was designed and tested in 2007 and 2008. In this article, we first explain the goal, the characteristics of the game and the procedural gameplay. Next, we look into this newsgame in a larger context in which we discuss how we might improve this game beyond its primary goal of delivering complex news content. In addition, we suggest how this game could encourage readers to take real world social action. Finally, we argue the potential of this game as a platform for further newsgames in which other community issues can be embedded.

Undoubtedly one of the strongest capabilities of the internet is its ability to make a wide range of real-time information easily accessible to anyone with a connection.  News aggregators such as Google News and Huffington Post serve as some of the strongest manifestations of this capability. 

One might think this easy access to information would lead to a more informed citizenry, but as a 2007 report by the Pew Research Center demonstrates, this is not necessarily the case.  In the report, Pew asked respondents questions that tested their public affairs knowledge in 1989 and then again in 2007, and despite the many changes in mass communication that have occurred over the almost two-decade span of time, public affairs knowledge changed little.  In some instances, it decreased: 74% of respondents could name the vice-president in 1989, but in 2007 that number dropped to 69%.

With the growing pervasiveness of new technology, educators are focusing on media literacy as an increasingly important and relevant skill for students to have. This encourages a wealth of other journalism-related proficiencies, such as having a critical eye and evaluating the accuracy of information.

Link TV is an independent media outlet (including online fora and a satellite television channel) that seeks to foster these very skills through a project called Know the News (KtN). Link TV hosts two online tools called Remix the News and News Challenge, both of which are games that encourage students to reflect on the source of the news and how it is delivered; however, the ability to be critical is not one that is limited solely to the consumption of news broadcasts, but one that plays into a more basic literacy of information analysis. It becomes a question of pedagogy: by explicitly stating their aims to encourage media literacy, is KtN successful? Bloom's Taxonomy is a model worth investigating as a constructive means of assessing the efficacy of Remix the News, News Challenge and the overall objectives of the KtN project.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

In the red desert of Mars I placed five remote mines on my truck, drove at high speeds toward an EDF roadblock, leapt from the vehicle roughly 300 yards from my target, and detonated the truck as it crashed through the gate. This destroyed a booth containing a turret emplacement, three lightly-armed EDF soldiers, and a civilian vehicle stopped at the checkpoint. A meter on the lefthand side of my screen showed that I decreased EDF "control" over the territory by three points for destroying the building; I was docked three "morale" points for killing the civilian. Red Faction: Guerrilla has been out for a few months now, but I just got my hands on it last week. The supposition that this game may be a commentary on the war on terror has been so widely covered that, unless you've never read about it before, the above description of my actions shouldn't surprise you much.

Parents need to know that this third-person action game tackles the difficult subject of wartime insurgency and terrorism. Players take on the role of a reluctant freedom fighter who uses his expertise in demolitions to help defeat a corrupt, militaristic occupational force. The violence, while more or less constant, is often directed at buildings rather than people, and players are encouraged to avoid hurting civilians whenever possible.

Many enthusiast reviews of the game conclude that any possible connection to the actual conflict in Iraq is most certainly in bad taste. This is an unfortunate misstep for those reviewers; the recent controversy and subsequent discourse surrounding the failed IP Six Days in Fallujah shows that many are ready for games that explicitly tackle contemporary tragedies such as the Iraq insurgency. Critical gamers welcome the chance to experience and interrogate the anti-American mindset through gameplay. Should your 12-year old play this game? Probably not. Should you support Volition with a purchase, then carefully analyze the game's construction while you play? Most definitely. Read our analysis of how Red Faction: Guerrilla proceduralizes insurgency after the jump.

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).