Newsgames

Crackerjack reporting skills and elegant prose may no longer be enough to arm future journalists. After more than 80 years, the Associated Press (AP) is modifying a reporter's most valuable branding to reflect an evolving era of multimedia.

Beginning Oct. 26, the AP style has been updated to remove the word "writer" from the byline. The new format includes the author's name followed by "Associated Press." While seemingly innocuous, this is a subtle but significant shift that acknowledges contemporary reporters are engaging in creative news activity beyond tapping out keys in an often dated word processing program. The classic definition and skills of a journalist could be in the process of redefinition as a result.

"It reflects what's been going on for a long time---people go out, they take pictures, they write stories, they do video, they work on different platforms," AP Managing Editor Thomas Kent told Editor & Publisher, noting that "it does say something about the changing skill set of our journalists, and that they work in may different formats."

While the absence of this description is not unusual---the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Los Angeles Times do not employ "writer" in bylines---explicitly addressing content creation for multimedia platforms as AP has is a significant bellwether of what will be demanded of journalists in a digital media age.

Comic strips -- sequential drawings with text that tell a brief story -- are a longstanding medium with hundreds of years of history behind them (see the Bayeux tapestries perhaps nearly a thousand years old, for an early prototype of the form). Though independent in origin, comic strips have been strongly linked with newspapers since the end of the nineteenth century.  How did this relationship form, and how was it cemented?

Online sources indicate that the birth of the newspaper comic was the result of a culture of experimentation in the newspaper industry -- a culture that has since been lost.  Indeed, the rise of the newspaper comic strip seems inevitable in retrospect; precursors to the comic strip appear to have arisen independently in several newspapers during the 1890s.  The early history of the form is ambiguous, however, and a number of cartoons claim to be the first newspaper comic.  I will discuss two such strips, The Yellow Kid and Little Bears, both because they have the most legitimate claims and because they illustrate a larger point about the newspaper industry of the time.

The Yellow Kid, the strip most commonly referred to as the first newspaper comic, was created by R.F. Outcault in the mid-1890s.  Outcault was working as an illustrator for Electrical World magazine, and, during 1894 and 1895, occasionally published cartoons for a weekly humor magazine called Truth.He also worked as a technical illustrator for the Sunday edition of Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, then the paper with the highest circulation in the nation.  On at least one occasion, the World published a humorous cartoon from Outcault, and in early 1895, it republished one of his cartoons from Truth magazine.

Newsgames have often been described as the videogame counterparts to editorial cartoons. Both forms aim to present thought-provoking opinions on current events in way that is diverting, brief and easily understood. While newsgames have enjoyed increasing popularity throughout the past decade however, the political cartooning industry has experienced a steady and serious state of decline. In 2004, the number of professional political cartoonists in the United States had dropped from nearly 200 to just over 90. Today, political cartoonist Jack Ohman of The Oregonian estimates that number has dropped to 58.

 

This may seem to be an unsurprising symptom of the ailing newspaper industry or even a simple matter of downsizing in a tough economy. Any professional cartoonist will tell you the problem is more complicated than that, and that more than their livelihood is at stake. In his article, "The Fixable Decline of Editorial Cartooning," Chris Lamb describes how political cartooning changed after 9/11. 

Most political cartoonists felt it was unpatriotic to criticize government leaders immediately following the terrorist attacks, and they modified their cartoons accordingly. Lamb states that several cartoonists continued to act as government propagandists following the crisis however, and those cartoonists who did return to satirizing and scrutinizing the government were accused of being unpatriotic. This rocky political climate helped lead editors to adopt a more conservative stance, which was later exacerbated by the present economic crisis.

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.

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

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

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

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.

In the course of our research we have examined how games or game-like interactive applications have been incorporated into some news outlets. But how do all these experimentations from the media industry relate to the training of future journalists and the research being done at Journalism schools?  Is there a space for videogames in J-school academia?

Traditionally, journalism schools, at least in the United States, have been separated into broadcast and print departments. This division of teaching has been present for decades as these platforms were completely different worlds: different skill sets, different media companies, and so forth. Today, with the efforts in the industry to converge and the growing space of the web as a blender of the traditional media, the separated platform training has been challenged.

Another focus that can be seen in Journalism Schools is a more theoretical one where it is possible to find more media, culture and communication research. Around this perspective we can see videogames taken as a cultural and societal phenomenon. For example, schools would observe how the entertainment industry is creating brands that are deployed across different platforms, including videogames, or they would assess how games affect people and society.

In both cases it is difficult to see videogames more than as an observable phenomenon, and far beyond from the idea that videogames could be something that journalists could create as news-related product. However, if I would predict how games will knock on the door of the Journalism schools, I could see that news-gaming might be introduced in the same way as multimedia and online journalism was done some years ago.

A few months ago I attended a couple of Journalism related conferences: The Society of News Design conference in Las Vegas and the Online News Association in Washington D.C. One of my goals attending these conferences was to assess the current understanding of new storytelling resources inside the online media industry, mainly interactive infographics and games, and how the newsrooms where adapting to the new challenges. It was good to see that many outlets were thinking and doing things about these topics. However, I believe their approaches are still too shy... and probably still unsuited for game development in a news environment.

For many years the word "convergence" has been present inside the media industry, but not many experiments became as successful as expected. Some companies blended their broadcast, print, and online newsrooms, others created collaboration teams between them, and many other combinations. In many cases the companies underestimated the culture clashes, technological challenges, and other issues that they would face. Others made deeper changes that seem to be going into the right direction. Even media companies where convergence was not an issue years ago are streamlining their operations and integrating as much as they can with their web counterparts.

Be a Reporter: Interactive Journalism Game is an online experience that is offered as a free online course in the NewsU.org training site, wherein people can assume the role of a reporter of a fictional town called Medina. As their official description says, it "helps users understand some of the basics: how journalists probe, clarify, verify and race against a deadline." This game was produced in conjunction with the Interactive Museum of News (Newseum).

The goal of the game is that the user reports and writes a story for a local media company in the city of Medina. The game starts with the editor's briefing, which explains to the user the issue that he needs to report about and reminds him about some core elements of a journalistic practice. The user needs to go around the city to collect the information needed to create a story by selecting different buildings or sites from an overview map of Medina. Each location contains information that can be gathered (such as news paper clips from the library) or has people that can be interviewed. Every once in awhile the editor pops up in a video screen to urge you to finish the story timely or to suggest you to go to a specific place to gather more information.

How are people interacting in news games? What kinds of decisions are they making? And what game elements and relationships are players most interested in? These are the types of questions that an observant journalist might answer, or at least pose, if they began to think of games as informal sources of information.

In their 2004 textbook, Behind the Message: Information Strategies for Communicators, Kathleen Hansen and Nora Paul write, "Informal sources include observations about audiences, messages, and the environment in which the communicator operates, as well as networks of supervisors, colleagues, clients, neighbors, and friends the communicator deals with every day."

Historiography

his⋅to⋅ri⋅og⋅ra⋅phy   [hi-stawr-ee-og-ruh-fee, -stohr-]
1. the body of literature dealing with historical matters; histories collectively.
2. the body of techniques, theories, and principles of historical research and presentation; methods of historical scholarship.
3. the narrative presentation of history based on a critical examination, evaluation, and selection of material from primary and secondary sources and subject to scholarly criteria.

We rarely consider the difference between news and history. After all, isn't a two-day old newspaper similar to a history textbook? They both chronicle information that has passed, yet clearly there is a significant difference in their format. Yet in the same way the Global Conflicts games can be seen as teaching journalistic practice, they are also teach the practice of researching and understanding history. This makes perfect sense, considering Serious Games Interactive's focus on school-curriculum and the accompanying literature. In the course of discussing the Global Conflicts games in the Newsgames project, we have questioned why the games are packaged as classroom tools. Was it a part of the original scope of the design process or was it a marketing-driven afterthought; a way to sell a niche game in bulk. In either case, we can dissect the games, the teaching materials, and student guides to analyze the game's representations of historiography.

The Interactive Museum of News (Newseum) in Washington, D.C has a couple of computer simulations that are available for the public to put them in the shoes of a reporter or an editor.

Both interactive applications are mainly tailored for kids. The first one is a game which is available in numerous computer stations ready for the young-want-to-be-reporters. The goal is to make the kids aware of the journalistic practice, how reporters work in the street, and teach them broadly what makes good journalism. The graphics are completely computer generated, and look like cartoons, which seem a fair choice taking into account the audience. Also, the way that the game addresses their users is more from a teaching perspective where the editor explains and instructs many of the standards of high quality journalism. For example, if you interview someone and the responses sound like a rumor or an opinion, the always-on virtual editor on the corner of the screen will remind us that those inputs are not good quality information and that we should keep digging.

I've been trying to get a handle on how interactive software such as games can be made more transparent, and perhaps more trustworthy. As suggested in The Elements of Journalism, transparency signals a respect for the audience and reaffirms a journalist's public interest motive, the key to gaining credibility. "The willingness of the journalist to be transparent about what he or she has done is at the heart of establishing that the journalist is concerned with the truth" (p. 92). I've begun the process of teasing apart understandings of transparency in journalism, which encompass a number of different notions including:

(This post was prepared by Bobby Schweizer and Sergio Goldenberg)

The Global Conflicts games, which include Palestine and Latin America, is a PC game series produced by Serious Games Interactive, a company from Copenhagen, Denmark. The games position the player as a journalist in the middle of a regional conflict looking to discover information. In 2007's Global Conflicts: Palestine, Serious Games Interactive focused on position the player amidst the Israel-Palestine conflict as a journalist who needs to conduct interviews of both sides so as to gain information needed to write a newspaper article. 

Games and Journalism both evoke their own cultural images; the Ramen and Dorito stained gamer on one hand and the hard nosed, gum shoe journalist on the other. It's not immediately obvious that oil and water can mix, nor am I going to argue that they should. But there are some interesting opportunities here, both for games to fill functional gaps in journalism and for games to come closer to journalism by adapting the cultural values of  news institutions. How can games fit into the sociology of news and journalism?

I started by reviewing "The Sociology of News" written by Michael Schudon, a sociologist at UCSD. If you haven't read this book I would recommend it, not only for its concise definitions of terms like "news" and "journalism," but also for its in depth description of the American culture of journalism.

I've put off writing about Dead Rising in the context of journalism and games for awhile. It pained me to think of the negative review I might have to give a game that I enjoyed so much. Luckily, in the past few weeks Capcom has released some information that helped get my ball rolling: Dead Rising's port to the Wii (Dead Rising: Chop 'Til You Drop) will not feature the ability to take snapshots with Frank's camera. Cue Chris Hecker sound byte about the Wii's processor not being able to handle a virtual camera (also, the Wii won't be able to render nearly as many zombies in one location as the 360 could).

This news begs the question: does the exclusion of the photography mechanic in the Wii version of Dead Rising change anything about what the game says about photojournalism as a practice? Let me first explain what the game is.

Games are a decent starting point for seeing how mechanical transparency is addressed in computer interfaces since many times simulation games are built around the concept of optimizing some state of the game (resource use, growth, or simply just score etc.) based on decisions the player makes. Here I illustrate how games are approaching some of the facets of mechanical transparency I introduced before.

In this post I'll continue trying to glean knowledge from the study of transparency of interactive systems in HCI, which I began in an earlier post.

Back in the mid 1990's there was a flurry of activity in HCI in trying to understand the explainability and transparency of interactive systems. Paul Dourish published extensively in the area and is known for his book, Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction, which (among other things) connects ideas from ethnomethodology with those of technology and system transparency.

A key concept studied in relation to ethnomethodology is that of accountability, meaning "observable and reportable" or able to be made sense of in the context in which an action arises. It addresses not just the result or outcome of an action but also includes how the result was achieved. Dourish sums it up thus, "Put simply it says that because we know that people don't just take things at face value but attempt to interrogate them for their meaning, we should provide some facilities so that they can do the same thing with interactive systems. Even more straightforwardly, it's a good idea to build systems that tell you what they're doing."

I've gone back to basics and have been reading through the HCI bible (Human Computer Interaction 3rd Ed. Dix et al.) to get a better understand how transparency is conceived of in interactive systems. System transparency does get a treatment as an element of formal interface modeling. There are several key points that we can learn from and which tie into transparency as it concerns journalism and interactive media.

While the state of the system is central to the notion of system transparency, what we're really interested in is an idealization of the system state. What's important in a user-centric model is the representation of "state required to account for the future external behavior." In the text Dix refers to this as the "effect" which I think is nasty terminology. I'm going to call it the "User-Relevant State" or URS.

One way to view journalism is as a combination of reporting and review. The first stage involves gathering and uncovering the information citizens need to know; the second stage involves contextualizing and interpreting that information in an engaging way.

Both stages are essential to the practice of journalism. Information without proper context and rigorous verification is just unreliable raw data; analysis without original reporting is just aggregation or editorial.

Of course, journalistic news media exists as a spectrum between these two poles. An interview typically focuses on reporting, whereas an editorial typically focuses on review. Nevertheless, we should note that the best interviewers contextualize and respond to the interviewee, and that the best editorial writers frequently incorporate their own reporting.

How do videogames fit into this spectrum?

In Ian's prior post on transparency and games he mentions three types of transparency: transparency of influence, transparency of construction, and transparency of reference. Cutting across these facets of transparency I'd like to add the transparency of mechanics which is particularly applicable to any consumer-facing journalistic software, of which games are one instance.

The NYT did a lot of interactive pieces for the 2008 presidential election. One of these is an interactive chart presentation of different political polls done by different organizations. This isn't quite game-y, though it could be if there were some additional features like being able to compare one poll to another, or to try to predict a future poll based on current polls for points. Anyway, the important point here is that these visualizations are based on some simple polling data, things like # of respondents, and % in favor of each candidate. The Times is transparent about this data in 2 ways, (1) by providing a link explaining eligibility for polls to be included in the chart and (2) by providing a link to the raw database dump of the data. The eligibility link speaks to data quality issues that can arise in the collection of data, which can lead to invalid results or bias. The database dump link speaks to the ability to peer behind the graphic to the actual data used to produce it.

We've been talking a lot about the idea of a "citizen gamist," the newsgame equivalent of a serious political blogger who uses new media tools to present their own form of independent journalism on the Internet. The question has been raised whether the sector of the game development sphere we'll just label "Indie Games" for purposes of simplification might be fertile ground for the future production of newsgames.

The question we're tasked to answer is, "Do the kind of people who create indie games have any reason to move away from their personal interests and goals in order to join our cause of making more thoughtful, creative newsgames (than the ones that are currently available) that follow the principles of The Elements of Journalism?" This question has multiple layers. Who are these people making Indie Games? Are they a homogenous group, or are they largely fractured in philosophy and practice? What constitutes a more "personal" style when it comes to newsgames, and does this raise issues for journalistic transparency or verification? And finally, is it actually important that a newsgame creator ascribe to the values in The Elements of Journalism that we've found so helpful in our own studies here at JAG?

A few weeks ago, Adam and I gave Democracy 2 a spin.

In Democracy 2, you play as a newly elected president who analyzes data, sets policies, manages a Cabinet, and responds to crises. There are a number of different scenarios (nations) to choose from. Most of them are fake names based on real configurations, although there is one explicitly real-named scenario (the United States).

The game is certainly fun. For our purposes, Democracy 2 is especially relevant because it acts as a kind of commentary on current issues. Admittedly, the game does not claim to be journalistic. Nonetheless, it does suggest a number of interesting challenges and solutions regarding the intersection of simulation and news.