Category: Newsgames

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.

One of the Elements of Journalism described by Kovach and Rosenstiel is that it  "must strive to make the significant interesting and relevant." This is something that we haven't really addressed directly on this blog, perhaps because this seems like a no-brainer: how do we make this news piece interesting? Well, we'll just make a game about it! The problem with this is that many newsgames continue to alienate both gamers and nongamers alike. We shouldn't just take the value of newsgames for granted. I think they satisfy this element of journalism, but I'd like to preempt those who might not think the same.

If it's true that there's a disconnect between these games and their players, then either the shortcoming is in the games or in the public (likely, it's both). It doesn't make much sense to demand outright that the players adjust themselves to the games. The standard indie developer response of, "Who the hell cares if they like the game?" doesn't carry over here (if this is your attitude, then there's probably no reason for you to read this). If you're making newsgames, its likely that you have some passing interest in raising awareness or influencing public opinion. Playing devil's advocate and assuming that it's the newsgames that need an attitude adjustment, we can tackle the problem from three angles provided by the Elements: significance, relevance, and interest. I recognize that this is not a completely accurate parsing of the element, but I'm using it as a working model.

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.

The day after Chesley Sullenberger miraculously landed an Airbus A320 in the Hudson, Ian wrote about the BBC News simulation of the emergency water landing using Flight Simulator X. The main criticism of this was that they used a game to make a video, as opposed to something playable by the reader. It didn't take too long for US Air Flight 1549 games to appear, however. Hero on the Hudson, Double Bird Strike, and the French game Hudson's Crash are all Flash games about landing a plane on the river.

I believe these games follow the trend of the news media's coverage of the event: because a disastrous situation was averted, we don't have to exhibit the reverence and mourning of a tragedy. In terms of media coverage, this means focusing on the feat that was landing a plane with no engines safely in a river along the largest city in the United States. While some attention has been given to why the flight went down (discussions of migratory patterns of Canadian geese), the story that most people have taken away was that "Sully" miraculously landed an airplane and everybody was okay.

On the one hand, given the attention that is usually given to tragedy in the news (the old 'if it bleeds it leads' mentality), this was a welcome change of pace. However, the situation was complicated by the Continental Airways flight that crashed outside of Buffalo, NY a mere month after a major disaster was averted. These two events, when compared, illustrate major differences in reporting. They also reveal some of the difficulties of creating games about current events and suggest the possible journalistic roles of a game. Putting these events in game form forces us to ask questions that aren't the heart of the traditional media's story.

(***EDIT: Please note, I use the example of a "tabloid" or exploitation game about Steve Irwin in this article not as a model that should be pursued but as an example of timeliness, the subject of this post. Please see any of our other posts on Newsgames or the Development Process for examples of newsgames that we actually admire. Thank you, GameSetWatch readers! 2/10/09***)

Every once in awhile, I struggle with the idea of the breaking newsgame. How could a newspaper, or an independent game developer, possibly make a game on the fly that was both "worth playing" and directly relevant to the news of the day? The makers of newsgames have, for the most part, freed themselves from worrying about this problem by dealing mainly with ongoing, long-term public issues; however, I constantly have the nagging feeling that these games need to become quite a bit more timely before being attractive as a regular feature for a news source. Let me share the story of a recent flurry of ideas exchanged on this subject.



We recently had a demo day here at Georgia Tech. Sitting in the corner of the room at our News Games booth, I watched (with a twinge of jealousy) Raph Koster and some dudes from the EVE Online team celebrate the accomplishments of some of my classmates on a board game they'd been working on all semester. None of the famous folks were coming up to ask me about my thoughts on the crossroads of news and gaming. Maybe this just isn't something that has a direct impact on their work? Just when I thought I wasn't going to be having any good conversations that day, a middle-aged man shuffled toward me and asked, in a British accent, if I had anything interesting to show him. It took me a few moments to spy his name tag. 

"If you're a former ballet dancer with a hot temper and nine and a half fingers, you're probably glad to see that this Rahm Emanuel fellow came along. If he can make it, so can you! Emanuel also has two brothers, Zeke and Ari, with whom you might have more in common than you might think. Take Wonkette's Official Emanuel Brother Diagnostic Personality Test and find out!"

Is how The Wonkette Quiz begins and, with it, an interesting approach to news quizzes.

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...

Sitting in a McDonald's the morning after I had stayed up until 2am playing Molleindustria's McDonald's Game, I was more angry at McDonald's for switching out their breakfast menu at 11:00 am­ than for corrupting my youth. Something that Molleindustria never mentions is the fact that all McDos have free wireless internet. This is perhaps not worth noting if you live in a concret­e jungle or have enough money to pay for internet service at Starbucks, but in smaller towns McDo and Dairy Queen are some of the only places people can go to get free web access. What I'm implying is that an Ivory Tower attack on McDonald's will likely ignore the value of low prices, speed, and convenience (of location and amenities) to people without abundant resources. I'm sure the intellectual attitude against McDonald's is amplified in Europe, where American fast food has been invading the turf of locally-owned creperies or trattorias. This is what a McDonald's looks like in Europe:

As you will see below, I don't think Molleindustria's game is a bad one by any stretch. It does what it sets out to do remarkably well, and I wouldn't go into such depth to analyze a game if I didn't love it in many ways. 

Back in September, my friend Brendan and I made a game-like website about Sarah Palin (speaking for myself, I was trying to blow off some angst). We called it PalinSpeak.

I think the "game" and our process failed on a number of levels. But it was a learning experience, so I thought it would be worthwhile to reflect on the production process. Here are some lessons.