Category: Newsgames

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.

For a few hours on Thursday October 15th, the news was enraptured by a single story: a hot air balloon carrying a six-year-old boy had become untethered and was floating over Colorado. It had all the elements of a human interest story: a child in peril, a grief-stricken family, a catchy name. Falcon Heene, better known as "Balloon Boy" was the single subject of cable news, news websites, and the Twitter trending topic list. It was the "Baby Jessica" of 2009. Some held their breath, praying for the safe landing of the airborn kid, while others joked at the seemingly improbable situation. As it played out, those who laughed first indeed laughed last.

It is not surprisingly that two games quickly appeared related to Balloon Boy's story. But to understand the shape they have taken, it is worth recounting how the event unfolded in the media.

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.

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.

Borut Pfeifer, a friend of the blog and Georgia Tech alumnus, recently left his job as a lead AI Programmer at EA Los Angeles to strike out as an indie. While many in his position would probably be worrying primarily about their fiscal security, hoping to cash in on the massive interest in small-scale downloadable games with a quirky art style and a few novel mechanics to drive the experience home... Borut has decided to make a political game. More specifically,  he's making a documentary game about the riots in Tehran following Iran's most recent election. In order to fund the project, he has turned to Kickstarter. This website allows one to set a funding goal and enumerate a number of tiered rewards for specific levels of contribution. Potential patrons are only charged if the campaign goal is met by the end date.

Borut, like many other indies using Kickstarter, offers producer credits and an in-game likeness of the patron at the highest tiers of contribution. The lowest-tier offering, perfect for impoverished students such as myself, is $10 for a preorder of the game. Presales, if you remember, were one of the two key methods by which African Americans were able to fund their first independent film projects. It's exciting that people like Borut are trying this for games, especially for a documentary game that has the potential to define the genre if it succeeds. Here is an article by Pfeifer at Gamasutra on the process of creating a Kickstarter project. Clicking on the widget above will take you to the project site. Please consider helping him out!

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.