Category: Transparency

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:

Jason Rohrer's Crude Oil is a two-player game/prototype about the recent controversy over whether to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).

Before the economy collapsed, ANWR stood out as one of the key issues of the election. You might remember, for example, chants of "drill baby drill" at the Republican National Convention.

Crude Oil, which is not only multiplayer but overtly political, represents a significant departure from Rohrer's more famous games. For our purposes, the game is relevant because it provides a quirky solution to the problem of journalistic transparency. In doing so, Crude Oil also offers a somewhat different spin on the notion of procedural rhetoric.

The spectacular crash of US Air flight 1549, along with the remarkable, safe rescue of all passengers and crew aboard, has captured the imagination of the public this week. Since 9/11, air disasters have taken on so many different meanings in our culture, and to have such a "successful" one occur in New York offers not only a chance to celebrate real heroism, but a dose of symbolic remedy as well.

One of the questions we can always ask about disasters is this one: "What would it have been like to be involved?" In most cases, it's a question we direct at victims or survivors. But in the case of US Air 1549, the stand-out figure is the pilot, Chesley Sullenberger, whose masterful and exacting water landing has earned him all measure of praise, not the least of which includes dozens of Facebook fan pages.

"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.

The intersection between games and journalism does not only entail newsgames.

Here at JAG, one of our key realizations has been that interactive infographics already have game-like qualities, and might have something to learn from traditional game design wisdom. Adam, for example, has written about Martin Wattenberg's NameVoyager, pointing out that its users frequently interact with the dataset by setting their own goals (e.g. which of my friends has the most old-fashioned name?)

Interactive infographics should interest us because they are already so widely used in online journalism (just think back on all the interactive demographics maps that were deployed during the 2008 Presidential Election). To be honest, my own personal suspicion is that game-like interactive infographics ultimately make more sense than so-called newsgames - at least for many types of news stories.

In this post, I'd like to compare and contrast two similarly minded, game-like infographics (or rather, data exploration apps) about natural disasters.

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.

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.

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.