"Mansion Impossible is a web-based videogame about real-estate investment... Houses pop out of the empty ground to go on the market, and disappear back into the ground when they sell. The price is inscribed on the house, and each house experiences a single gain-loss cycle before stabilizing. The player starts out with $100K, and the goal of the game is to build enough capital to buy the $10 million mansion on the edge of the screen. The player clicks on houses to buy or sell, taking care to time a sale for maximum profit. The town is divided into lower- and higher-cost housing areas, with the top right near the mansion offering the most exclusive and most expensive digs... A great amount of detail is abstracted from Mansion Impossible."

From the late 1970s until the economic downturn in the Soviet Union during Perestroika, Soviet military factories produced a series of arcade games alongside more commonplace military products. Because the production period is very sharply defined - once the Soviet government no longer provided the funding for the factories, game production was scrapped - an extremely distinct period of game production results. To a Soviet gamer of the time, the fact that the U.S.S.R. did not allow foreign games to be imported compounds the sharp definition of this era. This moment in time was resurrected in 2007, when a professor at Moscow State Technical University and two of his students tasked themselves with finding and repairing as many of these arcade machines as possible.

The result of their project is a called the Museum of Soviet Arcade Machines, which is essentially a basement converted into an arcade inside of a time capsule from the early 80s, albeit one that has been shaken around and mussed with, as not all the games are playable and many of the games do not run consistently. On their website, the herculean efforts of the Museum's curators is merely hinted at, but it is easy to perceive the difficulty of making these games function as many are mostly mechanical, half of them owing as much to puppetry and cardboard cut-outs as they do to a digital screen. Only a couple of the many machines have been preserved in emulators or other digital formats, and since the games' production ended long ago, most of the games and artwork on display in the Museum are profoundly rare.

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.

The thirty-three workers trapped in a Chilean coal mine for 70 days were rescued in a painstaking two-day effort on October 13th and 14th. This high profile story seemed ripe for a newsgame and a quick Google search proved this hunch.

A number of parameters made the topic appropriate for a newsgame. The event took place within a limited spatial domain that was easy to recreate as a game space. The rescue itself involved an elevator lowered down through a narrow mineshaft. Rescuers pulled up the miners one by one in a process that took around a half hour per person. Each miner was greeted with rousing cheers and teary eyes, and, because they resurfaced one-by-one, news organizations were able to profile each individually. This in mind, let's look at the kind of works produced in response to this event.

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.

If the voice acting and full-body motion capture are any indication, great care went into making The Curfew, a polished and attractive interactive work. Every line of dialogue is spoken; each of the characters is fully animated. The game is published by Channel 4 and written by Kieron Gillen, former editor of Rock Paper Shotgun, who is currently focusing his attentions on his comic book writing.

It is 2027 and you are living in an authoritarian state where the politics of security and safety have superseded citizens' freedoms and rights. It has reached the point where a curfew is imposed on the city. You find yourself at a safehouse and appear to be part of an underground resistance movement. You have been charged with relaying "the information" to someone you trust--one of four strangers in the safe house--in hopes that they will use it to "change the course of history."

The structure of the game is quite simple: after initiating a conversation with one of the strangers, you get to revisit and play through the story of how they arrived at the safehouse. There are four strangers in total: Lucas (The Boy), Aisha (The Immigrant), Leah (The Dissident), and Saul (The Ex-Policeman). In the flashback, you will talk to some people, gather some clues, and play a minigame or two before returning to the present and entering what is called the "questioning phase." This consists of a series of questions in which you interview the stranger to determine their trustworthiness. This repeats for each of the characters until you reach the end of the "web-game" (the site's own label for itself).

Using this specific name creates certain expectations in the audience:The Curfew is both a game and designed specifically for the web. Littleloud, the creation team, does an impressive job of the latter, using Flash to create detailed environments, an easily navigable UI, and an aesthetically pleasing browser-based experience. It is the inclusion of "game" that raises my objections.

The Curfew is a linear, dialogue-heavy narrative with ludic interruptions. This is by no means a dismissal of The Curfew as such--linear narratives can be expressive, creative, and powerful ways of communicating. Though I admit that the label might be being applied rhetorically ("web-narrative" doesn't have the same ring to it, after all), "game" is not a word to be taken lightly. As a game, The Curfew ends up feeling forced and gimmicky, which ultimately detracts from both its political rhetoric and its dystopian narrative experience.

By now you've likely read about the Berlin Wall game 1378(km). Drawing the title from the length of the border between East and West Germany, German university media-arts student Jens Stober designed the game to inject choice into the recreation of the space in a videogame. Stober's blog notes that the purpose of using a game to tell this story is because "I personally have the control over my behavior and my reactions, which take place in real time and in changing situations." To this end, Stober allows the player to experience both sides of the story: as an escapee in one and a wall guard in the other.

This is not the first time we've discussed the Berlin Wall on the Newsgames blog. The Berlin Wall map for Garry's Mod we examined last year served as a depiction of a physical space without tackling the operational of procedural realities of a living space. That is likely why it never created any controversy. You can only play as an East Berliner and it is quite easy to run right through Checkpoint Charlie because you're allowed copious damage resistance thanks to its roots in Half-Life 2. While 1378(km) is also based on a Source mod, it appears (from the video) to be tuned differently. We of course cannot know how it plays until it is released, but we can imagine that as a university project the designers would pay attention to this reality.

Even before its release, which was to coincide with the anniversary of the unification of Germany, the game sparked heated debate as the families of victims killed while trying to cross from West to East Berlin learned of the game. Dietrich Wolf, spokesman for the Federal Foundation for the Reconciliation of the Communist Dictatorship, called it "an ego-shooter game" and said it was "unacceptable given the historical context." A member of the Association for Victims of Communist Tyranny said it, "makes a mockery of the victims." These comments should sound familiar to those who know Super Columbine Massacre, JFK Reloaded, Six Days in Fallujah, or the many other controversial games that have touched on real events.

The response illustrates the age-old problem of documentary and current event newsgames involving violence: audiences do not have the videogame literacy needed to understand these works and producers do not have the tools to adequately demonstrate their importance. While claims have been made about the lack or presence of maturity in videogames as a medium, the fundamental issue in play with 1378(km) is not related to the game industry, but rather to journalism as a profession.

Some sites call them "ragdoll games"; others, the more honest ones, "torture games." All games of the genre have two characteristic features: a submissive, often restrained NPC and a bevy of tools the player can use to, well, hurt him. I say "him" because, from what I've seen, none of these games are about torturing women. Homoerotic sexual torture games and rape games arguably constitute formally similar but distinct sub-genres. In March of this year, Warner Brothers made a promotional game for A Nightmare On Elm Street called Keep Her Awake that shared many of the features of torture webgames, but it was quickly replaced with a non-interactive trailer after Boing Boing caused a small uproar.

Another commonality of torture webgames is a lack of contextual information. It's now fairly common to see "torture" missions in narrative-driven games, typically motivated by a need to force information from an NPC. These webgames aren't about intelligence-driven torture; they're about punishment. And one class of people that apparently isn't safe from representation in a torture webgame is the demagogue.

Ed Halter dedicates quite a few pages of From Sun Tzu to XBOX to the bin Laden whac-a-mole and torture games of the early 2000s. These games emerged soon after the 9/11 attacks, and, in many ways, they initiated the newsgames genre (though we now classify them as "tabloid games"). These bin Laden webgames are universally crude, brutish things. Torture Bin Laden lets players beat the villain with a baseball bat, cut him with a knife, or shoot him with a cruise missile to simulated applause. Osamagotchi conjures up a more twisted fantasy of revenge, featuring tools to keep bin Laden alive longer and the option to surround him with topless anime women.

Recently I came across a political torture game that I hadn't seen before, despite its 2006 release. The victim in this game is common in political games outside the United States, even though few Americans would recognize the name: Hassan Nasrallah is the Secretary General of Hezbollah, a figured reviled by Israelis because of his anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial, and guiding hand in the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict. I wrote about two Nasrallah games (also covered by Halter's book) in my "History of Editorial Games, Part One." The most likely reason that I'd never come across this torture game before is that I hadn't been searching in Hebrew.