Newsgames

You Shall Know The Truth is a timed hidden object game developed by Jonas Kyratzes for the Wikileaks Stories project. You play a spy sent by the U.S. intelligence community to retrieve leaked documents and biometric data on an unnamed Wikileaks employee from his or her apartment. It's a difficult game, not in that it's particularly trying to find all of the mission-targeted data before the timer runs out but because it adds a dark, humorous edge to a genre of casual games that traditionally has no ideological bent. It is also contradictory and perhaps difficult to take seriously at times, but, taken as a whole, it's a complex work with a novel take on the intersection between politics and play. Check it out before reading on, because there are spoilers ahead.

Obviously it's wonderful to see indie developers who haven't engaged with the genre in the past sticking their toes in the water (or their necks on the block), but it's impossible to ignore that the most timely and nuanced entry in the series thus far has come from Paolo Pedercini, a grizzled veteran. That boy has had to roll his eyes through enough of my insufferable critiques in the past, so we'll only be looking at the latter two this week and next. If you're unfamiliar with the project, Joel Goodwin's blog Electron Dance is a great place to start for links to all the games, brief analysis and comparison, and a lengthy interview with Jonas Kyratzes (one of the two Wikileaks Stories project coordinators).

Damian Connolly's Wikileakers is the most recent of the three currently-extant Wikileaks Stories games. It's clearly the most accessible, and it has, perhaps, been written off as overly simplistic. And we can see why: it's more cartoonish than the previous Wikileaks Stories games, it uses Internet slang ("pron"), marijuana jokes, and cheap one-offs at the President, and it hinges on a somewhat conservative score-chasing goal structure. There's no gray area here: Assange is our hero (as pointed out by Goodwin, it's the only game that features him as the player character), and the "propaganda model" media is trying to keep him down.

Players control a pixellated Assange as he runs back and forth in what appears to be an FBI lobby, dodging lasers and bombs. The former represent corrupt media sources, while the bombs drop from a crane ominously labeled "PR" (the bombs themselves alternately accusing the man of being a terrorist and sexual deviant). Lasers constantly track Assange, stopping briefly to intermittently fire. Players can mouse-click to place single a block labelled "free press" that will obstruct exactly one laser shot before disappearing. While the first two media lasers bear American flags, Swedish and Australian media sources are added as the player's score increases.

"Is this a newsgame?" isn't a question that comes up too often in our project studio meetings. In Newsgames: Journalism at Play, Bogost, Ferrari, and Schweizer clearly outline the various categories and qualities of different newsgames, and it's usually easy to identify new newsgames through their classification system. At the same time, it can be difficult to take stock of a title with newsworthy elements without playing it.

There's a single reason Casey Heynes commands our respect. It's not for what he did, even though what he did is what rechristened him in the waters of the Internet--anyone who's spent a little time on the wrestling mat knows how trivial it is to pick up someone half your own size, even if it's deadweight. No, our respect comes from what Casey didn't do. He didn't kick or spit on the bully while he was down, he didn't threaten the cameraman, and he didn't pump his fists triumphantly in the air at passersby. After his momentary, violent outburst (perhaps a necessary evil of adolescence), the Zangief Kid walked away.

The treatment of Wikileaks by the American press has been troublesome on many levels, but the most saddening fact is that -- among all the commotion -- the actual content of the leaks has been largely ignored. Whenever Wikileaks is discussed, what gets the most attention is simply that it exists, that it embarrasses the United States government, and the question of whether Julian Assange is a sex offender.

Video games on the topic to date have underscored this: the most popular game, Wikileaks: The Game, simply depicts Julian Assange stealing documents from President Obama, without any apparent interest what those documents contain.  It's a tabloid game, focused entirely on the colorful personalities involved (in this case, a shadowy Assange and a Barack Obama literally sleeping on the job). 

In my previous post, I critiqued The Curfew for its minigames and badge-collecting, which not only made it feel gimmicky but also detracted from its rhetoric. The ludic elements feel like they have been inserted for their own sake and do not engage the narrative (or the player) in a meaningful way. When not washing windows or hacking office computers, the player is in conversations or interviews. Unfortunately, the dialogue mechanic offers as little agency as the secondary ludic elements. Agency, as defined by Janet Murray, is a characteristic pleasure of digital media arising when a player is able to see the results of her choices. In The Curfew, the lack of agency creates a procedural rhetoric that is both problematic and dangerous.

There are two dialogue modes: flashback conversations and questioning phases. The former places the player in conversations with characters in order to gain information and advance the story. The latter takes place at the safehouse in the present, where the player is trying to foster trust in one of the four main characters. The two are related: perform well in a character's flashback conversation and you can unlock a 'high risk' question in the respective questioning phase, which can significantly raise or lower that character's trust.

(snapshot of a "poll cartoon" made by Mike Mikula for CNN.com)

Political cartoonists all seem to have different ideas about how to save their ailing industry. In 2004, Chris Lamb and Doug Marlette called for newspapers to re-assess their editorial priorities and urged peers to reassert the savage wit that defined their craft in the 60s and 70s. More recently, Steve Kelley and Matt Wuerker have advised fellow cartoonists to trade mean-spiritedness for good humor and optimism. The most compelling argument comes from Ilan Danjoux, who argues that the future of political cartoons lies online in "Reconsidering the Decline of the Editorial Cartoon."

Although digital publication is frequently blamed for the destruction of cartoonists' print-based natural habitats, it has also yielded a host of new opportunities. Danjoux points out that online publishing has allowed cartoonists to post comics that have been rejected by newspapers and editors, a strategy that is particularly useful for fledgling artists trying to gain exposure and readership. Furthermore, cartoons published online are available to a potentially limitless readership, instead of being constrained to the geography of newspaper circulation. Most importantly, the political cartoon's migration from print to digital media also introduces a number of new creative possibilities to cartooning and allows artists to interact with readers in novel ways.

Matt Wuerker's optimistic attitude may be the product of his own online cartooning successes. As staff cartoonist for the news site Politico, Wuerker has produced both traditional cartoons and a small arcade of interactive comics that blur the line between political comics and video games. Some of Wuerker's works include an unwinnable version of the classic board game Operation satirizing healthcare reform and a Duck Hunt-style shooting game starring Sarah Palin. Wuerker won the 2010 Herblock award for political cartooning, and he was also shortlisted for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in political cartoons. Wuerker isn't the only one who has found his niche online. The cartoonist who ultimately won the 2010 Pulitzer, Mike Fiore, won specifically for his animated cartoons, and previous Pulitzer winner Ann Telnaes routinely posts animations for The Washington Post.

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.

Switzerland is pumping out more than just high quality chocolates and super-secret bank accounts these days. The resolutely independent central European nation has also stepped up its production of religious intolerance as evidenced by a recent national referendum banning the construction of minarets throughout the country. Similar to the hide-and-go-seek racism employed by the hijab haters of the French Republic, members of the Swiss People's Party and the Federal Democratic Union whipped up anti-muslim sentiment in November by claiming that the offending architecture, which is only the most visible part of a larger mosque structure, was just the tip of the Islamic iceberg. Left unchecked, supporters claimed, Islam would loom as large on the political landscape as the Matterhorn over the Alps.

Into this hotbed of Alpine arrogance, Minarett Attack [sic] emerged online as a game firmly in support of the ban and its underlying logic of cultural overwhelm. The game comprises a single scene: a quaint mountain village that, based on the monuments depicted, is at least part Zurich and part Geneva. A small Swiss flag flies atop a distant mountain peak. The light oom-pah-pah of accordion music fills the air, while the entire scene is bathed in the soothing glow of an alpine sunrise.

(This post was prepared by Tanyoung Kim and Bobby Schweizer)

The iPhone has proven itself a viable platform for small game producers. Its technical capabilities serve most non-3D needs, it isn't overly complicated to develop for, and there is a plan for monetization that does not need to rely on the promises of advertising dollars. It should come as no surprise, then, that the kinds of Flash games we're all familiar with have moved onto a handheld device. This includes those that touch on hot-button issues and current events.

As one of the biggest events in the country in the couple of years, the government's bailout of the financial industry has made its way into ten iPhone games. There's Bailout Bandits, in which you play as the police capturing bankers floating down from a high rise with their golden parachutes. There's Bailout!, a spreadsheet-like financial simulation game. Bailout Ben has you piloting a helicopter, dropping money on bar charts to aid corporations in need. Bailout America is a Lemmings-style game. Bailout Bonanza is basically Activision's classic Kaboom.

Two games in particular, though, embrace a similar cartoon aesthetic whose roots can be traced back to the editorial cartoon.

The vast majority of the Gazette's digital work, especially from the earlier years, is in quiz form. This article is only going to look at the games they made, a virtual Voting Arcade from September 2004 and two interactive mazes from 2009.

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.

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.

In the red desert of Mars I placed five remote mines on my truck, drove at high speeds toward an EDF roadblock, leapt from the vehicle roughly 300 yards from my target, and detonated the truck as it crashed through the gate. This destroyed a booth containing a turret emplacement, three lightly-armed EDF soldiers, and a civilian vehicle stopped at the checkpoint. A meter on the lefthand side of my screen showed that I decreased EDF "control" over the territory by three points for destroying the building; I was docked three "morale" points for killing the civilian. Red Faction: Guerrilla has been out for a few months now, but I just got my hands on it last week. The supposition that this game may be a commentary on the war on terror has been so widely covered that, unless you've never read about it before, the above description of my actions shouldn't surprise you much.

Parents need to know that this third-person action game tackles the difficult subject of wartime insurgency and terrorism. Players take on the role of a reluctant freedom fighter who uses his expertise in demolitions to help defeat a corrupt, militaristic occupational force. The violence, while more or less constant, is often directed at buildings rather than people, and players are encouraged to avoid hurting civilians whenever possible.

Many enthusiast reviews of the game conclude that any possible connection to the actual conflict in Iraq is most certainly in bad taste. This is an unfortunate misstep for those reviewers; the recent controversy and subsequent discourse surrounding the failed IP Six Days in Fallujah shows that many are ready for games that explicitly tackle contemporary tragedies such as the Iraq insurgency. Critical gamers welcome the chance to experience and interrogate the anti-American mindset through gameplay. Should your 12-year old play this game? Probably not. Should you support Volition with a purchase, then carefully analyze the game's construction while you play? Most definitely. Read our analysis of how Red Faction: Guerrilla proceduralizes insurgency after the jump.

Wired Magazine has published a game about the business of Somali pirating. The game, called Cutthroat Capitalism, accompanies an article published in Wired, An Economic Analysis of the Somali Pirate Business Model. Here's a description:

You are a pirate commander staked with $50,000 from local tribal leaders and other investors. Your job is to guide your pirate crew through raids in and around the Gulf of Aden, attack and capture a ship, and successfully negotiate a ransom.

Continuing the thread on editorial games from my history, part one.

Author's note: While I was finishing up this piece, Ian forwarded me an upcoming DiGRA paper by Michael Mateas and Mike Treanor of UC Santa Cruz on *roughly* the same subject (though they focus much more on further defining the shared qualities of both genres). It thus became difficult to round off the article without seeing almost every claim as an argument made against their position. I'm not going to reply directly to any of their assertions, nor am I going to include any further insights into the subject that I may have gleaned from reading their piece. When their paper is presented at DiGRA, I hope you'll take the opportunity to contrast my definitional stance with theirs. We will be incorporating and replying to their article directly, and in long form, much later on down the road. Thanks for reading!

The line between "newsgame" and "editorial game" is fuzzy no matter how you slice it. Basically, our suggestion is that most games called "newsgames" don't have the same intentions or goals as traditional reporting, or "the news," but rather those of the op-ed piece: to persuade; therefore, we should label these digital opinion pieces as "editorial" rather than "news." Most people are probably inclined to ignore the possible distinction, because there doesn't seem to be enough proof that we need one in the first place (we can't exactly place a finger on what a "properly journalistic" newsgame would look like, as Paolo Pedercini has pointed out to us before). By the end we will (hopefully) have a slightly better understanding of the relationship between editorial and newsmaking, as well as a firmer grasp on how procedural rhetoric is used in editorial games.

The history of the editorial game began not with a bang, but with three. The first (the Big Bang of editorial games, as well as a couple other genres, so to speak) was the wide adoption of Flash in the creation of casual webgames. We can date this as sometime around August 2000, when Macromedia released Flash 5 with ActionScript 1.0, XML functionality, and SmartClips (an early form of components). Flash 5 and Flash MX were instrumental in the popularization of gaming portals such as AddictingGames.com (which we will return to near the end) in late 2001.

The second bang occurred on September 11th, 2001. Al-Qaeda's attack on American soil plunged the country into what seems today to be a perpetual war, becoming the most visible public issue (until, perhaps, our most recent economic downturn) both in the United States and abroad. The war on terror is a polarizing issue, leading to an explosion of opinion-based publishing on the Internet. Opinions are cheap, and we're quick to form them. Flash isn't incredibly cheap unless you're a student, but it is relatively easy to quickly make a game with it if you have any knowledge of keyframe animation or basic object-oriented programming.

Finally, the prior currents converge in late September of 2003 (I'm now finished with the "bang" metaphor): Gonzalo Frasca launches newsgaming.com with a controversial "toy world" entitled September 12th. Frasca had casually created a political game called Kabul Kaboom during a transcontinental flight at the beginning of the war in Afghanistan, and the game's unexpected viral popularity led him to develop September 12th--an elegantly simple game about the dangerous assumptions of tactical missile strikes on terrorist pockets--over the course of the next few months. It employs an early example of what Ian Bogost calls "the rhetoric of failure"--a game that can only be "won" by not playing it at all. September 12th became wildly popular, gaining mainstream media attention and inspiring almost a decade of political Flash games (recently winning the Knight Foundation's Lifetime Achievement award for newsgames at this year's Games for Change).

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 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.

January 19 was the second anniversary of the murder of the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink. Two years ago he was killed by a 17 year old nationalist who believed that Dink was insulting Turkishness by openly rejecting the official Turkish policy on the events of 1915. Dink believed that during the First World War the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire became victims of a state run massacre, genocide. He was not the only one. Today officially 21 countries and 42 of the 50 U.S. states recognize the events as genocide. On the other hand the official history of The Turkish Republic rejects this allegation. According to many Turkish historians not only Armenians but also thousands of Turkish civilians died during course of war and there was no genocide.

After almost 100 years later, with its many layers, the recognition or denial of the events of 1915 as genocide is one of the controversial issues of the history and politics. In Turkey the issue evokes distrust and anger especially among nationalists. The ethnical nature of the conflict and Turkey's recent terror problems with ethnical routes also solidify these feelings.

One of the discussions we had during project studio led us to ask a question about modeling three-dimensional game spaces in which journalism could take place. In his article "What Should You Show in a Graphic?" Alberto Cairo discusses the depiction of 3D space in the flat graphics of print or the computer screen. One of the difficulties of this space, he points out, is that news editors often want them to be dressed up to have more visual appeal. The problem is that this often means making up details of a scene that might be inaccurate or at least irrelevant. What I would like to address is what happens when the space rendered in this graphic is turned into a 3D space like those in games.

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To ground my hypothetical thoughts in some realistic manor, I'd like to consider a relatively specific space that could be modeled in a graphics engine like Valve's Source (used for Half-Life 2). As we are students at Georgia Tech, news on the campus is relatively important to us. Because this news is tied to a geographically specific region that remains relatively static, some intrepid students at The Technique have enlisted the help of their game-savvy friends to build the Georgia Tech campus using the Source engine. That way, any time a story hits, they have a pre-made map in which to set the elements of the story.

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 inauguration of the 44th President of the United States Barack Obama was commemorated in many different ways. One new digital tool that captured the moment President Obama took the oath of office was Photosynth, a project from Microsoft that stitches together 2D photographs to form a navigable 3D space. This kind of technology is reliant on mass contributions--the more viewpoints the better the image. Photographers were told to "Take one photo of the moment when Obama takes the oath... take three photos (wide-angle, mid-zoom, full-zoom)" and email their photos to an address. Microsoft's software stitched these photos together and the resulting product, "The Moment," was displayed on CNN.com.

Can we apply this kind of user-contributed data to develop game spaces for news?

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.

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.

As was mentioned on the blog a couple weeks ago, Comedy Central used its Indecision 2008 brand to release a number of election-related games on the web. I wrote that these games are in a unique position to make commentary because of their Comedy Central context. They lay somewhere in the middle of a serious news game and an irreverent editorial game. A handful of the games are actually quite good. Most are at least competent, illustrating the issue in a moderately effective way though weakened by poor design or ineffective commentary. A few are even just plain bad. But by examining each game in brief we can understanding where they succeed and fail and learn about designing these kinds of games in the future.

During the last three presidential election seasons, Comedy Central brought viewers its "Indecision" special programming. In 1992, Comedy Central entered the political ring as Al Franken presented humourous live coverage of the first Bush's State of the Union Address. But it was The Daily Show with Jon Stewart that launched the 2000 Bush-Gore election's coverage known as "Indecision 2000." Their spoof coverage even earned them a Peabody Award. 

One of the first videogames to be treated as a legitimate work about a contemporary issue was Chris Crawford's 1985 title Balance of Power. It is a strategy game about geopolitics during the Cold War. The player is charged to take the role of the President of the United States or the General Secretary of the Soviet Union. The goal is to complete a term of office (eight years, with each turn taking a year) without invoking a nuclear war, and to end the game with a higher prestige than one's opponent.

The game was reasonably successful, having been ported from its original Macintosh version to Apple ][, PC, Atari ST, and Amiga. More importantly, it became one of the earliest good examples of what we now sometimes call Serious Games, (or what I have called Persuasive Games).

There are a number of things worth noting about Balance of Power. The first matter of interest I'd like to share is one I've only begun to think about recently: this was a game that produced an impressive journalistic discourse about its topic.

I'd like to take issue with Bobby's post about "issues in games" following Rowsell's Escapist piece. I don't agree that "game poetry," such as the experience of playing Shadow of the Colossus, does a good enough job of making its players more informed or better humans. It's become a quick cliché in the indie game movement, feeding likewise into independent newsgames, to have games that teach a moral through "unwinnability." Take, for instance, September 12th or a game made here at Georgia Tech about heroin addiction, where the only way to "win" the games is to not play it at all. I don't think Shadow of the Colossus operates in the same way as these games, but many people seem to want to read it as one. From Bobby's examination of Shadow, it would seem that the only way to be a good person would be to not kill the colossi in the first place. The moral isn't that interesting: don't sell your soul in an attempt to play at being God. Do we really need more versions of Faust or Frankenstein in our lives in order to be better people?



The problem with these games is that there aren't any moral choices to be made within the games themselves (the decision to stop playing is meta-game). Shadow of the Colossus doesn't work on an ethical level for me, because simply watching a character's forced fall from grace through plot progression is about as persuasive today as an Aesop fable. September 12th and Shadow are old games now, and it's a cop-out at this particular moment in gaming history to create a game without a choice other than: play and be damned, or drop the controller. If only making such a statement got the mainstream game industry out of its slough of despond! (I'll also be linking this back to choice in newsgames at the end.)

Colin Rowsell, a writer for The Escapist, recently posted an article asking a variation of a common question: Why is the games industry so afraid of getting involved in the issues of the day? I understand and appreciate Colin Rowsell's point and believe it's worth pursuing further, but also feel we need to approach this question with a different strategy. We're still in the early stages of the medium of the game.

Answering Rowsell's question of why there aren't any commercial games discussing political or social issues is as easy as one word: money. The problem with Rowswell's article is that we already know this answer. Asking this question leads to an unsatisfactory answer, so we should reframe it. I'm hoping this blog post's exploration will let us arrive at a better question and encourage people to think differently about the medium's role in political/social issues.

Only two days left until November 4.

For months and months now, it's felt like the election has been on absolutely everybody's mind. With the stakes seemingly higher than ever, all sorts of people are coming out of the woodwork to support their candidate.

If we look to traditional media, we find scores of artists using their chosen craft to engage the election. To use a few Obama-centric examples: we've heard the Black Eyed Peas (and a gaggle of famous pop musicians) singing "Yes We Can"; we've seen Sarah Silverman use her in-your-face TV comedy to get out the Democratic vote in Florida; Ron Howard went as far as to resurrect The Andy Griffith Show and Happy Days for his own pro-Obama short; hell, even the Budweiser "Wassup" guys spoofed their commercial to urge people to vote for change. Hollywood too is cashing in on election fever: witness Oliver Stone's W or Kevin Costner's Swing Vote.

As a games researcher and designer, I can only ask: why are there so few - if any - compelling political games or newsgames about this election cycle?

The question, which plagues the so-called Serious Games movement more generally, is far too contentious to be answered in one blog post. Ian himself tackled the question just two days ago, drawing a distinction between politics and politicking. But in focusing on the various affordances of games, Ian only orbits around what I personally see as the heart of the issue.

For my purposes, I'd like to reflect on one particular example that, in my mind, symbolizes the failure of the game designer community to capitalize on this historic election. In doing so, I want to suggest that the "problem" - if we should even view the dearth of worthwhile election games as problematic - has just as much to do with the culture around game design. We need to address the mindset under which these kinds of games are designed.