Newsgames

Spent is a game about short-term personal finance, or the daily need to pinch pennies just to keep food on the table and provide a small levee against emergencies. Although the game's loose causal chain between decision and consequence (coupled with the emphasis on text-based delivery of information) provides a less pure procedural rhetorical model of poverty, it is nevertheless effective given an assumed target audience of middle-class teenagers and young adults. For many this game will merely serve as an exercise in sensitivity to the plights of the less fortunate (a balm to relieve conservative semantic engineering), perhaps inspiring a small donation at the end of the game. Instead of seeing Spent as a "call to action," it might be okay to settle for the more feasible--yet no less daunting or important--goal of educating young adults who are about to make decisions about whether to take out loans to go to college, keep an unwanted pregnancy, drop out of high school, or enter the job market.

The Iraq War Logs are a military leak for the information age: at nearly 400,000 documents, they contain more data than any single reporter could ever hope to process and synthesize. Released in late October by WikiLeaks, the logs are a collection of US army field reports dating from 2004 to 2009, mostly consisting of individual action reports.  

The sheer scope of the logs presents an obvious problem for journalists attempting to find patterns across the documents. Many commentators have emphasized the small scale of the individual documents at the expense of any larger trends. For example, a Pentagon spokesman dismissed the leak as "raw observations by tactical units, which were only snapshots of tragic, mundane events"; even WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange says that the "snapshots of everyday events offered a glimpse at the 'human scale' of the conflict" (BBC). Accordingly, most news reports are heavy on raw data and light on meaningful information, even though several news organizations--The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, and Der Spiegel--received the information in advance in order to analyze it.

In their size and scope, however, the logs also provide an object lesson in the importance of interactive infographics in modern journalism. Used correctly, an infographic can help readers and analysts find meaningful patterns in an imposing set of data like this one. Most major news organizations have made infographics of one type or another, with varying results. Comparing the scope of these graphics may give us a cross-section of the current state of interactive journalism.

The challenges that Colorado's policymakers face as they attempt to balance their state's budget are familiar to governments nationwide. In the face of the worst economic downtown since the Great Depression, municipalities of all levels have experienced dramatic drops in tax revenue and consequently serious gaps between their revenues and expenditures. This has forced many communities and governments to make painful cuts into public services or raise taxes on an economically-distressed population in efforts to close their budget gaps. Many of these cuts are dramatic and would be unheard of a few years go. For instance, Colorado's legislators, in the face of an almost $600 million deficit, is considering completely eliminating all of its $660 million general-fund spending for higher education, according to a recent article in the Denver Business Journal.

Colorado Backseat Budgeter is an interactive tool that presents the user with this difficult task of balancing the Colorado state budget. Budgeter is sponsored by Colorado State University's Bighorn Leadership Development Program and developed through EngagedPublic.com which seeks to promote "consensus, collaboration and creativity in the public sphere." While I could not find an explicit purpose statement anywhere within the Budgeter's documentation, in an article at Chronicle.com, Brenda Morrison, the director of the Bighorn Program states that "'by putting themselves in the governor's shoes,' people will better understand how the system works."

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.

Imagine this: a warm early summer's day. The sky looks cloudy, rain is immanent. Suddenly, the atmosphere takes on a green tinge. Is it your eyes? The wind picks up. And, without warning, pellets of ice begin falling from the heavens.

Hail. Effing hail. Is my car okay? This is so weird. Is my aluminum siding okay? (Why am I worrying about aluminum siding?) Woah, hail! Golf-ball sized pellets of ice in the middle of summer, piling up outside my front door. Effing hail!

Effing Hail by Jiggman and Greg Wohlwend of Intuition Games is a Flash game that looks like an infographic. It's an isometrically positioned diagram of the atmosphere sliced into fictionally named sections (the cleverly labled Aiesphere through Effingsphere). The player's mouse click acts as a strong updraft of wind that can lift falling precipitation back into the upper atmosphere to form large chunks of hail with which to pound the defenseless buildings on the ground. The goal is to make either an array of large hailstones or army of smaller hailstones to pummel an increasingly stronger set of buildings and objects in the sky within a time-limit.

An infographic titled "How Different Groups Spend Their Day," produced by the New York Times, recently circulated around the Internet, earning acclaim from casual news-readers and the multitude of Twitterers who passed the link around the net. People claimed they liked the infographic, which depicted how different population groups spend their day, because it was interactive, deep, multi-dimensional, and fun to investigate. People also spoke about the results of the quantitative information depicted: claiming that the results were fascinating, identifying trends and specific instances, and even noting some of the peculiarities (the unemployed spend less than 1% of the day working!).

There are at least two aspects of this New York Times infographic I'd like to explore, neither of which relate to the actual data itself. The first question I'm interested in is what it is about the graphic that, despite its flaws, people found so interesting? This relates to a larger question we've been exploring about "cool" infographics and chartporn—depections of data in which people are more interested in the graphic design than its utility. The second question criticises the graphic, examining what could have been done to actually make it live up to the commendations of its blog-sharers, Twitters, and Digg-ers.

One of this project's alumni, Nick Diakopoulos, spent the past summer working in California as a journalism research fellow. While working with us, Nick brought his journalistic experience and work in human-computer interaction to bear on a discussion of transparency in reportage, computer interfaces, and videogames. In the past month Nick created an interactive map for the Sacramento Bee--the purpose is to visualize the distribution of federal stimulus money to various counties throughout the state. We can see that he applied many of the ideas we had spoken during our research: transparency of construction, directed activity for infographics, and process journalism. Please check it out now, along with this "quiz version," then read our analysis after the jump.

What makes chart porn so appealing to us? There's certainly the admiration for fine craftsmanship, extensive data tables, and flashy aesthetics. I'd like to suggest that another reason we like it is the same "awareness instinct" written of by Rosenstiel & Kovach in The Elements of Journalism.

Rosenstiel & Kovach use the idea of the awareness instinct to explain why we read the news. One purpose of the news is to influence public opinion in such a way that the force of the people's opinion can be brought to bear on matters of policy; however, not all reportage seeks this end. And we don't read the news just so we know what our government is doing. One way to explain the popularity of investigative reporting and seemingly unimportant news such a tech and beauty columns is this awareness instinct. It implies a basic human desire for any and all information. Certainly the idea is that we hope to synthesize some of this information and use it in our daily lives, but this doesn't explain why people are so glued to celebrity gossip and the latest specs on Sony televisions. To put it crudely: we want to know about stuff.

John King has been called the "magician" because of his fluent use of the "Magic Wall" since the last primary elections. Today, the CNN presenter uses the wall every Sunday in his new show "State of the Union". However, the usage of the interactive screen has been reduced again just to a cool gadget in spite of its enormous potential to be used as a tool to show scenarios, models, simulations, predictions, and collaboration.

"EA SPORTS Virtual Playbook is born out of our deep football heritage at EA SPORTS and our drive to expand the impact of our innovative sports technologies beyond gaming," said Peter Moore, president of EA SPORTS. "Telecast on ESPN, EA SPORTS Virtual Playbook marks the future of sports production by allowing television analysts to highlight, critique and dissect on-field action more intimately than ever before. EA SPORTS Virtual Playbook brings an entirely new level of excitement and realism to football analysis to ESPN viewers this NFL season."

So goes the Press Release by EA introducing the feature to ESPN's football coverage this past September. The feature has garnered positive remarks by other sports news outlets, but what does the system offer sports journalism and how is it bridging the gap between games and journalism?

In keeping within the spirit of my infovis-related posts (see here, here and here) and being inspired by Ian's BusinessWeek Arcade post, I thought I'd mention some online infovis apps and, in particular, point to some examples of how infovis is being given larger contexts (i.e., devoted sections) within major news sources.

Open data sets and online visualizing apps are most often geared towards and most used by designers, scientists and statisticians. Information Aesthetics has a good list of some of the most popular of these apps in the first sentence of this post. But more examples are starting to creep into major news sources. Both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times have introduced new datavis sections in the past year that are aimed at allowing their readership more direct access to data sets.

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.

Note: This post is one in a series of posts that seeks to examine ways in which information visualization (infovis) can be game-like, or gamey (an unfortunate, but fun, term we default to when discussing this topic as a group).

Moving on from my earlier discussion of narrative infovis, I will now engage what Bobby and I identified as free-form infovis.

Free-form infovis allows users to engage large data sets in relatively open terms. A nice game analogy might be something like the experience of playing Grand Theft Auto. Players are free to roam within a large gamescape and adhere to a set of play guidelines only if they choose to do so. Structure is available as something to adhere to, react against or simply ignore and these choices, or options, are inherent in the game's system.

Traditional works of journalism craft stories to present information in a cohesive manner. But what if there isn't any clear trajectory or narrative? What if a journalist really just wants to present an otherwise disconnected collection of references and fragments?

Digital media artifacts like palinaspresident.us suggest one interesting potential solution.

palinaspresident.us is a "click-through" flash app (developed during the election cycle) that satirizes the idea of Sarah Palin as president. The user clicks around the office to uncover graphics that poke at campaign issues and gossip in a humorous way. The content ranges from jokes about the "maverick" moniker, to dystopia visions of Palin blundering her way to nuclear apocalypse.

Admittedly, it seems dubious to deem palinaspresident.us as "journalistic." At the time, the game certainly played off relevant news topics (e.g. Troopergate, the "drill baby drill" chant), but the primary purpose here is clearly to amuse (or terrify), not to inform. Given its partisan nature, the website would probably be more fairly labeled as activism.

Nonetheless, we could certainly imagine using this kind of explorative, click-through interaction to craft engaging info visualizations. One might use this kind of framework to compellingly present a jumbled series of different issues and facts. 

Note: This post is one in a series of posts that seeks to examine ways in which information visualization (infovis) can be game-like, or gamey (an unfortunate, but fun, term we default to when discussing this topic as a group).

After a brief word on directed activity, I thought it might be useful to discuss a fundamental split in infovis that Bobby and I sussed out a few weeks ago. After some discussion, we noticed that most of the infovis examples we were looking at fell into one of two categories: narrative or free-form.

All infovis invariably boasts spatial exploration of data, but some follow a stricter pattern of narration to convey a cogent story with multimedia and infographics. Other visualizations, the free-form variety, are more open engagements with data sets, featuring multiple filters to achieve alternative perspectives on said data. Exciting right? In this post I want to explore two examples of what I believe to be narrative infovis.

Through our explorations of information visualization we have been able to identify some "game-y" characteristics. Some of the elements both common to games and infovis include: the modeling of data, investigating models through space, revisitability, experimentation of effects, and discovery through participation with the system. We also noticed that there are two general tracks for the representation of data: guided and freeform. Guided information visualizations are crafted to lead the participant to some sort of conclusion in a linear fashion. Freeform representations are depictions of data that are open to multiple readings. Looking for examples of each? Check out this geology diagram from Alberto Cairo and the Sense.us website. Each of these tracks have their own game element strenghts, but neither one is better than the other for imagining infoviz as a game. The guided track is often too linear and doesn't encourage procedural manipulation, whereas the freeform track lacks direction.

A few weeks ago, Adam and I gave Democracy 2 a spin.

In Democracy 2, you play as a newly elected president who analyzes data, sets policies, manages a Cabinet, and responds to crises. There are a number of different scenarios (nations) to choose from. Most of them are fake names based on real configurations, although there is one explicitly real-named scenario (the United States).

The game is certainly fun. For our purposes, Democracy 2 is especially relevant because it acts as a kind of commentary on current issues. Admittedly, the game does not claim to be journalistic. Nonetheless, it does suggest a number of interesting challenges and solutions regarding the intersection of simulation and news.

Note: This post is one in a series of posts that seeks to examine ways in which information visualization (infovis) can be game-like, or gamey (an unfortunate, but fun term we default to when discussing this topic as a group). 

One way we can consider infovis to be game-like is by exploring the notion of directed activity. Directed activity in games and in information visualizations influences the ways users navigate through the game or information space and it can occur implicitly or explicitly. In both games and information visualizations directed activity operates to guide the user to certain goals.