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.

Puzzles have long been an intellectual staple, whether they involve solving the daily sudoku or crossword puzzle, deducing a brain teaser, or bending a Rubix cube to one's will. Puzzles demand a test of logic and strategy, rewarding those who are patient enough come up with a solution on their own and frustrating players that try to simply guess their way through the problem. There is no shortage of puzzle games in today's library of games, digital and analogl, but one recent popular formula comes from a series developed by Nintendo and Level-5, Professor Layton.

The premise of each Layton game is that the titular Professor Hershel Layton, an English gentleman and professor extraordinaire, and his snippy apprentice Luke Triton engage a foreign space, its people, and their puzzles. There is certainly a resemblance to a Conan Doyle novel in each of these adventures, with unique characters and a cartoonish but engaging art style, but the mainstay of the series lies in the puzzles that pervade each game. 

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.

At first glance, CNN Challenge is an online quiz game revolving around the news, current events and general knowledge of popular culture. A player might have certain expectations based on the genre; for instance, most quiz games have the end goal of teaching players some body of knowledge that they did not have prior to playing. In this case, the player selects one of ten CNN personalities who will serve as a guide throughout the game, which includes giving instructions on how to play, as well commenting on the player's progress after each round.

As well as its implementation of standard quiz game conventions, CNN Challenge takes on a more nuanced and intricate approach to online news trivia. Many of these subtleties were revealed in an interview with Kay Madati, current Vice President of Audience Experience at CNN. In our talk with him, we discussed the ways in which CNN Challenge is important on its own as a quiz game. More importantly, however, Madati explains how it fits into a larger, more complex structure that extends beyond notions of play. Instead, the game can be useful as a platform through which other purposes can be served within the CNN organization.

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.

Undoubtedly one of the strongest capabilities of the internet is its ability to make a wide range of real-time information easily accessible to anyone with a connection.  News aggregators such as Google News and Huffington Post serve as some of the strongest manifestations of this capability. 

One might think this easy access to information would lead to a more informed citizenry, but as a 2007 report by the Pew Research Center demonstrates, this is not necessarily the case.  In the report, Pew asked respondents questions that tested their public affairs knowledge in 1989 and then again in 2007, and despite the many changes in mass communication that have occurred over the almost two-decade span of time, public affairs knowledge changed little.  In some instances, it decreased: 74% of respondents could name the vice-president in 1989, but in 2007 that number dropped to 69%.

Everybody knows now that eBay and Craigslist did a number on newspaper revenue. We're told that newspaper producers were caught completely off guard by these online classifieds. One thing we wanted to know is: what would happen to the circulation of a newspaper if its game-playing constituency also migrated to the Internet?

This leads to a tacit first question: what number of newspaper-subscribers buy the paper just for the puzzles? There are some difficulties acquiring statistically significant numbers here. First, most newspapers don't do regular surveys of their readers to actually find out why they're buying the paper. Will Shortz at the New York Times shares an interesting figure - he does after all have a lot at stake here as the world's current Dean of Crossword Puzzles. In a 2004 interview Shortz discussed a survey from earlier in the decade that found 27% of newspaper readers playing the crossword occasionally. That numbers isn't particularly compelling for our purposes, but there is one other number dropped by Shortz that does carry some weight: 1%. That's the percentage of Americans who named crossword-solving as "their favorite activity in the world."

"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.

In examining various sort of games that newspapers currently employ in order to see what can be changed to increase the level of journalistic discourse these games can offer, I have been looking at the quiz. With this in mind, I look at the quiz from various perspectives. In this entry, I will survey the history of the quiz as well as the various formats that quizzes are presented.

The quiz is an interesting format that has been used for both pedagogical and entertainment purposes. Quizzes usually take the form of "general knowledge" or "trivia", but news themed "news quizzes" exist. These take various forms with radically different goals ranging from pedagogy, to entertainment, to self-exploration. The news quiz has permeated through various media, most interestingly, in digital forms.

One traditional news quiz is the New York Times News Quiz, which has a strictly pedagogical bent. The focus of this quiz, which is similar to many other newspaper-based news quizzes,  aims to instruct younger readers about techniques of reading and synthesizing information from a newspaper article whose style of writing is different than styles taught in school such as the essay or short story.

In analyzing the intersection of games and journalism, I thought it would be fruitful to look at games as they presently exist in print journalism. In this article, I touch upon the crossword, its history, and its possible use as a platform for Journalism.

While the crossword is a relatively recent construction (about 95 years old), word games and riddles have appeared in newspapers since the 17th century. The forms themselves, the riddle, word square, rebus, and enigma date back thousands of years .

On July 5th, 2003, in the Op-Ed Page of the New York Times, instead of the various daily columns, a large puzzle is in its place. This puzzle, entitled Patriot Games, is one of ten so-called "Op-Ed Puzzles" created by Puzzability, a firm made up of three veteran crossword and other puzzle constructors: Wall Street Journal Crossword Editor Mike Shenk,  Former Games Magazine Managing Editor Amy Goldstein, and Puzzle Constructor and Illustrator Robert Leighton.

The puzzles take the form of several smaller puzzle, each a take on the theme (usually a holiday or event, such as the United Nations Day Puzzle, Country Club). The answers to these smaller puzzles are then used as entries in the last puzzle which answers a question posed by the writers at the beginning of the puzzle. For example, in Patriot Games, the question asked is: "our vote for the best way to spend Fourth of July holiday weekend". The answer for this puzzle (I hope it's not too much of a spoiler) is "Join a Party" which, as many word puzzles tend to be, is a pun on the word party as both a festivity and a political group.

This led me to think about the nature of these puzzle's construction and whether the creators themselves saw themselves working in a journalistic or editorial capacity. Moreover, how did these puzzle even come about in the New York Times and why did they take the form of "Op-Ed" Puzzles?

I'd like to once again thank Amy Goldstein and the other members of Puzzability for politely answering my questions regarding these puzzle and both the formal and ideological processes behind their construction.

Below my interview with Amy Goldstein of Puzzability: