Bogost Newsgames
9 Journalism at Play
In 2006, Persuasive Games created a series of editorial current event garnes, which Web portal Shockwave. com published under the series name The Arcade Wire. The games were more like opinion columns than cartoons, taking nuanced positions on then-current events like the airport security liquid ban that September (Airport Security), an outbreak of E. coli in domestic spinach and tomato crops that autumn (Bacteria Salad), the dynamics of global conflict and natural disaster that contributed to high oil prices that summer and fall (Oil God), and the frenzy of holiday shoppers struggling to capture scarce toys that holiday season (Xtrerne Xmas Shopping).
The games use simulation to express opinion. In Airport Security, players take the role of a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agent trying to keep up with rapidly changing security rules. In Oil God, players apply civil unrest and natural disaster in order to manipulate oil futures such that fuel costs in a target nation reach a target price. And in Bacteria Salad, players face the difficulty of tracing contaminations back to farm networks managed by big agribusiness. They are well crafted and unusual, and they take their editorial positions seriously-factors that may have contributed to some tens of millions of plays since the first title's release. They are profitable, too: players pay nothing, but Shockwave. com sells rich-media advertising that runs before the games start. Though the cost per impression (CPI) for such ads have fallen from highs of $30-$501 when the series was originally released, these units still commanded $15-20 in the sour economy of spring 2009.2 Atom Entertainment, which owns the sites on which the Arcade Wire games appear, does not release gross revenue figures to developers, but based on these figures it is reasonable to conclude that the games may have brought in several hundred thousand dollars of revenue even if inventory wasn't always fully sold.
The following spring, Persuasive Games inked a deal with the New York Times to create editorial games for the op-ed section of their Web site. The
feat was brought about partly by high-profile publicity The Arcade Wire series had earned, including features in the New York Times itself.' wired,' USA Today, 5 ABC News," and Playboy.7 Game news Web site GamePolitiCS.com called it a "cultural milestone. ,,8 Persuasive Games had high hopes too, both journalistically and commercially. From an editorial perspective, what venue could be better than the Gray Lady? And from a commercial perspective, the series offered a chance to establish a system to support editorial games on an ongoing basis. Concerned about finances but eager to bring newsgames to the paper, Persuasive Games agreed to a trial run of editorial games, one a month for six months. They accepted the Times' offer of "columnist pay," $1,500 per month.
The first title, Food Import Folly, addresses the difficulty the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) import inspectors face when inspecting ever-increasing volumes of foreign food at America's ports. The second, Points of Entry, operationalizes the complex calculus of the merit-based evaluation system proposed for green card awards in the Kennedy-McCain immigration reform bill under debate in mid-2007. We offered both as examples of reportage games in chapter 2.
Soon after Points of Entry, progress ground to a halt. The editorial desk editor began rejecting the studio's treatments, including a game about gun laws and state lines following the April 2007 Virginia Tech massacre, and a game about the cult of Apple in anticipation of the release of the iPhone in June of that year. Persuasive Games had completed a third game, Steroid SLugger, about the social and business dynamics of steroid use in baseball. Despite the fact that the game was ready to be released just as Barry Bonds passed Hank Aaron's home run record that August, the Times editorial desk had stopped responding to contact from the studio. The game was never released, and none of the remaining games were created. The newspaper quietly paid out the remaining, modest monthly checks, although the payments were assuredly a result of corporate automation more than shame. Shockwave.com had paid the company a small advance for games in the Arcade Wire series, but they had also paid a royalty based on advertising sales. Even though the Times sells video ads on their Web site, the editorial desk responsible for publishing the newsgames wasn't able (or willing) to determine how to run such ads."
In retrospect, Bogost is convinced that the New York Times meant no harm in dropping their arrangement with his studio so suddenly. Rather than wickedness or deceit, organizational politics are likely to blame. As budgets tightened and staff reduced, who could blame an editor for making compromises? Certainly nobody would notice if a videogame didn't make
177
Journalism at Play
it onto the Web site. No horseman was deployed to the front of the charge of the newsgames brigade at the New York Times, so the cavalry retired to
their desks.
Battered but still determined, Persuasive Games engaged in many further
conversations with other news organizations. The Washington Post and National Public Radio both expressed considerable interest, and the studio engaged in extensive discussions with editorial, publication, and business development personnel at those organizations, among many others. At the end of the day, the prospect of changing existing practices to accommodate games proved too difficult a burden to overcome, even when the small game studio bore the burden of the risk, as it had done for the New York Times. In response to one of Bogost's proposals for a series that would require no up-front investment from the publisher, an editor responded without irony, "Budgets and staff are so tight right now. The interest is there, but any extras are a tough sell right now, as you can imagine."
'''Ie tell these stories not to seek empathy or to assign blame, but to characterize the organizational circumstances under which particular newsgames have been proposed and developed. It's a matter worth putting in context. There is a concern today that the news business is dying. Local papers are shuttering, while larger ones are making cuts just to stay afloat. The social value of print news, which has taken up residence on the Web, has been undermined by bloggers and commenters. [ts economic viability has been threatened by falling advertising revenue and competing services. Figuring out how videogames fit into the world of news is even more difficult than building the games themselves: in addition to determining how to tackle newsworthy topics in game form, journalists must also fit games into news media and news organizations more broadly.
Andrew DeVigal, multimedia editor for the New York Times online, discussed the evolution of that paper's newsroom structure at the 2008 Society for News Design conference.1o The multimedia section of the Times, DeVigal explained, had been converted into a "transverse" endeavor, with new, overlapping roles replacing the once separate areas of graphics, photography, design, and multimedia. At that year's Online News Association Conference, Las Vegas Sun New Media Projects Editor Josh Williams revealed a similar approach.!' As a part of a wholesale redesign, the paper had added new jobs, including database developer, software developer, Flash journalist, and design technologist. These moves toward integrated work environments demonstrate real progress in adapting the newsroom to a different media landscape. Today it is more common to see Web sites that unfold news stories progressively, as new information arrives, and
178
efforts that were once entirely independent are now more tightly integrated. For example, since the multimedia department at the Times now works more closely with photography, a Flash journalist can update news packages online as soon as the latter department releases new material. These cases suggest two important realizations: news products cannot be created in silos, and new principles are required to create new types of
news media.
Journalism is not only becoming digital, it is also becoming playful. As
journalists and news organizations consider this charge, they must adopt new ideas to regulate the interaction between games and journalism. We conclude with a few such principles for a journalism at play.
Culture Computation
When we learn to read, to write, to do mathematics, to repair motorcycles, to design bridges, or to architect software, we tend to start with first principles. We learn the basic knowledge in a domain so that we can master its exercise in a variety of ways, ways that are usually not obvious at the time of our training. We've already suggested that both journalism and game design bear similar principles of construction: both seek to understand and represent the behavior of systems in comprehensible ways. But another fundamental area of knowledge must be added to that of game design for newsgames to flourish: the computational expertise required to
construct them.
Despite advances exemplified by the New York Times and Las Vegas Sun,
these organizational solutions might be too instrumental and overly connected to technological roots to signal enduring change. Although the multimedia department of papers like the Times has become more comprehensive, roles themselves still rely on specifics of implementation for the present moment. Duties are separated, and novelty is arrested. Newsrooms are still struggling with digital multimedia (video, audio, interactive applications, and so forth), the pursuit of which amounts to playing catchup. Rarely do news organizations inspire and reward new approaches that haven't already been beaten into the ground by creators outside the
newsroom.
Rather than focusing on the instrumental skills of tool-use, journalists
must develop a first-principles expertise in computation. These future computational journalists will spin code the way yesterday's journalists rattled off prose, and they will do so as if by second nature, in the service
of journalistic goals.
'79
Journalism at Play
Choose Systems Over Stories
Journalists write, shoot, produce, edit, and publish stories. They think of their work in terms of people, events, locations, moments, motivations. They craft ledes and choose images to draw readers or viewers into a specific individual's plight, and then they move from the particular to the
general.
But as we have shown, games are better at depicting the general than
they are at the particular. Cutthroat Capitalism addresses the economics of Somali piracy, not the tale of a particular pirate or freight captain. September 12th offers an opinion on the inevitable outcome of surgical missile strikes, not a perspective on one such attack. PeaceMaker depicts the political dynamics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, not the run-up to a particular period of hostility. The crossword offers a calming feeling of mastery in a world of uncertainty, not a test of the meaning and usage of particular
words.
Games can and do include characters, settings, and events. But even
when they do, they work best when those features are rallied in the service of system rather than a story (just think of Freedom Fighter '56, which uses real events and fictionalized characters to relate the overall experience of the Hungarian Revolution). Games offer journalists an opportunity to stop short of the final rendering of a typical news story, and instead to share the raw behaviors and dynamics that describe a situation as the journalistic content. It's a paradigm shift, to be sure. Those who create newsgames don't "get the story," they "get the system" instead.
Specialize
Just as there are different forms and genres of print and broadcast journalism, from the investigative report to the editorial cartoon, so there are different forms of newsgames. Each one serves a different purpose, and knowing when to use one over another proves as important as-if not more important than--executing well within a particular form. As we've shown in this book, different types of games can do different things for journalism, from characterizing the operation of an economic system to offering a light mental exercise between the front page and the sports page.
Newsgames are not monolithic. Their different genres, from current event games to newsgame platforms, serve unique purposes. As a creator, choose a purpose and develop an expertise in it. And as an editor, identify opportunities for newsgames as you would do for any type of coverage.
Furthermore, expand those horizons, creating new forms of newsgames by translating old forms, combining existing ones, or inventing new ones.
Scale Up
As Play the News and the Arcade Wire series suggest, successful newsgames might need to be created at scale, with frequency, to enjoy long-term success. Imagine if the new form were the televised newscast instead of the videogame. No one would imagine that a single broadcast would offer a satisfactory sign of long-term potential. Hiring a Flash journalist or a database developer won't inspire the op-ed editor to change his priorities about editorial games. [t won't invent new ways of integrating news puzzles to recapture the value lost to casual games. It won't devise new ways to synthesize current events into computer behaviors that might be licensed for use in tomorrow's blockbuster entertainment videogames.
Deeper structural barriers must disappear before news organizations will be able to set the stage for success with computational media. For newsgames to become successful, their creators must expect to fail often, to learn from those failures, and to translate them into more frequent successes. That will take time.
Make Something
At its core, news is comprised of ideas. It is not made of folded newsprint, broadcast studios, or Web pages. It is not run by television anchors, radio talk show hosts, newspaper editors, beat reporters, or bloggers. And journalism is not an industry, nor is it a profession. It is a practice in which research combines with a devotion to the public interest, producing materials that help citizens make choices about their private lives and their communities. There is nothing medium-specific about journalism, no reason that its output must take the familiar form of text, image, or video. This book has offered numerous perspectives on the use of one new medium for journalism, from adaptations of familiar forms like editorial cartoons to resurrections of forgotten forms like puzzles to the creation of entirely new forms like middleware platforms. But none of these opportunities will ever be realized if no one is willing to see them through.
The best way to advance the practice is to make something-and not just as an exercise, but in earnest, as a part of a breaking story, Of a local expose, or a documentary retrospective. What newsgames need most from journalism is its legacy of scrappiness, its heritage of feisty, unstoppable
181
Journalism at Play
sleuths probing for information, piecing together dynamics of an unseen system, giving voice to an unheard flock. But instead of sitting down at a typewriter, tapping out prose as dusk gives way to night, this new newsgame reporter will crank out code. Compile times, not plate-etching processes, will put a deadline at risk. Perhaps this is the most important lesson would-be newsgame creators must learn: ultimately, whether or not newsgames become an important part of the future of journalism is a question of will rather than a problem of technology.
icons on the left to see existing comments.
0 General Document comments
0 Sentence and Paragraph comments
0 Image and Video comments
Everyone loves a free game and everyone loves a game that brings issues to life. Two world cups ago after Zinedine Zidane head butted that other player from the Italian team there was a game made about it and up on the internet within the hour. So why is it that when a game is made about the different issues facing society it is so easy for people to start playing them? It’s not like they are solving the problem by playing these games. They are not telling their congress man or their senator how they feel about the problem, they are not making a difference, they are just playing a game that talks about a problem they know about. More so, the mechanics of these games are based on opinions. So are the people playing it because they agree with the opinions or because it’s just fun?
New Conversation
Hide Full Comment Hide Thread Detail
I think a lot of it is just fun. Sadly, most people are not very proactive when it comes to solving political and social problems facing society today. I think the most people do with issues is complain about them, but very little is done to personally come up with solutions. Rather than dealing with underlying issues of feminism, sports play, etc. and actually working to solve them, games like the one with Sarkeesian and Zinedine Zidane are made and popularly played to further encourage this naivety about and neglect of societal problems. Making a joke about serious issues make it seem less heavy, and I think that people yearn for this sense of security. I think that’s why political satire as a form of entertainment is so popular.
New Conversation
Hide Full Comment
I agree with Genevieve and that it really comes down to the fun of the game. Political satire is widely entertaining to many and I think it does add something when it takes place in a game. That’s why people love South Park, not only is it funny, it is very smart and relevant, it adds something to the program. Last fall Old Spice released a game with Dikembe Mutombo and his mission to save the world: http://kbhgames.com/8790/old-spice-. The levels were released weekly, enticing the player to come back. Each week it covered a different current event and proved to be quite timely. While the game mechanics are fairly recycled, the game is a lot of fun because of the current events involved and the ridiculousness of the characters. Was I left with some lasting message after playing the game? No, but it was definitely more engaging because of the current event topics it dealt with and it kept me coming back week after week.
New Conversation
Hide Full Comment
Other than simulators, which I think are useful, I do not understand how video games could ever communicate news stories as effectively as the newspaper, online articles or television coverage. While they may be a powerful force to update people on current events (which I am also skeptical) I just don’t see how they will ever become a news medium.
New Conversation
Hide Full Comment Hide Thread Detail
I think its certainly possible to see video games used in the future to support news-like ideas, but I also can’t see them used for breaking news, or anything like that. I could see a game that teaches people about the issues in an election, and how those issues are debated, but like people have said in class, there will be bias in a game like that.
New Conversation
Hide Full Comment Hide Thread Detail
I think amidst everyones conversation in class and on Nowcomment I kept wondering whether or not we really needed another type of news outlet. I think the fact that we cannot be sure that there won’t be any kind of bias or misinformation on whatever news game is created would just add into confusion about news now. With so many outlets for news now, I feel like adding another potential outlet could risk making the news more convoluted.
New Conversation
Hide Full Comment
There is nothing that prevents the medium from effectively conveying news. Video games, especially some very recent ones, are able to carry very strong messages and contain loads of information. I think time is the only issue in this debate (as to the question of whether games can be an effective form of breaking news). Other than that though, I don’t see anything that prevents the same messages and information that are carried through video or text being able to take place in a virtual world.
New Conversation
Hide Full Comment
Jon Stewart loves to rail on CNN for relying too much on playful gimmicks in their programs like hologram simulations and touch screen madness. Is he right to do so? Should news just be a presentation of the facts or can they be playful. Does CNN cross a line with hologram models of North Korea’s potential nukes and become too playful?
New Conversation
Hide Full Comment Hide Thread Detail
I would suppose they do all of these thing to remain “hip/trendy” or on the “cutting edge” or to have the “competitive advantage.”
But I wonder if this could be helpful … I don’t know of any actual studies done on this matter, but I wonder if with the new mediated environment that we grow up in if there has been a shift from the numbers of auditory learners to more visual or even calisthenic learners in our population. If this is the case, the talking head just won’t cut it anymore.
New Conversation
Hide Full Comment
I think simulations actually add a lot to the news-watching experience. For example, I remember that during the last presidential election, they could simulate different states going either red or blue to show the viewer the likely scenario of the end results. I think that sometimes CNN does get carried away with their cool gadgets but they are also often helpful.
New Conversation
Hide Full Comment
The way I always saw it as it just a visual aid that they used to keep the attention of their audience and emphasize their points. I never considered them gimmicks or even out of the ordinary. I almost feel that they need these aids to hold the audience they do have. If we had to just sit and listen to a person read the news to us off a TelePrompter then we would switch the channel.
New Conversation
Hide Full Comment
I think that everyone has pretty much covered it all. I think that with entertainment being such a huge part of our daily lives, the use of technology for playful presentations and gimmicks in the news is just a way for the news to try to maintain and satisfy its viewers. People expect entertainment in everything they do, see, watch, etc. and like Tayo said, if watching the news meant just watching a person read off a teleprompter, people would feel more compelled to engage in other things. In some cases, the playful gimmicks might detract from the news broadcast, but in others, they can help people better understand the issues at hand, at least more than just plain figures and numbers would.
New Conversation
Hide Full Comment
Bogost made a interesting reference right here. He stated that games let journalist “stop short of the final rendering of a typical news story”. When I read this I think back to the fact that the news reporters and journalist use to be the gatekeepers for our news. The controlled what we heard and thus what we considered important. But what we easily forget about is the hierarchy or cooperate America. It’s not what the journalist say, it’s what the editor and the higher ups say should go through. They censor, they sculpt the news, and they decide what is printed and what goes on air. So what is the people who go and find a story out don’t always get to present their findings the way it should be shown. A game can change all that. So when Bogost says they get the system, he says that understand the institutions in place that prevent their message from getting out through a given medium. So videogames has become their new outlet.
New Conversation
Hide Full Comment
Bogost describes video game news stories as simulations opposed to narratives. What is the difference? Is simulation amore engaging mode of storytelling ? As Bogost states in this paragraph, “At it’s core, news is comprised of ideas.” These ideas are not confined to the medium of journalism and video games may provide a better forum for audiences to interpret and understand these ideas.
New Conversation
Hide Full Comment Hide Thread Detail
I see simulations as “showing” a story and narrative as “telling” a story. Simulations introduce the sense of sight into the story which can make them all the more powerful. It also allows the person who is on the receiving end of the story experience it and interact (favorite buzzword) with the story in a way they are unable to do with narrative. I really liked his discussion of simulations vs. narratives and felt it was something that I actually agreed with. A pretty new experience for me with Bogost
New Conversation
Hide Full Comment Hide Thread Detail
But don’t TV shows and movies consist of visual simulations too? Do those not have scripted narratives that are molded for and dictated to the viewer without too much flexibility for manipulation generally. Do videogames that provide simulations and not narratives allow us to present the facts of a news story or the concepts and driving forces of a greater phenomenon? The types of games that Bogost presents all seem to present overarching complex news stories that aim at providing perspective to an issue that may typically be covered by 60min. I don’t think gaming can encompass the news brief type of stories appropriately or efficiently, so perhaps not all of the news may head in this direction.
New Conversation
Hide Full Comment Hide Thread Detail
Maybe I shouldn’t say it’s seeing that’s the difference but interactivity. I’m sorry that I’ve been using that word everywhere on nowcomment but for me it’s really emerged as the defining characteristic of videogames and what makes them unique as a medium.
I there are narratives that use sight. The example that comes to my mind is a movie that phrases a problem in a different way. Neil Blomkamp does this in very effective ways. He takes social problems and adds a sci-fi narrative, but it’s still narrative not simulation.
These games Bogost talks about are definitely simulations and allow the player to interact with the problem instead of passively consuming it. I’m a fan.
TL;DR- INTERACTIVITY
New Conversation
Hide Full Comment
I agree that a local run-through of news stories does not seem to be as efficient when converted to a simulatory form. One often does not really care to invest oneself so far in these stories that you’d want to play through a simulation of the events (on another note, recreating a crime in video game form could lead to an awesome tool for policework). But for large events and ongoing stories like understanding and recreating war battles, a phenomenon such as somali piracy, or perhaps something like a story about a recall of a car or piece of machinery, a game-like simulation of what goes on and why could be very useful in helping people understand what actually goes on, rather than just labeling it “seizing ships” or “U.S. Soldiers took X earlier today.” I think there’s massive opportunity for journalism to adapt in this area.
New Conversation
Hide Full Comment Hide Thread Detail
I really agree that the opportunity right now for newsgames is in ongoing stories and large events. The first thing that came to mind to me when hearing about some of these simulations is big murder cases. You could make a very interesting simulation that provides all the facts available and try to piece together the stories or something along those lines. It would be like the public being able to play detective without actually having any real role. I also think these type of simulations have the capacity to do greater good than a talking head when it comes to understanding the whole scenario. It’s just a thought of simulations that could be very interesting and grab people’s attention.
New Conversation
Hide Full Comment
One can see a clear difference in news coverage of say the 70s to news coverage of today. The advanced technology makes the viewing experience so much more enjoyable and informative. You get real time information and coverage, you can read other news headlines at the bottom of the screen and you can see simulations of things that might be hard to describe. Like I said in my other comment, the election simulator is the best way to visualize the probable outcomes and scenarios of an election before the results are finalized.
New Conversation
Hide Full Comment
General Document Comments 0
Whether or not we all think video games are the answer news does have to change. Our generation does not like to receive news in the old forms and these companies need to continue to open up to new ways of putting out the news. I think products such as Google Glass will really change the way we see the world and in turn the way we see news. What other technologies do you believe will have an impact on the news industry?
New Conversation
Hide Full Comment
I think that with any news medium, video, text, etc., or any medium for that matter, there will be some sort of bias. When people report stories, they are writing with some sort of agenda. Certain news networks are more conservative, democratic, republican, etc., and there’s no going around it. Newsgames will contain some bias just as other sources would, but it would be more immersive and helpful in providing a better and deeper understanding of issues. As some people have said, as an outlet for breaking news, I don’t think it would be very successful, but as a means of conveying news, I don’t see a problem.
Also, I saw one comment that mentioned “virtual world,” and I thought about a game that is a simulation that mimics the real world. People could create their own avatars and live in this world and experience the news. This game would be structured the same way as the real world and modified and updated weekly to bring in news and current events as it comes. I don’t know if this is realistic, but it was just a thought. What would it take for a game like this to come into fruition? Would it even be possible?
New Conversation
Hide Full Comment