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

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

DMU Timestamp: March 28, 2013 23:38

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