Columns « Chungking Espresso

Follow Up: Practical Matters of Breaking Newsgames

Posted in Columns, Newsgames, Schoolwork by Simon Ferrari on February 15, 2009

This was my rough draft of a post that Ian turned into something much better on our blog at http://jag.lcc.gatech.edu/blog/ (see that post for a much better numbers crunch by Bogost including consideration of the Pareto Principal and problems of scale)

——-

balance-of-power-2

Commenter Elle suggested that the model of Global Game Jam shows that people working concertedly for 48 hours could achieve amazing results; also, she asserted that newsgame developers should not balk at pulling all-nighters to make a breaking newsgame because mainstream developers do the same during crunch-time before going gold.

Certainly the Game Jam is an incredible asset to the development community, so let’s look at how it can and can’t work as a model for newsgame development. First, the groups working together for GGJ (up to five, with an average of four) are typically larger than most studios producing newsgames. We’re talking 1-3 person teams on a lot of the existing artifacts. Second, although a good number of finished pieces that come out of this competition, there’s an extraordinary mass of games that just don’t work. After the two day race is over, they’re completely broken. Many of the working games are basically hacked or jerry-rigged together. Professional game designers need to create something that works when thousands of people are visiting their site daily to play the game.

Ian and I did some calculations on the economic of Game Jam. There were 1600 participants, cramming in roughly a 40-hour work week within two days. This equates to 64,000 manhours. If we average the cost of a game designer at 50,000 dollars a year, we get an hourly pay of around 25 dollars. Multiplying that by manhours, Game Jam would cost about 1.6 million dollars. Three hundred and sixty working games came out of the project. Assuming all of them are “worth playing,” this comes to a rough cost of $4,500 dollars per game. This happens to be an incredibly appealing and realistic cost for a newsgame (according to Ian); however, the cost becomes quite preventative if you start considering which of these are “worth playing” (50% would be a generous figure). Game Jam’s website doesn’t give us an accurate measure for this percentage, because around 300 of the 360 games post an average of 3/5 stars.

Another dissatisfied comment came from game designer Kriss Daniels. Daniels, because he finds most gamers so daft and most game mechanics so derivative, develops purposefully mind-numbing games as a form of protest and play with the industry. He derided my use of “tabloid games” as examples of quickly-made products following a news event (the Steve Irwin Stingray games are an example of this). He also didn’t like that I was only thinking about the narrative aspect of these games; that is to say, most tabloid games are poorly coded versions of side-scrolling or top-down shooters with crude cartoonish skins pulled from the news event. Even most well-received and -conceived newsgames are often derivative of tried-and-true core mechanics from arcade games. When the mechanics and the purported “purpose” or “message” of a newsgame do not allow meaningful player action, we have what Ian would call a “loose coupling” of mechanic and argument. Needless to say, this is a major obstacle for us to overcome.

In the last post, I attempted to find a way out of this predicament by hypothesizing an independent company that would license regular newsgames out to several traditional news sites. The idea is that this would allow enough coders to be working in the same place to be able to craft game mechanics for newsgames that wouldn’t be so copy-paste. Since this is only a hypothetical solution with no proof of concept, I’d like to develop another way out.

When coding a newsgame, what’s the hardest decision a developer needs to make? The answer to this question seems to be what information and player actions to include or exclude. In the words of Miguel Sicart, what one chooses to include or exclude determines the editorial line of a newsgame.

One highly detailed explanation of how time-consuming this decision-making process can be comes from pioneering geopolitical game creator Chris Crawford. The book he wrote about the design and construction of Balance of Power goes into detail about how he chose what data and player actions to include in the game. Working on a Mac Lisa, the biggest constraint for Crawford was RAM (128k at the time, not including the RAM taken up by the then-new GUI). Working as a freelancer after the collapse of Atari, time was a relatively liquid asset for Crawford. He had the time to program everything he wanted into the game, but he had to make cuts to account for the memory limitations. This iterative trimming and playtesting process appears to have lasted around 9 months for Balance of Power.

The situation is somewhat the opposite today for a newsgame developer: they have an almost unlimited amount of memory to work with (with a limiting factor being that it should not be too large in order to load up relatively quickly in Flash), but time is working against them if they want to release breaking newsgames. Despite this disparity in resources, I think Crawford’s modus operandi can still function as a basic model today.

The key for Crawford, once he had a bunch of data and mechanics that needed cutting, was to decide exactly which actions were necessary in order to convey an argument or a system to the player. Honing in on the idea that the Cold War superpowers were at the greatest risk of nuclear confrontation when drawn into a indirect conflict by their proxies, he settled on only allowing players to provide money, arms, or political pressure to a either a secondary nation’s government or its insurgency. This is an unarguably tight coupling between player action and Crawford’s argument. The goal for a breaking newsgame developer would be to prime her mind in order to be able to generate such a coupling quickly on hearing of a game-able news story.

Now, what does a working programmer have that the average participant in Game Jam does not? Besides, of course, the structure of a paying job and professional experience working specifically on newsgames. An answer to this question comes from an article by Chaim Gingold, one of our recent graduates and a lead developer on Will Wright’s Spore.

Gingold describes the plight of the game coder as this: you come up with a lot of ideas, you try to code them, and they don’t work. Most people take this process as a failure and throw everything away. Gingold suggests another way to use this process: save your code, extract the mechanics you developed, and use them later on other projects. For proof that this works even in a corporate atmosphere, Gingold tells the story of how he found a bunch of algorithms and simulations that would later be used in Spore on modified builds of prior Maxis games kept in storage at their studio. His argument is this: Wright makes games that are critically well-received and commercially successful because he constantly prototypes mechanics and never throws away any of his experiments.

leave a comment

Earth 2100 vs Superstruct

Posted in Columns, Newsgames, Schoolwork by Simon Ferrari on February 8, 2009

(originally written for http://jag.lcc.gatech.edu/blog/)

Earth 2100 is a crowdsourcing and future forecasting project – somewhat similar to Jane McGonigal’s Superstruct - in which “players” view video summaries about the state of the world in 2015, 2050, and 2100 before making videos based on the possible conditions presented by those scenarios. The best submissions make it into a 2-hour primetime special on ABC.

Superstruct and Jane’s other games all deserve their own posts at some point, so I won’t go into an in-depth analysis of McGonigal’s design here; however, I will make some comparisons between Earth 2100 and Superstruct in order to contextualize the former. Superstruct is a future forecasting ARG (alternate reality game) focusing on multiple different scenarios in the year 2019: famine, pirates/raiders, disease, mass immigration, and war. Superstruct considers all of these possible scenarios as encapsulated alternate futures, while Earth 2100 takes a holistic approach by asking players to imagine what would happen if multiple conditions such as these converge over time; therefore, Superstruct tends to have many well-developed storylines for each possible future, while Earth 2100 stands more as a random scattering of entires.

It’s also probable that McGonigal, as the Dean of the ARG, would take issue with Earth 2100 even being referred to as a game. Superstruct incorporates a badge system similar to the achievement structure in World of Warcraft or the PS360. While the latter systems reward players with points by making general progress in games or accomplishing particularly difficult side tasks, Superstruct rewards players for specific contributions to the game community. When one of your submissions qualifies for a badge, one of the other players will nominate it for consideration. Consider two badges from the game (the most basic and the most difficult to earn, respectively):

Emergensight - 21 points
The ability to prepare for and handle suprising results and complexity that come with coordination, cooperation, and collaboration on extreme scales

High Ping Quotient - 2 points
Responsiveness to others’ requests for engagement and the ability to reach out to others in a network.

Every player can achieve a total of 100 points by earning every badge, and the points earned by every player combine to raise humanity’s “survival profile.” To continue comparisons with mainstream games, this global effort is similar to the server-wide resource-hoarding required to wage war on the gates of Ahn’Qiraj in vanilla WoW. Earth 2100, on the other hand, has no such affordances for player achievement. The “winners” of the contest receive airtime on ABC, but it’s only a two-hour long special packed with professional interviews and commercial breaks. Finally, the producers of Superstruct released content regularly in order to drive the narrative of their game – read: they did actual design work – while Earth 2100 users only get the introductory footage. A lack of a community feel and ludic structure results from all of these shortcomings.

Scenarios

In 2015, the world continues to suffer increased numbers of floods, droughts, and wildfires. We’ve probably failed to adequately confront the global climate crisis in this short period. Coastal regions suffer increasingly severe hurricanes and flooding as glaciers melt. Players see brief glances of infographics of Manhattan island being submerged. Provocative video clips show an African exodus and a mass Mexican border crossing. Food shortages are becoming a mounting problem in the less industrialized countries.

By 2050, food production cannot meet consumption levels as populations in Africa and Asia balloon. Water runs dry as the climate heats up. Major urban centers might be flooded by the ocean, but one can count on major reservoirs such as the Colorado River drying up – making it impossible to live in vast stretches of North America. By this time we’re nearly running out of gasoline , and brown-outs or complete electricity loss is common even in the US. Anti-immigration wars are a fact of life in industrialized nations. Scientists urge us to realize that nuclear war is a strong possibility during this time, because the protection provided by mutually-assured destruction vanishes if countries holding nuclear weapons have run out of food or water already. Video clips mostly show violent conflict in Africa.

Finally, in 2100, potable water has completely run out. People basically live in a second coming of the Middle Ages – meagre pockets of affluence are surrounded on all sides by subsistence living. One is left to imagine the political and religious consequences of these conditions. Accompanying video clips show subsistence living in African villages.

For the most part, these introductory videos require little in-depth analysis. It suffices to say that they are well-edited mini-documentaries mixing the talking heads of climatologists and political scientists with stock footage of natural disasters and political unrest. One rhetorical undercurrent does deserve note: Africa’s deplorable current conditions are used time and again as an example of what everyone’s world will be like in the future. One must ask the question, why aren’t we hosting an alternate reality game about ramping up humanitarian efforts in Africa instead of specious future forecasting? Using this footage without presenting “Africa 2009″ as a major contributor to future disaster in their convergence model strikes one as disturbingly colonialist.

Submissions

At the time of this writing (January 25th), a Producer’s Message has been released on the Earth 2100 website in order to give a “state of the game” address. Submissions have come in two forms: typical talking head vlogs and meticulously constructed vignettes with actual acting and pyrotechnics. Strangely, the producer actually encourages more of the amateur talking head content. This is probably because they want as many submissions as they can get; they’re also playing off of the popularity of the viral vlog genre (see lonelygirl15). Entries are organized by the location of their submission (or at least based on where the scenario presented takes place). The map animation is fairly poor, and it’s usually difficult to pinpoint something from a location you’re actually interested in. Despite this, one can see that submissions are trickling in from literally all around the world. There are 37 accepted entries posted to the site at this time.

Under the “Solutions” category, Jason Mann of (my alma mater) UGA’s Agroecology Lab and Full Moon Farm gives a basic explanation of the changing politics of farming in the U.S. He gives a rundown of how agriculture has become a niche understanding in formally rural states such as Georgia, and he encourages everyone to understand how scary it is that we don’t know where the majority of our food will come from in the future. Mann also gives an explanation of how he’s working against the average person losing all semblance of understanding food production: students from around the state can come visit his farm to spend half their time working the field and the other half learning textbook ecology and biology in a synergistic setting. The one other submission in the Solutions section is a voice-on-the-street documentary on how high school students see recycling as their most accessible method for combatting environmental disaster. The director provides no alternative or critique for this viewpoint (he is a high school student, after all).

Over half of the current submissions construct the world of 2015. Many entries are blogs simply reflecting on the conditions presented by the introductory video: water shortages, rising prices on groceries, and climate change. One impressive video (in the shaky handheld style of Cloverfield) depicts the “next big attack” on Manhattan through flashback. Just as in Cloverfield, the cameraman documents smiling New Yorkers chatting with each other and having a good time before running outside to view a noxious cloud of poisonous gas exploding over the city.

Dionne Figgins of Los Angeles mentions at the beginning of her vlog-style entry that although Obama’s presidency raised spirits in 2009, few people heeded his call to reduce our environmental impact. Now there are widespread water rationing efforts in the US. She details her disgust at an emerging divide between the rich and poor (one can pay $300 to bypass the ration for a week). Dionne presents one of the only “series” of videos submitted. Although most users put specific dates on their videos, she explicitly establishes a rough timeline for the two pieces she’s created for 2015. Her second entry takes place on July 4th and highlights the irony of America’s growing dependence on other countries – a dependence that the world regards with disdain on account of our former unwillingness to cooperate with them or successfully decelerate the tragedy in Africa. An African American woman, Ms. Figgins clearly understands that by politicizing her submissions she engages the current power structures leading to the convergence of escalating disasters in the 2015 scenario.

Videos for 2050 constitute a mixed bag of varying quality. One’s willingness to suspend disbelief on the vlog format begins to make these entries far less compelling. Despite this, two video diaries by teenaged girls in Texas ring clear from the noise: the temperature has risen so high that they go to school from 4pm to 8pm. They conduct the other half of their schoolday over the Internet, and high school sports have all but disappeared. The rising cost of subsistence becomes more arcane and menacing through the lens of two little girls unable to contribute fiscally to the well-being of their families.

A clever player presumably from Hong Kong creates a spy persona for himself in one of the more properly journalistic videos about 2050. He plays a compromised British agent monitoring deteriorating health conditions in China. His argument is that some countries will not report to the world the depth of their tragedy – this is information that must be smuggled out of these countries with sophisticated satellite hacking devices. The landscape of 2050 is particularly poignant for citizens of Hong Kong, who will be absorbed into China’s economy in the year 2047. The producers of the game probably didn’t anticipate this particular angle when they determined this section of the game, so it’s great to see how cultural specificities affect the narratives created here.

At the time of this writing only one entry has been created for 2100. Two Chinese men run through a dusty, destroyed village while avoiding gunfire from invading Russians. This goes against the introductory material provided by the producers, who predict events such as this occurring in 2050 as opposed to this late date. Since it reflects a fear of Russian imperialism among Chinese citizens that I was previously unaware of, I anticipate that many of the players will end up doing much more than future forecasting – they will educate us about aspects of the current condition of the world that our mainstream news media ignores. In America one only hears about climatological and political crises in China. This video and the entry from Hong Kong have the potential to educate worldwide audiences in a way that only the Internet can.

Conclusions

I can safely assert that, by the time of this writing, Earth 2100 has not developed into what anyone would call a game. This is a future predicting video contest. Without the well-designed structures of an artifact such as Superstruct, the “players” of Earth 2100 struggle to understand exactly how they’re supposed to construct their narratives and play off of each other. I discern no continuity between multiple entrants (excepting the encapsulated series of videos by Dionne Figgins and Samuel Bennett), despite the fact that many of them use specific dates that one could conceivably manipulate into a timeline. This also leads to an over-abundance of redundant material.

By making players jump between three such huge time gaps, it forces them to compact too many occurrences into an unrealistic span of time. Generally these submitters lack an understanding of how to depict systems that have been developing in the decades between the accepted dates – they structure everything as if it is breaking news. This would be valuable to our study here if one could actually call the experience a “game” or “journalistic.” Except for the spy piece on China in 2050 and one entry explicitly presented as an Internet news broadcast in 2015, the entries resemble either YouTube vlogs or short sci-fi student film projects. Understanding these video diaries requires a more comprehensive explanation of “citizen journalism” that we cannot explore in this article. As Earth 2100 develops toward the primetime airing of the game’s winners, and as our valuations of citizen journalism gain clarity, our project will likely return to some of this content in the future.

Tagged with: alternate reality, ARG, crowdsourcing, earth 2100, future prediction, superstruct

leave a comment

Newsgames and Documentary

Posted in Columns, Film, Newsgames, Schoolwork by Simon Ferrari on January 16, 2009

I know you’ve already looked at the title and exclaimed: “Cinema Envy!” Well step off it for a moment, because I’m not going to sit here and lament how newsgames “aren’t as good” as documentaries. Rather, I’d like to take a look at the various sub-genres of documentary in order to identify some room for new types of newsgames that we might not have seen yet. Along the way, I’ll make some comparisons between works in both media. I promise not to analyze them using the same standards or theories. I’ll also try to avoid stepping on Ayo’s toes here, because she’s planning on upcoming post on the value of transparent bias and reflexivity in film and games

There are some games that are painfully reminiscent of the cliché of “talking head” documentaries. Ian and I examined a game called Homeland Guantanamos earlier in the semester about an alien (both legal and illegal) detention facility and one particularly troubling death that took place there. What started out as an intriguing investigation simulation quickly turned into a series of poorly motivated fetch quests linking together video clips of interviews with detainees. The makers almost seem to have given up on editing a properly engaging documentary and instead “settled” on making a video game, a medium they apparently associate with sloppy narrative and multimedia-happy tedium. The idea of going into a detainment area for unwanted or criminally suspect aliens does however call to mind Fred Wiseman’s work on High School and Titicut Follies. These are basically one of the precursors (print muckraking or “yellow journalism” being the other) to investigative TV reporting.

Investigative journalism works in any medium – for a time. By transposing oneself onto the camera’s POV, both Wiseman films and investigative news allow one to gain access to secret or contested spaces; however, recent studies have shown that TV viewers are perceiving such “soft journalism” as a poor turn for television news. And we don’t see documentaries like Born Into Brothels or Iraq In Fragments causing the same amount of public commotion as did Titticut Follies, which – along with works such as Foucalt’s Discipline and Punish – raised widespread concern over the well-being of people held in mental health facilities.

Perhaps its time for serious games to step up to the plate and take on the muckraking mantle? I don’t think it’s diminutive to say that what counts as soft news in TV and film is much “harder” than most of the material one comes across in video games: it’s a nice place to start and develop from. Video games simulate processes and spaces better than any other medium, and they grant a modicum of control that aids engagement with an issue. What I’m saying is, Homeland Guantanamos could have been a really important newsgame. If a game similar to Molleindustria’s McDonald’s tasked itself with focusing on one of its four mini-simulators, say the cattle processing plant, then something far more meaningful than an investigative report would emerge. PETA’s Mama Kills Turkeys pairs the familiar Cooking Mama sim with shocking video footage of poultry plants. This could have been a really persuasive piece, but the work falls mostly on deaf ears because the game itself doesn’t focus on the troubling part of the cultural phenomenon (namely, the mistreatment of animals in processing plants).

Moving on, “intimate” documentaries are an intriguing branch of the genre that we really don’t see converted into the newsgame medium. Art video games such as Jason Rohrer’s Gravitation and Passage seem to share a lot in common with the experimental home movies of Stan Brakhage, but this kind of document doesn’t really count as news. I’m talking more about games that would relate one person’s own point-of-view on a current or historical news story. If you’re my age, then you hear all the time about our parents were doing when they heard about Kennedy’s assassination or the Armstrong’s first steps on the moon. Lots of films dealing with the period call upon these nostalgic moments, so it’d be exciting to play a game that simulates the feeling of anxiety or wonder at watching these events unfold.

Ross McElwee makes some of my favorite intimate documentaries, and he deals with many issues that would fit comfortably within “serious” gaming: love, death, religion. His Sherman’s March starts off as an exploration of the historical event and quickly spirals off into his own march through legions of “eligible” Southern bachelorettes. It might seem like I’m harping for more first-person perspectives in newsgames, but it seems like the metaphor used in McElwee films is an entertaining and accessible way to approach historical and current issues. One game called Medieval Unreality, a collection of personal reflections on blood feuds in Albania created as an Unreal mod, replicates this model (in a necessarily less humorous way than McElwee). What we have here is a violent FPS being turned into a non-violent, collaborative meditation on loss and reconciliation – accomplished through metaphor and evocative imagery.

Next, some documentaries seek to muddy the waters of truth and falsity about a news event. The Thin Blue Line and Capturing the Friedmans are some good examples of this. The latter reminds me of a nightmarish nonfiction version of Kurosawa’s Rashomon, where each new firsthand account of a supposed mass molestation brings the viewer further and further away from understanding the “facts” of what happened. A game like Kuma’s John Kerry’s Silver Star Mission could have accomplished something like this. The company claims that their game will “present the player with the facts needed to decide what happened” the day Kerry supposedly ran a swiftboat nose-first into an embattled beach and shot a fleeing Viet Cong at great personal risk. In the middle of Kerry’s presidential race, conflicting perspectives on what exactly occurred during that mission arose and brought into question whether or not he deserved his Silver Star. Instead of showing both accepted and dissenting versions of the events, the game simply regurgitates Kerry’s own story.

Another example, closest to the goal of The Thin Blue Line, is the JFK Reloaded game that seeks to show how hard it would have been to make the Oswald’s killing shot from the depository. This was to be the world’s first “mass-participation forensic construction” of a historical crime, and a contest was held to see who could get closest to matching the conditions claimed in the Warren Commission. Ian’s written before about the shaky ground on which video “evidence” stands in court cases and the rising acceptance of simulations in courtrooms, and I’ve also read a bit about the Innocence Project that seeks to get convicts off of death row by exposing flaws in their legal proceedings. Newsgames dealing with such contested court cases seem to be an obvious direction for such simulations to develop.

Finally, many newsgames seem to follow the “Michael Moore” style of wildly biased “documentary” work. Moore’s early work on Roger and Me and The Big One cast the director as a crusader for the underdog on a highly personal quest. For a few years, it was touching to see him approach the business leaders he criticized with pleas for their participation in the work. Since Bowling for Columbine, these pleas have struck a discordant tone with more and more viewers – raising such questions as, “is a senile old bat like Charlton Heston really the bad guy here?”

I personally think that September 12th makes its argument against “tactical bombing” pretty well, but that might only be because I already agree with its premise. Someone trained in counterterrorism or ballistics might have good reason to disagree with this premise – namely, it’s blatantly reductionist and it doesn’t propose an alternative solution to the war on terror. Some of Molleindustria’s work can also be seen in this light. See my post on their McDonald‘s game and how it ignores some verification work that might otherwise strengthen its model. These games are most similar to Moore’s Sicko and Fahrenheit 9/11: we know what they’re arguing against – and they do it well – but whether we agree with them in the end is usually reliant on the opinions we enter into playing/watching them with.

These Moore documentaries, and the newsgames I’m comparing them, work because their bias is transparent. Moore’s habit to skew the order of certain timelines in his films aside, everybody knows what they’re getting into when they pay ten dollars for a ticket. As long as the makers of these newsgames don’t actively seek to decieve their players, then I can’t see anyone mounting a strong opposition to them based on bias. Newsgames aren’t satisfied with presenting facts. Unlike traditional print and TV news, they task themselves with persuading players to see an issue their way. It might be necessary to take a more nuanced or balanced approach – presenting both sides of a contentious subject matter and letting the player decide which is more plausible – before we see these games make any converts.

Tagged with: documentary, Game Analysis, games, investigative journalism, newsgames, transparency, videogames

leave a comment

Follow Up: Against Escapism

Posted in Columns, Newsgames, Schoolwork by Simon Ferrari on January 16, 2009

My last post on how video games weren’t necessarily escapist (and the subject I initially set out to address: how they also might fit Chomsky’s propaganda model) raised quite a few objections, so I’d like to see if I can clarify my meaning on a few of those points. By the end, I’ll try to segue back onto the subject of newsgames and how they relate to this issue.

On the subject of escapism. This is where I got myself into the most trouble. I failed both to understand how important the notion of escape is to many gamers and to clarify the exact type of escape I was addressing. I admit that many people play video games not to avoid thinking about the war on terror and the economic recession, but rather to avoid thinking about their jobs, relationships, and other more direct troubles. This comment from the last post that calls me to task most effectively:

My argument is that the very games that support the possibility of a noteworthy gaming industry are the ones that support escapism. [...] This isn’t the escapism of the great depression, and nothing can quite be that, so to use the term in a modern context it *has* to be adapted to modern sensibilities. Otherwise you’re just saying the 1930s are over and little else. [...] I don’t believe that the reasons people need an escape have stayed the same, since I think we an agree that it’s a cultural phenomenon, and our culture has changed.

What I’d like to point out is that alongside the Great Depression, people in the 30′s also had to deal with the same day-to-day problems that we still do – only to a perhaps heightened degree thanks to the partial-shattering of public spaces by recent information technology. If we’re going online and into video games to find interpersonal engagements, then I think this is an attempt to recreate these lost public spaces rather than to escape from their destruction.

Back on topic: the historical assumption – which might of course be a false one – is that people latched onto musicals and screwball comedy not to escape common woes such as having a belligerent boss or a nagging spouse, but specifically the larger social woes of economic depression and social stratification. I am unsure of the degree to which this is true, but I’m betting that a lot more people who play games are regularly worried about the economy and foreign policy than they are willing to admit on Internet gaming forums. Video games would be a likely place to go to avoid having to think about such issues. My assertion is that many video games deny players – at least players who pay attention to the story – a complete escape from these worries.

Many gamers and non-gamers are familiar with the Grand Theft Auto series, so it’s fertile ground for drawing points. This series has dealt with gang violence, drug use and distribution, poverty, immigration, and ethnic minority issues to a much greater degree than any other game franchise. Here’s one example: Ian has talked about the tacit argument that San Andreas makes about the food choices that many underprivileged Americans have in their neighborhoods – it inspired him to make his own game, Fat World, about the politics of nutrition. What this shows is that we can find connections to the real world even in a game featuring the primary mechanics of shooting guns and stealing cars. Whether or not one realizes it while they’re playing the game is a different issue – but it’s likely that these ideas do enter into our subconscious thoughts while we’re playing only to resurface later on (McGonigal’s idea of an “experience grenade”).

Whether you agree with his design criticism or not, Richard Bartle’s recent unexpected controversy over a torture quest in WotLK is proof towards my assertion. See, when people thought about the issue long enough to argue with Bartle they revealed the fact that they’d been thinking about the game and its moral implications all along (they were just choosing to ignore them in most cases). Users brought up examples of genocide, poisoning, animal cruelty, racism, and other questionable practices in WoW quests. Whether or not they thought the moral implications of these quests were serious enough to forego some easy experience points is irrelevant. People aren’t escaping from such real world issues by playing games, they’re dealing with them in highly structured ludic encounters because it’s a fun way to feel potency over realistically insurmountable problems.

On the subject of catharsis. I guess people have quite a few different ideas on what catharsis actually is. This isn’t surprising, because our historical literary source for the word doesn’t do much to clarify its meaning. Despite whatever changes in definition the word may have experienced (most people seem to reduce it to meaning any sort of “release”), I refer specifically to its original use in Aristotle’s Poetics (and later, Politics): a purification of two emotions, fear and anxiety. Brenda Laurel (one of my favorite video game writers) has applied the Poetics to computing, but I haven’t read this book yet myself. I’m not convinced at the moment that the dramatic structure of a game is much like that of a Greek tragedy; however, I do think that Aristotle’s catharsis has some relevance to the issue of games and escapism.

I hold that escapism and Aristotelian catharsis are mutually exclusive. This comment from the last post encapsulates the counter-argument to my position:

You seem to draw a distinction between escapism and catharsis as they relate to art/media, and it is this distinction that I call into question. Is not the cathartic value of video games that which we use to escape from life’s ills? [...] I would even argue that, because of the control they offer a player, many video games are even better methods of escapism than the glitzy movies and Broadway plays you reference. What better way to escape than to completely transport your conscious into that of a digital avatar, fighting the ills of modern life in a way only possible by way of video game?

Aristotle valued tragedy over comedy (any play with a happy ending, not necessarily funny) because it forced viewers to come to terms with their own beliefs, character flaws, and mortality. The Oedipus cycle is the prime example of such work: we’re forced to watch a good person and his family suffer for sins outside their own control. What I’m getting at here is this: taking control of a digital avatar in order to fight the ills of modern life is the opposite of escapism. A game confronts you with a problem, you can usually relate this problem to one you’ve observed in daily life or the news, and then you deal with it. The agency that games grant us in these simulated alternate versions of warzones and economically depressed neighborhoods is a way of “purifying” (catharsizing?) our fear and guilt over these situations.

video_game_kids_wideweb__470x293,0.jpg

On the subject of the propaganda model. I definitely made a grave misstep when I mentioned the effects of modern shooters on the “tender” minds of young players. It wasn’t my intent to fall into the category of the anti-gaming scaremonger talking about the negative effects of games on children. One commenter that agreed with me based on perceiving my comments in this light wrote:

The fact is, most war games promote war… (as do many films, though many war films are also anti-war). Whether the hostiles are Mexican or Russian is useful to a point, but the greater issue is war begets war.

I don’t find this to be true at all. I’m staunchly anti-war and anti-violence; I’ve been playing violent video games since I was 4 years old, and I still don’t think violence solves real world problems. On the other hand, I think the idea of trying to remove violence as a primary mechanic in most mainstream games is misguided – at the least, it’s a bit hasty considering how long it took popular TV and film producers to realize that conflict wasn’t essential to plot progression. One of my professors, Celia Pearce, has a lovely anecdote that she shares whenever a “concerned adult” asks her about the psychological effects of violence in games: almost all mammals playfight, and they understand the difference between it and real violence. Surely your clever little children are at least as smart as puppy dogs and kitty cats?

Chomsky’s propaganda model isn’t about dark government agencies embedding mind control into your media, it’s about subtly controlling public opinion through the exclusion of some stories and facts. If there are no AAA titles dealing explicitly with the war in Iraq, all this means is that the industry is missing out on a great opportunity to be the prime medium through which young Americans interact with the news. Instead of rehashing my half-formed ideas about the shortcomings of the mainstream gaming industry, I’d like to finally bring the subject back to newsgames.

The majority of newsgames, in that they don’t rely on corporate funding for their development, completely avoid the danger of falling into the propaganda model. In their unflinching goal of simulating experiences relevant to public issues, they avoid the pitfall of being labelled escapist and trivial by non-gamers. Even though I think its possible to recast mainstream gameplay as engaging real issues through metaphor or displacement, there’s still the fact that many players probably enter into them explicitly for escape. This is why newsgames have struggled to gain a popular following, I think: because one doesn’t start playing one of them as a means to cool off or forget about what’s happening outside.

People don’t avoid playing newsgames because they’re boring – quite the contrary, most of them build off of tried-and-true “fun” game mechanics and utilize the stylish Flash animation that has defined the most recent generation of TV cartoons. Rather, I suspect that they avoid them because they’re afraid of purposefully mixing their pleasure with intellectual engagement. I’ve struggled to show how mainstream video games might not be escapist, because I’d like to help break down the wall between the act of playing a shooter and the act of playing a newsgame.

Tagged with: escapism, news, newsgames, propaganda, videogames

1 comment

Newsgames in the Pipe

Posted in Columns, Newsgames, Schoolwork by Simon Ferrari on December 11, 2008

(upcoming post for http://jag.lcc.gatech.edu/blog/ – please email me if you want to link this, because I need to post it to the JAG blog before that happens)

Every once in awhile, I struggle with the idea of the breaking newsgame. How could a newspaper, or an independent game developer, possibly make a game on the fly that was both “worth playing” and directly relevant to the news of the day? The makers of newsgames have, for the most part, freed themselves from worrying about this problem by dealing mainly with ongoing, long-term public issues; however, I constantly have the nagging feeling that these games need to become quite a bit more timely before being attractive as a regular feature for a news source. Let me share the story of a recent flurry of ideas exchanged on this subject.

We recently had a demo day here at Georgia Tech. Sitting in the corner of the room at our News Games booth, I watched (with a twinge of jealousy) Raph Koster and some dudes from the EVE Online team celebrate the accomplishments of some of my classmates on a board game they’d been working on all semester. None of the famous folks were coming up to ask me about my thoughts on the crossroads of news and gaming. Maybe this just isn’t something that has a direct impact on their work? Just when I thought I wasn’t going to be having any good conversations that day, a middle-aged man shuffled toward me and asked, in a British accent, if I had anything interesting to show him. It took me a few moments to spy his name tag.

This was Richard Bartle: one of the early online gaming movers and shakers, and architect of my ten long years of MUDding (I played Gemstone and Mihaly’s Achaea). This man was a personal hero of mine, sure, but did the old Wizard have any tricks up his sleeve when it came to thinking about newsgames? As it turns out, he did. It also turns out that he was only talking with me for so long to avoid the pesky necessity of leveling his warlock up to 80 in WotLK (joking). Perhaps all the little esoteric niches within the critical gaming community were closer together than I’d previously thought. After some polite conversation on the nature of our research, I shared with Bartle some of the roadblocks we’d been coming to. On the subject of the absence of the breaking newsgame, he had this to say:

“Well, we all know the Queen is going to die someday. So we could make a game about it today, and release it when she does.”

This seems like such an obvious partial answer to the problem – one which Ian hints that he already might have been thinking of – but it’s one that we really hadn’t talked about in discussions of the topic before. At first I thought making such “predictive” games might somehow violate journalistic integrity; however, it turns out that this would fall squarely within the practices of most news outlets. There are a few different manifestations of this. First is the article on something one knows is going to happen once. Obituaries for famous people are commonly written long before their actual deaths, and they are constantly updated as these people continue to survive and add to their accomplishments. The second case is when one knows that a decision or outcome will fall in only a small number of ways. One such example of this is the tradition of pre-making two headlines for the two possible resolutions to a presidential race. And then there’s the pre-making of material for events that are known to occur cyclically: weather, economic activity, politics, etc.

When we start looking for examples of games that might fit this predictive mold, we run into some initial hiccups. Take, for example, the “obituary games” dealing with Steve Irwin’s death by stingray. How could one possibly have predicted that he would die this way, let alone made a game about it beforehand? This isn’t as big of a hitch as one might initially think. You simply have to choose which information you can be most sure about. For example, Paul Newman was pretty old when he died. You wouldn’t have had to predict exactly what he would die of to be able to make a great video game where an old man surrounded by salad dressing bottles fantasizes about his early days as a cowboy or Cool Hand Luke. In the case of Steve Irwin, it was likely that he’d die playing with dangerous aquatic animals. Despite being unable to know which animal would manage to penetrate his catlike reflexes, one would still be able to create most of the underwater gameplay mechanics, placeholder art, and sound bytes before the actual event occurred.

For the second case, that of pre-making a news story that will assuredly break in one of only a few possible directions, I’d like to take a look at some of the media surrounding Obama’s recent election. When it comes to biting, timely satire on a public issue, nobody can really hold a flame to Comedy Central’s Daily Show and South Park. The night after polls closed South Park aired an episode (click on “About Last Night…”) wherein Obama wins the election, liberals get drunk and riot in the street to celebrate, and conservatives fear for the end of the republic while locking themselves away in a fallout shelter. Now, it’s possible that Parker and Stone have such an ace team on their hands that they were able to make this episode in one night’s time. But it’s more likely that they’d pre-written the shows for either decision (and had of course already prepped the art for both).

To my knowledge, there weren’t any games that addressed the public hype over this event – probably because we were all celebrating or cursing the event in “real” life. But that’s not to say that such games wouldn’t be enjoyable and interesting to experience. We’ve talked a lot about how great it would have been if the CNN “holograms” on election night had simulated for viewers the experience of being in Grant Park that night. It wouldn’t have been too much of a stretch for somebody in Second Life or There.com to have recreated this space inside a virtual world for people to experience in real time (please drop a comment if this was actually done in some way). Of course, it is an incredible asset for virtual worlds that they can play host to post-election celebrations and grumbling drunken escapes in ways that the South Park episode did. Doug Wilson is planning a series of posts on our explorations into the world of Kuma Games and their re-creation of current and historical war zones. They do some decent work toward trying to allow players to “take part” in actual military encounters (like the capturing of Saddam’s sons, for instance). It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch for such a company to make the kind of predictive leaps in game development that I’m talking about here.

Finally we come to the idea of games about cyclical events. Doug is also planning a post on hurricane and meteor-strike calculator “games.” Such simulators, which allow users to input various sorts of data about the size and location of storms or extraterrestrial objects in order to see the amount of havoc they might wreak, could easily be expanded into games about actual events. We’ve played some games that retrospectively look back at the events in New Orleans during Katrina, but there’s no reason that such games couldn’t have been made on a “breaking news” deadline: “Try to rescue survivors from rooftops… but beware, some of them will shoot at your helicopter as you attempt a descent!” On the subject of the cyclical nature of the economy, we have the fact that most everyone knew we were headed into a recession many months (or years) before feds actually announced that we’d officially landed in one. Newsgames about the recession and its impact on various sectors of the corporate and public world could have easily been pre-made for this event.
Katrina Game1.jpg
Now, it’s one thing to come up with the stories and core mechanics for games such as these before the event strikes, and it’s another thing to have the art and assets ready and up-to-date when the final details are reported. Bartle also addressed the subject of content creation for breaking newsgames. Advocating a Farmer & Morningstar-style approach (introduced in their Lessons from Lucasfilm’s Habitat), he asserted the fact that the core game mechanics should be separated from the graphical content should there be a technological leap in the latter before the predictive breaking newsgame can be published. He entertained my idea of multiple news sources outsourcing the work of creating newsgames to an independent company supplying the lot. This is probably the only conceivable way that a newsgame developer would have the fiscal security and size to hire the amount of people required to make games on a regular or breaking news schedule. If the people who pioneered info-visualization in newspapers and their websites (Alberto Cairo is our preferred source of information on the subject) could figure out a working model for their work, then there’s probably a solution to this problem out there in somebody’s head as well. What I’ve written here is only a tentative first step in that direction.

We wrapped up the conversation by talking about (non-video game) journalists and their standing disdain for games as trivial. Bartle seemed to think that this was the largest obstacle toward making games a common sight on news websites. We can only hope that more journalists will pick up on the potential for video games to address serious or personal issues, following the odd example of the BusinessWeek Arcade that Ian posted about. One disconnect here might be the fact that a reporter has to work on strenuous daily deadlines and sometimes pull all-nighters to bring a story to print, while most makers of newsgames have no such deadlines and can therefore be seen as pronouncing judgment from a temporally distant Ivory Tower. Perhaps the availability of breaking newsgames might interest or satisfy journalists in a way that current such games do not.

EDIT: Richard wanted me to know that he thought it was funny that I’d described him as a “shuffling, middle-aged” gentleman. I wanted to note that I would never describe the man as “shuffling” in general. He’s as regal as they come. If he denies that fact that he’s quite a bit older than I am, then I will also go along with him on this point. The man is damn sprightly.

Tagged with: Bartle, breaking news, Game Analysis, games, newsgames

leave a comment

Build-A-Newsgame Kits?

Posted in Columns, Newsgames, Schoolwork by Simon Ferrari on December 10, 2008

(early ideas on breaking newsgames for http://jag.lcc.gatech.edu/blog/)

We still haven’t decided here at JAG whether or not the idea of a breaking newsgame is possible. There are already many examples of public policy and news games of varying levels of quality, but the idea of being able to churn one out in a week or less in order to accompany a breaking story seems mind-boggling. One creator of the recent Truth Invaders 2008 presidential campaign game notes the difficulty of pumping out their relatively simplistic project on a two-and-a-half week timeline (look at the third comment down). Another issue we’ve been looking into is the rapidly expanding notion of the citizen journalist, and the question has been raised whether or not an analogue to the “professional” citizen journalist blog might be developed in the newsgame format. I’d like to suggest a way that citizen journalistic games and an expedited production schedule for breaking newsgames might be possible: the use of generic game creation software and game-specific level editors. It was jokingly asked in one of our project meetings whether a level made in LittleBigPlanet could be considered an “indie” newsgame. Yet within a few days of LBG’s release a few players had already created levels that required one to fly an airplane into the Twin Towers, as comically recounted by The Penny Arcade. Below I shall discuss the multiple programs available, their relative strengths and weaknesses, examples we already have of games made in this way, and the idea of journalistic originality in the context of these pre-packaged game creation tools.

Most level editors are only available if one owns the game they are derived from. When one builds a mod in Source or Unreal, the mod can be distributed for free to anyone who owns the game as well. This situation arose when game companies saw that they would make more money off of selling game discs to people interested in modding culture than they would from tracking down and suing their amateur content creators. In the case of Counter-Strike, based off of Half Life’s Source engine, Valve bought the intellectual property from the modders who created it. KumaGames, a company that makes both schlock fare (dinosaur hunter games) and vaguely politically relevant games that seek to immerse players in a news event (such as John Kerry Silver Star Mission), appears to use the Source engine for their games. The value of Kuma’s political games as educational tools is shaky, as Doug Wilson has written elsewhere, but the notion of dropping a player into a violent situation pulled from the news seems like a largely untapped reservoir for newsgaming if integrated with an emphasis on journalistic practice. The anti-violence game mod Velvet Strike comically alters Counter Strike so that players shoot spray paint instead of bullets. With a valid and apt context grafted on top of a “protest game” such as Velvet Strike, the idea of a citizen journalist game developer appears realizable.

Another popular base for modders are games made on the Unreal Engine. Albanian survivors of widespread “blood feuds” co-created Medieval Unreality with Lindart by modding and skinning Unreal Tournament. Lindart sat down with individuals involved in the blood feuds and helped them visualize their interior/psychological spaces inside the game. The model for citizen journalists to derive from this would be that of a modder interviewing people and then deriving an in-game version of their stories or perspectives. 9/11 Survivor, a game that places players in the shoes of someone trapped in an upper story of one of the WTC towers as the building collapses into flames around them, is also a UT 2003 mod. Doug Wilson is making a game about terrorism and paranoia (don’t want to spoil anything) using Unreal as well. Mods based on shooters have the strengths of being able to either immerse a player in a first- or third-person perspective within a dynamic 3d environment. Being able to skin spaces allow modders to alter pre-built structures to look and feel the way they want them to. A major weakness of basing newsgames off of shooters, as evidenced best by the KumaGames we’ve played, is that such games almost always carry shooting into the mod as the primary mode of interaction with the game space (there are notable exceptions).

If shooters and their game mechanic-related limitations aren’t one’s cup of tea, then RPGs are an obvious alternative. Their main strength would have to be the increased emphasis on dialogue between the player and NPCs. There are already many communities built around designing outfits and facial skins for characters in PC RPGs, allowing simple and deep NPC customization. Professor Nora Paul of the University of Minnesota has already created a newspaper reporting simulator, Disaster at Harperville, in the Neverwinter Nights level editor. The value of using older RPGs as the base for one’s work are that the decreased emphasis on graphics suits the mode of micro-development we’re looking at. The only obstacle is the fact that an isometric view implemented in older RPGs has obvious weaknesses in the area of optical immersion as compared to 3d shooting games. One could imagine building a newsgame in Oblivion’s level editor, but the amount of work that would go into lighting everything and making the textures look proper would far outweigh the benefits of the enhanced graphics at this point in time. The two most accessible amateur build-a-game kits are RPGMaker and RPG Sim Maker. The ultra-controversial Super Columbine Massacre RPG and its Virginia Tech shooting clone were both made using RPGMaker. This is obviously the most accessible method of building a game, because all it requires is time and the ability to drag objects around with a mouse. Another strength is that games made with these programs can be exported by the developer and then downloaded by people who don’t have the RPGMaker software (unlike most mods). They can also be sold, if finances are important to the citizen journalist/developer.

So we haven’t really made any progress into citing specific examples of how to make breaking newsgames; however, I think these examples show that a notion of the citizen journalist game developer is both viable and desirable. Discussion of journalistic independence and originality forthcoming.

Tagged with: Game Analysis, games, newsgames, video games

leave a comment

Potential Future Distribution of Newsgames

Posted in Columns, Newsgames, Schoolwork by Simon Ferrari on December 9, 2008

(co-written with Bobby Schweizer)

In response to Ian Bogost’s discussion of Platform Studies at the GVU Brown Bag, we raised the question of delivery formats for news games. (Bogost’s study deals especially in technical peculiarities of particular consoles, but we’ve adapted the idea for broader use here) We believe this is not just an important question, but a critical question for conceiving of newsgames. Not only do platforms imply different technologies affecting output, but they can also have an effect on audience. Though we can use some abstract and general concepts to begin designing our newsgame, the platform will dramatically influence its direction.

In order to do this, we unfortunately have to make some generalities. I say unfortunately because we don’t like generalities. Bobby believes that terms like ‘casual’ and ‘hardcore’ are better suited for the marketing departments than the scholars, though Simon disagrees. Either way, this is an intellectual endeavor with marketing results, so some amount of demographic lumping will occur. We hope to show that these groupings are already a result of the platform technology–that the hardware and platform interfaces are more suited to specific kinds of design. The obvious answer for a newsgame’s platform is web browser because it is ubiquitous and structurally connects with news websites. However, to think only about browser games is to limit ourselves to certain kinds of games. By focusing on these other platforms we can develop a broader range of games with greater possibilities.

To explore this question, we’re breaking gaming platforms into the following categories:
Web Browser, PC, Xbox 360/Playstation 3, Wii, DS, PSP. Through this discussion we imply/conclude that the Web Browser, Wii, and DS might be where we’d want to narrow the field of investigation for the future dissemination of newsgames.

Web Browser
This is without a doubt the most accessible means of newsgame delivery. It has a low barrier of entry in terms of required hardware and uses input devices that most anyone with a computer can understand. Anybody with webspace has a platform for a web-based game. The development times for these games are often much shorter and the shortened publishing pipeline speeds to process of deployment. It’s other greatest strength is also a weakness–the limited requirements for computing and graphics processing power of a Flash-based game make it accessible but limit possibilities for 3D modeled games.

The web browser ties naturally into news websites and provides for a direct connection between the story (or stories) and the accompanying game. I believe that if this were the case, though, news organizations would end up falling back on their written work to avoid coming up with ways to explain the story in the game itself. It is quite possible that I have this opinion because I am a game player looking for more complex newsgames, while an editor sees it as beneficial.

PC
‘PC’ refers to non-browser games. These games might be downloaded as applications to be run or installed that may be provided in physical format, download from the web, or through a client like Valve’s Steam. They have the potential for higher-end graphics and to use game engines like Unreal or Source. The Kuma games model is based on the Steam model: 3D game rendered with Source distributed through a download client. This works well when the designers want to place the player in a realistic environment and need more intense physics modelings. As we’ve discussed in class, this format is good for recreating scenes from the real world, but I think it’s limited to very specific range of games.

The client-based approach approach has the benefits of automatic delivery through a single pipeline like the consoles, but is not forced to use go through the corporate channels of Microsoft, Sony, or Nintendo. Steam users have grown accustomed to different kinds of games being available on the service whether it be a full 3D first-person game, a short puzzle game, or a 2D platformer.

The PC also allows users to look at material on the web at the same time. This could be the opposite of the browser-game interaction: instead of reading a story and then playing a game (which is how I imagine editors would conceive of the use-flow), the written material could inform the gameplay afterward. Also on the web exists the possibility of newsgame portals. Imagine a Newgrounds or AddictingGames specifically for journalistic games. The newsgame, as been shown in many of the examples we’ve looked at in the Journalism & Games project, does not have to come from traditional sources. It could develop a community of fans interested in the whole genre of newsgame and give developers a place to showcase their work.

Xbox 360/PS3
These two high-end consoles (not as high-end as a good PC) have two possibilities for delivery: the disc and the download. I’m going to say up front that I think these are the least valuable platforms for newsgame delivery. Their graphical capacities are so high, and the expectations for games on the consoles so demanding, that only highly-polished works are accepted by the community. Re-releases of retro games are popular, but only if they’ve been enhanced for HD or given blur effects that help hide their harsh pixelization. On the other hand, the PSN and Xbox Live network have shown themselves to be more open than the Wii in presenting art games (such as Braid, Everyday Shooter, and Space Giraffe) to the public. It’s hard to argue that this in any way trumps the distribution of these games over computers, however. On the other hand, if a newsgame managed to break into the communities developed by these two consoles then the company that made it could cultivate a dedicated group of fans. Now, most larger game companies can’t really afford the risk of making a AAA title addressing the ill impact of the American military on life in Iraq, say. But a smaller company such as The Behemoth, if it were so inclined, could definitely get away with it – maybe the video game analog of the “news graphic novels” we read about for our alternative journalism study considering The Behemoth’s use of cell shading and hand-drawing graphics.

We imagined the kind of schlocky idea of the Sunday Times sending out a game disc once a month the same way that the glossier video game magazines do. What are the content on these discs? Usually less-labor-intensive content such as prefab demos, article supplements that didn’t make it onto the print space, and simple games that could easily have been made in Flash that one plays in order to get gamerpics or some other small reward that can be displayed on one’s online community/forum avatar. In mid-November Microsoft will be unveiling its “Mii killer” new Xbox Live avatar community, featuring graphically-enhanced avatars and activities such as online gameshow-style games. It still stands to see how impressive these features are and whether they’ll catch on with the Xbox Live-ers, but the kind of avatar-based debate game with character progression and development based on quality participation judged by a moderator or survey of other players seems like it could find a home here.

Games produced for the Xbox Live Arcade might also be played by a certain sect of the population just for the purposes of accessing achievement points. This could be used as a way to draw in players who might not otherwise desire to access newsgame content. I think it stands to be explored in a later week to see how developing an achievement structure so online avatars can display a person’s access or engagement with news content or news games might engender more interest around the news with our generation of Internet- and avatar-crazed individuals.

PSP
With the launch of PSP Firmware version 5.0, the PSP has gained the ability to download games and content wirelessly from the PlayStation Network Store. This makes the PSP the first handheld to behave the most like its console counterparts and puts it in a unique position for newsgame delivery. Expectations for a PSP newsgame would fall somewhere between browser and 360/PS3. Its controls closer resemble those of the PlayStation 2 than its handheld competition the DS. The limitations of the technology–storage space, screen size, processing power–mean that developers can focus on more simple designs, but still benefit from having a standard controller scheme.

However, this standard controller scheme may be a burden. It forces unnatural mappings of any sort of mouse/pointer games we might find in browser or PC games which, like the 360/PS3 limit the kinds of games that can effectively be developed.

The PSP also has about half the userbase as the DS in the United States. While there is some overlap, this userbase is different than the DS. When considering these numbers in conjunction with what the hardware and software have to offer, the prospects of newsgames on the portable are not the most inspiring.

Wii
Graphically the Wii stands on much lower footing than its current-gen counterparts; however, this would seem to be a strength considering the lack of time and resources that many companies have when it comes to creating newsgames. The Wii already has news channel that tries to replicate the experience of reading a story on physical media: grab the page with the Wii Remote hand to move it around. While not nearly as engaging as holding a physical newspaper in one’s hands and filling one’s field of vision with the news-scape, this does seem to hit much closer to home for dedicated news readers than simply clicking on hyperlinks to navigate news stories. There’s also the fact that one can read news stories by navigating around a simplified Google Earth-type globe by grabbing the map and spinning it. This is a progressive information visualization that just isn’t seen on news sites today. Unlike the other consoles, the Wii already has multiple channels that aren’t game related.

The Wii Remote also seems well-suited to a game where players would be able to flip through television stations and perhaps magically enter the news story, TV show, or advertisement (to do some nice family-friendly adventuring and manipulation) a la Alice’s looking glass. This is outside the scope of our project, but it does suggest some interesting intermedia possibilites for the Wii’s special controller.

Read the discussion of the DS below to see what we think about Nintendo’s more open mission of providing educational games and games keyed toward children, the elderly, and businesspeople. Also of note is the discussion about Japan’s acceptance of alternative methods of education through media such as the manga.

DS
The Nintendo DS appears at first to have the greatest technological limitations of any of the other delivery methods we mention here, but really this is only true in terms of graphics–as we’ve discussed this may not be an issue. Instead, we turn to the DS’s main strength: the stylus and touch-screen. The stylus maps to how one uses a pen to explore a document. Regarding traditional games in print media, such as those Ray explores in his discussion of games in newspapers, the stylus seems to be the unqualified best candidate for such content. But we’re far from fully demonstrating the possibilities for persuasiveness and political power of games in the print media at the moment. Still, there’s definitely something to be said for the tactile quality of holding the stylus pen. There’s a reason businessmen in Japan and 40-somethings in America are playing games like Brain Age on the DS – you feels like you’re doing semi-productive brain work when you hold the stylus.

The best DS games force players to effectively use both screens to min-max their play activity. Let’s look at The World Ends With You as a premiere example of this. While playing this game, it’s difficult to tell whether your brain is creating novel, efficient synaptic connections or just decaying into ADHD. This is because the player has to control one avatar with the stylus in the bottom screen, while using the four-direction control pad to direct a secondary hero’s simpler actions in the top screen. This is taxing even for a hardcore gamer such as myself, so the character in the top will go into auto-pilot if left idle – but it won’t be as efficient or quick with its attacks. In any case, the second screen almost always adds a helpful UI that can visualize information more conveniently for most games (as opposed to opening up a map or help screen separately on the main screen). The microphone also picks up basic actions such as shouting and blowing, which seems tailor-made for something like a British Parliament simulation. Coupled with the DS’s less intensive graphics, all of these features seem like they’d be major strengths for delivering newsgames with smaller design budgets.

But what about delivery? Well, for the current model of DS lites one has to have the taboo Revolution 4 chip to download games off the Internet, and its wireless features are wonky. This is why future newsgames will really only be conceivably accessible on Nintendo’s recently announced DSi. This new hardware will feature robust wireless capability and download service. Since Nintendo bills itself as the future of casual and alternative gaming (engaging children at a young age and now the elderly and business-minded), I don’t think it would be much of a stretch to convince them that delivering newsgames to the DS could be anything but a benefit to their company profile. Especially considering the fact that alternative methods of delivering educational content through manga is a popular trend in Japan. The DSi also comes with two cameras (one for each direction, don’t ask why) – field journalist simulation, perhaps? The new DS will play MP3, but no sound recorder has been announced. If it did, that would also be a strength for a journalism game. Coupled with a creative community of contributors used to uploading content (like as Spore or Little Big Planet), you’d have a robust online news community or forum that we’ve been mentioning as something that might be crucial to developing a following around news games in the future.

Tagged with: distribution, Game Analysis, games, newsgames, ps3, video games, wii, xbox360

leave a comment

Forums Roman and Virtual

Posted in Columns, Newsgames, Schoolwork by Simon Ferrari on December 9, 2008

When it comes to discourse over the Internet and the popular develop of the semantic web through tagging and sharing newsworthy items, we here at JAG have mostly read material that finds these areas of Internet development lacking. Our original discussions of the subject have largely fallen back on a somewhat weak stance of agreement that Reddit is better than Digg – because of filtering and its more intuitive upvoting and downvoting scheme – yet not better enough to mark a major victory for Internet intelligence and citizen journalism. As far as the quality of reader forums surrounding newspapers go, there’s still far too much flaming and nitpicking going on to really generate useful input for a newspaper most of the time. I’ve been bouncing around an idea for awhile that might be a “gamey” or ludic solution to this problem (although requiring far more resources than we’re able to acquire for our research). So I figured I’d jot down everything I’d come up with so far and ask for feedback from you, the reading community, on how you’d personally improve the system I’ve devised.

The basic idea is to create an online, multiplayer Roman-style forum within which to encourage meaningful debate, story sharing, and contribution to a news story – be it political or apolitical in nature. I’m not sure of the ideal server population for such a game. I’ve enjoyed a fairly deep political climate in MUDs such as Achaea that had slightly fewer than 100 heavily active users and 300 casual users at any given time. The game would, of course, have to be graphics-based for my idea to work. The key here is to tie people’s online voices in forums to an avatar that they actually care about. Something like this could be done in Second Life, but I’ve found that particular virtual world difficult to navigate as a novice user unsure of where to go. I feel that giving a player’s opinion on a news story a face and a body (virtually) in such a game would lead them to debate issues constructively (or at least intelligently) while avoiding flaming. Each realm would be monitored by volunteer moderators who would also reward players for continued contribution to posting news stories and rating them based on journalistic values. Their other duty would be to keep score during official debates over contentious issues. The experience points and levels rewarded to players would allow them to “pimp out” their avatars, have more weight in upvoting or downvoting news stories, and speak more during crowded debates.

What are some problems with this idea? Well, cost for one. Unless there was large user base and the game attracted well-paying advertisers there’d definitely be maintenance and development cost issues here. Also, it’s more time-consuming for the average user to participate in a virtual world like this instead of just checking in on Reddit, Digg, or their RSS feed. But maybe it would attract the bored, mature WoW player who has a few hours to kill before her guild dives into Black Temple for the evening? Can anyone help me modify this idea to make it cheaper or more casual? (I’m starting to realize that something like this would actually be fairly easy to implement in Second Life as a prototype). Thanks for reading!

Tagged with: crowdsourcing, forums, Game Analysis, games, newsgames, video games

leave a comment

Model Propaganda

Posted in Columns, Newsgames, Schoolwork by Simon Ferrari on November 28, 2008

(My article for JAG that got prematurely linked on Kotaku and eaten alive: follow up on the way.)

So we read Chomsky’s Propaganda Model earlier in the semester for insight into limiting forces on journalistic verification and transparency in mainstream news media. Before you discount this post as mental masturbation or the ramblings of another upper-middle class anaracho-syndicalist (which I’m not), I’d like to state clearly that I’m not going to suggest that there’s any sort of collusion between the video game industry and the government to prevent the production of video games dealing with touchy foreign policy issues (or any government issue for that matter); however, I’d like to dispel the common association of video games with harmless “escapism.”

28dvd.2.300.jpg

Coming from a background in film, the archetypal examples of escapism that pop into my mind are the Depression-era big budget musicals and screwball comedies. If you’ve never seen a Busby Berkeley musical, then you owe it to yourself to see some of these prototypical examples of “eye candy” that have informed the visual flair of most action movies, Broadway musicals, and even video games that we see today.

Warner Brothers was the only Hollywood studio to maintain independence during the Depression, and they did so by appealing to everyone’s desire to visually escape from the drudgery of daily life at the time. This is essentially the same method used by the Catholic Church during the Dark Ages, when cathedrals were the only place one could go to see a visual simulation of what Heaven might look like to a populace riddled with poverty. Screwball comedy poked fun at the foibles of the rich to show poor people that money didn’t necessarily make one happy.

The point I’m getting at here is that escapism works, quite literally, as an escape from real world ills. Video games don’t necessarily do this. If we sought an escape from violence and terrorism, then we wouldn’t have so many video games on the market focusing on just these two issues. Rather, many video games seek to provide catharsis for the mental ills that plague us all. We don’t see games about Iraq, but there are plenty of games that attempt to deal with the same “forces of evil” that fearmongering pundits fill our heads with through metaphor or displacement.

Even Mario wages battle against the totalitarian, (literally) draconian Bowser. Americans don’t like seeing freedom, safety, and capitalism toyed with (and the Japanese are happy to produce games that reflect our values exactly). WWII games used to be the most common FPSs besides scifi-themed shooters, but recently we’ve seen a market influx of “modern” shooters – Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare being the highest-quality example. If game company marketing departments advise against addressing current political situations directly in war shooters because of fiscal considerations (“we don’t want to alienate half of all potential buyers”), then we have a self-enforced limiting influence similar to the mainstream news propaganda model on our hands. I’m not saying that the cause is the same (government control), but the effects certainly are (avoiding sensitive subjects through a given medium).

I do think there is something troubling about the kind of shift from WWII shooters we’ve seen towards games positing Russian and Mexican terrorists as the enemy. One would do well to remember how quickly the American propaganda machine shifted from vilifying Germany to declaring a cold war on “Uncle Joe” after Berlin’s surrender. When you listen to any right-wing radio personality talk about his “solution” to our present sticky international relations situation, he reminds us that propaganda was essential toward the goal of hardening American hearts toward its enemies during and after WWII. CoD4 is particularly troubling because it posits Russian terrorists as having a controlling influence on Middle Eastern militants (this is actually a complete reversal of the truth of our having financed Bin Laden and others in their struggle against the USSR).

Currently we’re on the brink of seeing yet another cold war against Russia (our politicians use the war on terror to obscure this fact), and the “looming threat” of cheap foreign labor (particularly Mexican, on our own soil) troubles a majority of working class Americans. Both CoD4 and Battlefield: Bad Company deal with Russian enemies, while Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter I & II deal with terrorists on the US/Mexico border. All four of these games are both well-made and wildly popular; however, we must ask the question as to what it’s doing to our subconscious thoughts about foreign policy when we play games where we have to battle Russians and Mexicans instead of extremist Muslim terrorists. Are we not priming the minds of teenaged players toward future conflicts with these countries under the guise of avoiding touchy “real” military engagements?

Tagged with: escapism, Game Analysis, games, propaganda, video games, xbox 360

leave a comment

Narrative Space Ends With You

Posted in Columns, Game Analysis, Schoolwork by Simon Ferrari on November 18, 2008

Maps are spatial depictions of data. Video games, insofar as they create space, similarly depict data spatially. Henry Jenkins, writing about what he calls “narrative architecture,” attempts to present an alternative to the procedural and narrativist extremes of video game theory. Narratologists (he cites Janet Murray as a prime mover here) fail to realize that video games do not have to tell stories, and if they do it is not likely that they will tell them in the same way that a book or movie does. Ludologists (like Jesper Juul) fail to understand that the intentions of an author do not necessarily limit the narrative explorations and interpretations of the reader (or player, or user). Despite the mis-steps of these two schools of thought, it seems clear from a comprehensive history of play that it requires, creates, and expands space. Jenkins addresses the concerns of both warring schools of video game theory through his discussion of Kristen Thompson’s (my film studies grandmother, as it were) derivation of “embedded narratives” in film. The idea here is that a work such as a film or a video game is a body of information through which a viewer/player moves while attempting to make sense of it by forming and testing hypotheses. One salient comparison Jenkins makes from literature is the fact that “spatial stories” such as War & Peace and The Lord of the Rings have more in common with video games than with most other written work because of their shared emphases on environmental descriptions and open, unfolding space.

This post argues that The World Ends With You, both as a game and as an interactive map, constructs space based around the ideas of trendiness and flux. Why do I say that TWEWY can be alternatively read as an interactive map? First let me explain how the game’s narrative and mechanics work. Our protagonist here is a selfish, insular boy named Neku. Neku has died, and he has to play a game called The Reaper’s Game in order to earn a second chance at life. This fact is of course revealed not in a straightforward manner, but through a plot construction based on flashbacks and revelations of withheld information that construct feelings of intrigue, suspicion, and wonder. The Reaper’s Game takes place in an spiritual version of Tokyo’s Shibuya district called “the UG.” The ghostly players of this game can see the living inhabitants of Shibuya, and they can read their thoughts as well. TWEWY tackles the baffling problem of depicting the capricious nature of “trends” in Shibuya.

To the uninitiated, Shibuya is the epicenter for all of the bizarre fashion that one sees coming out of Japan (google Yamambas, Fruits, or Gothic Lolitas). What do dead people playing a game where they essentially struggle to survive against demonic forces called “Noise” for the duration of a week have to do with fashion trends? Well, in TWEWY the clothes your avatars wear and the “pins” they use to summon forth magical powers are “branded.” As you enter into battles against Noise wearing clothes and using pins of a given brand, that brand will gain points on a popularity chart for the area you are currently battling in. So trends in the living Shibuya are set and manipulated by an invisible contest between the dead! The game manipulates player expectations by showing the world of the living and that of the dead simultaneously on the same plane, because sometimes certain events or NPCs seem to exist both among the living and the dead – playing on the idea of multi-dimensional beings sharing the same spaces as mere mortals such as us.

Usually games are criticized for relying on “backtracking” as a means for moving through the game space. In this game, backtracking is essential in every conceivable way. The entire game takes place inside this one little section of Tokyo. You do unlock small amounts of new territory as you progress through the game, but you never leave the district itself. When you bring up the pause/inventory management menu, the top screen on the DS fills with a map of all of Shibuya. A tiny icon of Neku’s head shows you the section of Shibuya that you’re currently in. To the left of the map is a ranking board of the trends in the area. Wearing popular brands grant the player bonuses, while the least popular brands will hurt the player in some way

Celia Pearce writes about the idea of narrative environments in relation to theme parks and video games (with an emphasis on MMORPGs). According to her account, the early conceptions of Disneyland were not of hybrid media synergy; rather, Disney’s idea was to recreate for Southern California a folk American history that had been completely buried by movie studios and luxurious villas. This is what Henry Jenkins would call an “evocative space.” Narrative spaces within games foster agency, while multiplayer games also engender identity and community. For anyone living outside Japan (and probably the same is true for its inhabitants), Shibuya certainly strikes one as carnivalesque to the extreme. From the garish clothes, to the street games and shows, to the towering shopping and technology centers, Shibuya maps closest to the goals of Disney’s Epcot Center – that is to say, it constructs an environment that predicts our hyper-consumption capitalist future. Working completely against the notion of community, anyone entering Shibuya must struggle to create an identity for themselves against waves of pettiness and flamboyance. These are the forces that TWEWY‘s player and protagonist must battle against.

Ludica’s “A Game of One’s Own” explains that the idea of personal or feminine space are important when constructing narratives that will appeal or cater to women. They contrast their feminized spatial ideals of enchanted, secret, or domestic spaces with the “contested” and “dangerous” spaces of male play. I actually wrote about the importance of feminine space in an unpublished essay on women in the films of Wong Kar Wai.. In Chungking Express, the female protagonist Faye uses the song “California Dreaming” to demarcate her (aural) space from the world of men around her. Breaking into her desired mate’s apartment, she plays this song on his stereo and goes about changing everything to her taste (much like Amelie‘s scene of revenge on the cruel shopkeeper). This basically turns the stereotypical domestic role (or fantasy) of women and posits it as something active or potent. Women in this film are in a constant state of flux, while men are continually associated with stagnation. In order to become happy and “get the girl,” male protagonists must learn how to embrace change.

The dual notions of feminized space and the masculine struggle to accept flux intertwine in TWEWY. The game’s Shibuya certainly maps to the notion of a male “contested space,” with the gameplay’s emphasis falling on the contest against Noise and Reaper foes. I struggle with the idea of labeling the strong element of shopping and character customization as “feminine,” but it certainly provides a relaxing alternative to the constant stylus-whipping and frustration of battle; furthermore, I think that female players generally enjoy the act of clothing their avatars (I posit this because I’ve seen multiple non-gamer females become instant addicts when presented with the character outfitting in a game like Oblivion). The game also includes a mechanic wherein shopkeepers reward loyalty from frequent shoppers by revealing secrets about each outfit and allowing access to newer and better clothes. This reflects a real-world mode of capitalist exchange wherein women tend to develop personal relationships with proprietors while men treat them as a means to an end. The personal strife that the game’s secondary protagonist, Shiki, feels about her self-imposed loss of identity and her search to reclaim it will also resonate with female players.

Neku, the game’s protagonist, begins the game at a distinct disadvantage because of his inability to embrace change and open himself up to others. Because of the nature of the Reaper’s game, Neku must rely closely on a rotating cast of strangers who serve as his partners in the contest. TWEWY‘s game space is fractured in an interesting way, reinforcing the humbling effect of complete reliance on others. On the bottom screen the player controls Neku with the stylus, while on the top screen Neku’s partner battles in an alternate plane of the same location and battle – controlled with the four-direction control pad. This splits the players attention in an interesting way, destroying the typical concentrated, unified viewpoint that players usually take have on a game. Sometimes the action of the game becomes so hectic that one must just let the partner on the top of the screen go into AI autopilot, a particularly frightening form of trust for gamers used to faulty NPC intelligence. So The World Ends With You teaches masculinized, “competitive” or “violent,” players to learn a new way of playing (adapting to flux) while reiterating this point through the narrative space of the game that teaches Neku how to be less self-serving and isolationist.

Tagged with: Game Analysis, games, henry jenkins, ludica, the world ends with you, video games

1 comment

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Chungking Espresso

Follow Up: Practical Matters of Breaking Newsgames

Earth 2100 vs Superstruct

Newsgames and Documentary

Follow Up: Against Escapism

Newsgames in the Pipe

Build-A-Newsgame Kits?

Potential Future Distribution of Newsgames

Forums Roman and Virtual

Model Propaganda

Narrative Space Ends With You

Chungking Espresso

Categories

Friends and Frenemies

Twitter Y’all

Follow “Chungking Espresso”