Michael Hancock is the Book Reviews editor on First Person Scholar. He is a PhD candidate in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo. Currently, his grey matter is engaged in writing a dissertation on the use of image-based and text-based rhetoric in videogames.
In his 2007 book Persuasive Games, Ian Bogost expounds at length his problem with the term “serious games.” The term was coined in order to define games whose topics were serious things such as economics, or ecology, whose purpose was first and foremost to emphasize their educational and institutional orientation. The problem with “serious games” is that the title implies that whoever used it was defining themselves in opposition to games that lacked the adjective, a distinction that made “regular” games appear light and frivolous, whereas serious games came off as ponderous and pretentious. If the term must be used, he decided, let it be used for games that draw attention to underlying structures, or call for a greater attention to detail. But he’d prefer to use different terms entirely.
That passage kept repeating in my head while I read the 2010 book by Ian Bogost, Simon Ferrari, and Bobby Schweizer, Newsgames: Journalism at Play. A newsgame, it should be established from the start, is not merely a substitute term for serious game, though the reader may at first be forgiven for thinking along those lines, as they cover often very similar topics. The actual definition of a newsgame is at once narrower, and much more expansive: the intersection of game and journalism. Obviously, with such a broad definition, there’s room for misinterpretation. Does it refer to games that are based on the news? Games that invoke journalism in their plot? Is it journalism that consciously becomes more playful? As the book unfolds, so does the answer: yes, yes, and yes. While the book drifts a bit in terms of its audience, Newsgames: Journalism at Play defines and establishes its genre with a taxonomic rigour.
Chapter-by-Chapter
In a brief opening chapter introducing newsgames via the example of Wired’s 2008 game simulating the lifestyle of a Somali pirate, Cutthroat Capitalism, Bogost, Ferrari, and Schweizer outline the course of the rest of the book, promising that each chapter will focus on a different genre of newsgame. Chapter 2 follows up on Cutthroat Capitalism, exploring current event games, games that take their content and sometimes their form from events in recent news. Current event games is further divided into three categories: editorial games, tabloid games, and reportage games. Editorial games attempt to present an argument, as in Gonzalo Frasca’s September 12th, or Mary Flanagan’s Layoff!. Tabloid games are “playable versions of soft news”–they’re less about making a point and more about catering to a current trend. And reportage games are those whose primary function is to inform; they may contain some sort of argument, but the information is a higher priority. The authors offers the games Food Import Folly and Points of Entry from Bogost’s company, Persuasive Games, as examples. The challenge of current event games is that it’s difficult to finish a game with a thoughtful, integrated message within the brevity of the modern newscycle. The solution the authors present is to design games not to speak to the issue when it breaks, but while it’s still relevant.
Chapter 3 looks at infographics, at the way digital media enables an engagement with the presentation of information in a way that is both elucidating and playful. As such, they outline the history of infographics in news sources, with a particular focus on the Sentinel, the New York Times, and USA Today. There’s also a fair smattering of visual design theory, as provided by specialists such as Benjamin Schneiderman and Edward Tufte. Game studies also makes an appearance, as they follow up on Martin Wattenberg’s observation that users who play with infographics correspond to Richard Bartle’s classic taxonomy of players, which transforms the way we usually think of people responding to statistics into something more dynamic; with interactive displays, we don’t just view the results, we play with them. The chapter takes the previous one’s premise and flips it on its head: rather than looking at how games can become more news-like, it argues that news can become more game-like.
Chapter 4’s focus is the documentary, and the primary means of transforming the documentary into game is the simulation, or, as they phrase it, the three different ways available for a documentary videogame to engage with reality. First is the exploration of spatial reality, which focuses on replicating the environment of an event as accurately as possible, as in The Berlin Wall, a model made possible through the tool Garry’s Mod. Next is operational reality, wherein the player is put into a single event, with limited control to change the outcome. Examples include JFK Reloaded, 9-11 Survivor, and Kuma\War’s John Kerry’s Silver Star, all games based on a fairly narrow exploration of a single event. Finally, there’s procedural documentary games, which go beyond the single event to map out the processes that led to it in the first place, as in Freedom Figther ‘56!, which is based on the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, and Peacemaker, which charges the player with finding a nonviolent solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as either the Israeli Prime Minister or the president of the Palestinian Authority. Documentary games allow exploration of human focus stories, but also risk controversy, due to public perception of games; the authors note that Gus Van Sant’s film Elephant, a fictional account of the Columbine shootings, received far less outright rejection than Super Columbine RPG!, a game based on the same events.
Chapter 5 moves from the “news” side of the newspaper to another feature that illustrates game and journalism intersecting: puzzles. The authors outline the history of the crossword puzzle, and argue that a digital equivalent could be meaningfully employed to integrate local and current news into a more playable form. They also speculate that newspaper publishers may have already lost out, as the casual games revolution seems to have already captured a large portion of the reader-users who would be interested in such a service. What interested me most about the chapter was a reference to crossword expert Michelle Arnot, who notes that the pleasure of crosswords is that “By presenting a solvable problem, the puzzle offers comfort to a chaotic world.” It strikes me that the same pleasure is a great part of videogames in general, in that they offer players the opportunity to demonstrate their agency by mastering a knowable system. What would it mean, I wonder, to convey that sense of mastery in a newsgame? Could it make the average player feel more knowledgeable and in control of the world around them? Or is it impossible to transfer over the feeling of mastery of a closed system to the open-ended real world nature of a newsgame?
While it’s chapter 7 that addresses these questions most directly, there’s hints of answer in Chapter 6. Chapter 6 is called literacy, and what the authors mean by that is investigating how games situate the practice of understanding and creating journalism. That in turn means looking at games that are focused on journalism (Dead Rising, Beyond Good & Evil, Amnesty International’s Pictures for Truth), games that feature news channels (Grand Theft Auto, MMO radio programs, Fallout 3), and games that attempt to teach journalism, both in terms of getting a single story (Be a Reporter, Disaster at Harperville) and games that model journalism more as a process (the Global Conflicts series). The chapter ends with three types transparency that journalism could learn from games: being transparent about their ideologies, and transparent about their construction, and transparent about their sources. It’s actually a fairly rare game that incorporates all three, but I think I understand where they’re coming from.
Chapter 7 is on community, specifically on how newgames can cater to the local sense of community that newspapers can offer. The game model here is the Alternative Reality Game, or the ARG, and its the ARG’s blend of real world and game that offers, I think, the best answer to how a game can offer a sense of control, but still speak to larger world importance. The authors use World Without Oil as their starting point, and look heavily at Superstruct as well, to demonstrate how game systems can be oriented to get people to engage in discussion over potential real world problems. I have my doubts about this particular sort of newsgame approach to be honest; one of the problems facing news now is that many people just can’t be bothered to keep up with current events, and the effort that an ARG requires won’t make that any easier. Then again, maybe it shouldn’t be easy; maybe being a responsible citizen requires an active engagement.
Chapter 8 is on platforms, that is, systems that simplify the development of other things on top of it. The printing press, for example, is a platform for delivering the news, as is broadcast television. The newsgame Bogost, Ferrari, and schweizer champion for this platform discussion is Play the News, which provided players with background information about a news story, then asked them to predict what would happen, awarding points for accurate predictions. The game, then, is a platform for news delivery, one that encourages a different sort of engagement with the news than the traditional services. The rest of the chapter explores various other applications of platforms: fantasy sports leagues, as games that use statistics and news as their platform; the various software platforms that enable the newsgames discussed throughout the books; and speculation on what a platform that integrated news into its form would look like. The final chapter is a brief conclusion. It’s written largely for would-be newsgame creators, and offers a series of advice, including developing a computational expertise, thinking of process over single event, and, most importantly, to start creating.
Conclusions
Those who have just read through the above summary may accuse me of just presenting a list of terms and games. That accusation has some truth to it, as that, though grossly understated, is the purpose of the book, to define and catalog newsgames as they already exist. It’s useful to situate this book in terms of Bogost’s every-expanding oeuvre. I don’t want to diminish Simon Ferrari’s and Bobby Schwiezer’s contributions; the book definitely has a different tone to it from other books Bogost has written, and I imagine a large part of that difference should be attributed to them. But at the same time, it’s clearly speaking to other works Bogost has published. The value of games in terms of creating procedural rhetoric is referred to a few different times, as well as terms such as “simulation gap,” which, as the book itself notes, are taken from Serious Games and Unit Operations. The book’s taxonomical focus and the speculative side of chapters such as the ones on literacy and platforms resemble How To Do Things With Videogames, though the speculations here are more structured and formal. And while the series isn’t mentioned explicitly in the main text, it’s clear that Bogost’s work on the series he co-edits with Nick Montfort, Platform Studies, was the inspiration and underlying principle behind the book: what changes in journalism if games become the playform for news?
Where Newsgames differs from those other books most is in its audience and main argument. The intended audience of the book is something that only becomes evident in the conclusion, alongside the argument. The introduction frames the book as one that is primarily interested in taxonomy, and in that sense, it succeeds, as the book is an unparalleled resource for the list of gathered newsgames, and explaining the significance of particular games. But at the same time, the taxonomical purpose is insufficient to explain the book’s choices in genres. Why put puzzles on the same level as documentaries? What news-value is there really in a game such as Grand Theft Auto that occasionally relays fake news to the player, in comparison to a game that actually teaches journalism skills? Why would a game studies person be interested in whether journalism missed the boat on adapting the crossword for the digital audience? The answer is that the question itself is wrong, as the book is not primarily for games people at all, but for journalists. As the final chapter makes clear, the purpose of the book is to make the argument that journalists need to adapt to digital technology, and that incorporating games would be an effective way of doing that. If the journalists are familiar with existing game theory, so much the better, but it’s the willingness to do journalism that’s the first prerequisite.
The conclusion does an excellent job in drawing together the chapters that sometimes feel disconnected and disparate; it’s unfortunate that it’s only in the conclusion that these connections are made absolutely clear. It’s only in retrospect that the point of some of the chapters are evident, that they serve some purpose beyond checking off some obscure checklist. The audience issue is also something that feels like it should have been addressed much earlier, as the difference between arguing that journalists should incorporate games is significantly different than the argument that game designers should incorporate more journalism. But the conclusion is there, and it does draw together these themes, and as such, the book ends on a satisfying note.
So that this review also ends on a satisfying note, I’d like to turn to one of the points the conclusion raises, the distinction between event and process. As journalism is situated now, the focus is on the single event; we refer to the newstory, for example, and the story structure means imposing a beginning and an end. This frame becomes a sort of platform in itself, one that obscures the connections between stories, and gives a false sense of closure. Videogames are not about stories, but about processes—you repeat the same steps to progress in the game, and make iterative changes as you advance. The advantage of treating journalism more like a game is that such treatment encourages users/players/readers to engage in a process instead of being subjected to a story, and that engagement allows for a more democratic participation in news circulation. In a way, it’s hardly a new argument; it echoes the database/story distinction Lev Manovich explicated for new media, and also harkens back to the great ludology debate between games and narrative. But in this case, I think it’s cast in a slightly different light, as the ability to work through processes is the key element that games bring to journalism. Well, one of two elements, anyway.
The other point is a sense of play, which brings us back full circle to the discussion of serious games, I’d like to return to the chapter on platform studies, and fantasy sports leagues. The fantasy games serve a very important foundation here; while the speculative stuff considers what news as platform could do, the fantasy games represent what’s already in play. I stated earlier that a “serious” ARG would require too much effort, but the fantasy leagues show that people are willing to devote a lot of effort into pastimes they feel passionately about. The difference between sports news and “regular” news is that the former is an acceptable, endorsed form of play, whereas the news proper is usually serious work—unless it’s about some sort of frivolous topic, such as celebrity gossip or cute animals, in which case it’s open for consumption again. Ian Bogost has spoken out against “gamification” (see “Gamification is Bullshit”) for similar reasons for his rejection of serious games, that it performs the very ostracization that it purports to overcome, and that it’s more about branding a product than creating anything useful.
Newsgames, then, in the final estimate, isn’t about gamifying the news. Rather, it’s about looking at what makes games—the sense of play, the exploration of process—and asking what journalism can use from that to maintain its relevance in a digitally integrated world.