News games on the rise
Dan Terdiman has an article on the rapid proliferation of “news games,” which were an unusual and even controversial genre a few years ago when Ian Bogost and others started pushing them. Today, they are all over the place, thanks to the huge Flash community: tiny games that serve as a replacement for editorial cartoons (editorial cartooning, btw, is a business that is apparently in trouble).
When we talked five to ten years ago about how games were going to be the dominant medium of this century, I don’t think most people were thinking in terms of this sort of tiny minigame, mostly made by amateurs. And yet, I think that is kind of where we’re going.
It makes me ponder, what other areas of media will have little games slip in and replace the old way of doing things? We could maybe walk through the newspaper and see: how about classifieds? Obituaries? The social column? The letters column? Anyone got a Flash game to replace the Arts page?
Some choice quotes:
Doherty’s Fubra bought Sock and Awe from its original creator on eBay for more than $8,000, but said ads on the game earned the money back in just 48 hours. And Tocci said his creations earn money from royalties paid by the casual games sites that host the titles.
That leads to staggering numbers like the 14.5 million viruses tackled in Swinefighter and the 93.5 million shoes tossed at Bush in Sock and Awe alone. Tocci’s Double Bird Strike has been played more than 400,000 times.
“It’s a shame the innovation (of providing CDC advice about swine flu in Swinefighters) was left to two entrepreneurs,” said Doherty. “It would have been great if the World Health Organization had realized they could use a game to raise awareness about preventing swine flu.”
— ‘News games’ put public in charge of hot topics | Geek Gestalt – CNET News.
16 Responses to “News games on the rise”
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As far as the World Health Organization (and other similar–meaning traditional–organizations) recognizing the potential of games as a medium, I say just give it time (say, as long as it takes for a good number of its positions to be filled by the next generation).
We’ve already got memorials within game worlds honoring departed developers, players and others. I don’t know about making the memorials into games per se, but I could certainly see making them into interactive retrospectives on a person’s life and legacy. A plaque or monument is nice, but a gateway to a museum honoring the person would be nicer, IMO. And if that person were a game developer or consummate gamer, having a game element to the monument might be an appropriate tribute.
flashback….
16 years ago.
http://www.cube3.com/thunk
originaly floppy disk distributed/then cdrom. then “shocked” in 95….
notice how ideas/products lik _current.tv and _vlogging were all considered “satire parody” in 1992 terms.
made by alot of true pioneers of new media;)
all in NYC!
For what it’s worth, my understanding of “newsgames” has expanded considerably over the years. More on this at my Georgia Tech research blog, with a not-quite-accurate summary at the Chronicle of Higher Ed (sorry for the ego-links, but it seems helpful.
On a more related note, I don’t think games like the ones presented in Dan’s article do much to replace editorial cartoons. Good cartoons are insightful, but most newsgames are not; they are simple recreations of an event meant to provoke clicks rather than thought. I’ve been calling them tabloid games.
i agree.. news and entertainment are terrible mergers. proof shown by the last 25 years of video tv news.
sadly only Jon Stuart knows what hes doing is NOT newz.
Thomas Nast needed more and more…but not as the “editorial director” of all news..lol
btw– heres a new experiment in news and its value ..
http://www.newsgroups.ning.com
Ive set up a pod newzrooms 3d avatar space to watch news clips and discuss.argue with friends and others..ill update its content weekly..for a late night sunday group gathering scheduled….
an avatar driven THIS WEEK, for you and your avatar pals..:)
c3
Jon Stewart is doing news, and that’s the really ironic part to all of it. He’s not a journalist, and makes no attempt to be, but he’s actually about as useful as most cable news channels in terms of understanding what’s been going on lately, he just doesn’t pretend to be objective or “fair and balanced”. He goes for the laugh instead.
So the two can definitely work, you just need to make sure the entertainment bit gets prioritized higher than the news bit. You can get some limited success going the other way around, MSN’s Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow are effectively News/Entertainment, with the priorities reversed, and they don’t work quite as well (in terms of being entertaining) because they’re still trying to cleave to some rough concept of journalistic integrity, which is counterproductive.
So you can also make insightful news games, they just need to be well designed, and good design as we all know is hard. ;p
hes doing entertainment– hes using NEWS as the fodder… big difference in what;how i was using the term “news” as also meaning “journalism”. He would agree hes not providing the “news”…. hes said many times hes a monkey boy doing entertainment. his editors are looking to make us laugh, not inform us about any civic dangers or natural disasters headed our way:)
I can see it now: “Trust The Vaccine RPG!”
What I want to see is a game making app like Mockingbird, Playcrafter et al. that is oriented toward system simulation and procedural rhetoric.
I don’t think most editorial cartoons meet that definition, unfortunately.
@cube, He’s not doing journalism sure, but he is providing news! They’re separate in my head, so I’m drawing a distinction between the two that perhaps you weren’t. You can find out about current events by watching the Daily Show, and there’s usually enough of a gap between the funny jokes he makes and the events that they’re based on that you can tell the difference. As I said, he makes no pretension to journalistic integrity, but the other cable news shows don’t really have much either for all the posturing, and he’s funnier. ;p
“You can find out about current events by watching the Daily Show”
ill just suggest you “analyze” comedy shows the same way you openly “analyze” news shows.:)_
Like any comedy show on TV, “the daily show” wont be “providing” the main “current event meme” of the country if the story, like 9/11 or a natural disaster like katrina, has accured and makes it to “unsafe” for jokes or to be “funny”..which IS the main goal of his show… not to help you find out whats ‘news”
my guess is that during the days after 9/11 while the network “news” and newpapers were for their reasons offering tons of time to the deaths of the thousands etc…. the daily show was not…, it certainely didnt ignore 9/11 but the producers draw a line in content/context….that lines reason is described below.that GAP in time to feel free to include the content as a JOKE is why its not NEWS…. news is as they say, only valueble when its new…:)the last days news is today doggie doo paper.
“Describing itself as a fake news program, The Daily Show draws its comedy from recent news stories, satirizing political figures, media organizations, and often, aspects of the show itself. – wikipedia”
anyhow- maybe just think about my comments:)
c3
The problem of ‘news as comedy’, ‘news as entertainment’ and ‘news as a game’ is throwing away the point of journalism which is to eschew advocacy and report facts as fair witness.
Between the ‘Roone Arledge School of Journalism as Profit Center’ and the right wing radio talking entertainers as shills for the rage cycle, the value of informative channels is falling fast. Games will be more of the same but worse. Stewart made us laugh but I don’t think he excelled in any way or informed. He took the comedy points and ran with them and that is his to do, but frankly it is the same as Rush, just playing for the other team. I like Stewart’s routine better.
Maddow and Olbermann did a hack job on journalistic ethics although as I looked around the mainstream, about par with CNN and Fox. Never have I felt so abandoned by the US news organizations. It bodes ill.
yeah, what len said..
thunk about it.
I think there’s some misunderstanding about what exactly political comedians, such as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, have achieved. (Nevermind the recent study that reported that more Americans trust political comedians than The New York Times… or something to that effect.)
What these comedians have achieved is the dissemination of news to larger and more distributed audiences through entertainment. They don’t create news and they’re not “first on the scene.” What they do is aggregate news content in a compelling way.
no. its the dissemination of JOKES using “current events/people” as the topics…
Just as “Seinfeld” used human foibles and small talk as his fodder for getting LAUGHS..
NO ONE ever considered JOHNNY CARSON’s Monologue a NEWSCAST….the fact that anyone considers the Daily Show for having anything but Entertainment goals is what’s so sad.
they aggregate JOKES about news casts/news events/news type casters..but they do not aggregate news content….the fact they sit at a fake news desk set. does not make it a newscast…:)
there is a difference that i think may have now been lost on many…but its a real difference…god help us that at least “COLBERT AND STEWART” know the difference, but if they would read this thread they might want to quit:)
and as for more americans trusting political comedians and even placing them in the same context as journalists..well thats just evidence of how far we as a culture have gotten away from the reality of this difference. Ask Al Franken;)
1984 really happened…even Star Trek is no longer immune…;)
It takes real resources to get real news. Journalists may be ‘in crisis’ but it is crisis du jour. The web devastated the image industry, then the music industry and is now moving like locusts on the print journalism and broadcast channel (say TV) industries.
Face it: the day of the mainstream control of distribution is over for some kinds of content (although it will reaggregate and disaggregate several times before settling into some comfortable big pots for the savvy business types – see Second Life). But on the other side of it, content of immediate high value still requires resources to get and unlike other kinds, news rots from the point of picking and there is an unquenchable thirst. The rot of reality TV is just fungus. Print journalism is being replaced by digital journalism but it is just a medium replacing a medium.
The hard job of getting the news is the same as it has been. It’s a little easier right now to hide bad journalism among the pack. That will change and then the old brands will get some of their value back with less of their bulk.