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Atlanta, GA | Posted: October 18, 2010
Georgia Tech Media Relations
Laura Diamond
laura.diamond@comm.gatech.edu
404-894-6016
Jason Maderer
maderer@gatech.edu
404-660-2926
Summary Sentence:
Newsgames: Journalism at Play, the latest book by Ian Bogost examines the use and potential of video games to inform the public and bring context to the news.
Full Summary:
Newsgames: Journalism at Play, the latest book by Ian Bogost examines the use and potential of video games to inform the public and bring context to the news. In this Q &A, Bogost talks about this collaboration as well as how games can help journalists share the rest of the story.
The Authors of NewsgamesNewsgames: Journalism at Play, the latest book by Ian Bogost, prolific video game designer, critic, author and director of graduate studies in Georgia Tech’s Digital Media program, examines the use and potential of video games to inform the public and bring context to the news. For his latest book, the author of Persuasive Games and Racing the Beam is joined by graduate students Simon Ferrari and Bobby Schweizer. In this Q &A, Bogost talks about this collaboration as well as how games can help journalists share the rest of the story.
Q: In this book, you teamed up with two of your graduate
students, Simon Ferrari and Bobby Schweizer. How did the book benefit from this
collaboration?
When done right, a relationship between a professor and a graduate student
should be one of building colleagues. Graduate school is a place where students
learn to be professionals, sometimes professional engineers or lawyers or
whatever, and sometimes professional scholars. Real colleagues don't work in
master/apprentice relationships nor in boss/worker relationships, but sit on an
even keel. By working with my doctoral students on the book (in addition to the
dozen or so other researchers who participated in the lab), we were all able to
work through the topics at hand together, finding approaches and answers that
we might not otherwise have seen individually.
Q: What do you mean by the term "newsgames?"
"Newsgames" is just a name for the ways journalism can partake
of video games as a medium. Originally when the term was coined (by Georgia
Tech digital media alumnus Gonzalo Frasca, in fact), it meant bite-sized games
that express a designer's commentary on a current event—a sort of playable
editorial cartoon. In the book and in related work in our research lab here at
Georgia Tech, we have expanded the term to include any application whatsoever
of video games to journalism, and vice versa, from editorial cartoons and
tabloids to documentary games and crossword puzzles and software platforms.
Q: What can newsgames add to the news that traditional forms like print and
broadcast miss?
The videogame is a powerful medium for constructing systems that are governed
by rules. A videogame is a computational model of a system whose underlying
code governs what that system can do and how it operates. As such, players of video
games reason about the logic that makes the videogame world possible and use it
to proceed through the game.
Print and broadcast media do the opposite. They tell stories about people,
places, objects and events. Broadcast news excels at supplying vivid images
that appeal to viewers' emotions, while print stories often weave elaborate
narratives. Journalists may research the underlying
processes that brought such events about, but journalistic matter, itself,
often just scrapes the surface of the outcomes.
Video games, by contrast, reconstruct the underlying logics that make
particular stories possible in the first place. For example, the tale of the woman
who can no longer get to work because her MARTA bus route has been cut is
important for making us aware of the budgetary problems of our transportation
system, but a carefully constructed newsgame starts by examining the root of
the problem, for example the entire economic, mechanical and operational
mechanism that is the public transit system.
Today, most problems are complex and systemic rather
than surface-level. Good video games always involve systems, and for that
reason they have much to contribute to civic knowledge and engagement.
Q: Are newsgames likely to become more popular, like Internet news sites did,
or will they always be a niche format? Why?
The biggest challenge newsgames face comes from their fundamental
incompatibility with the way readers and journalists think about the news. The
obstacle here is not the technology or the medium, but what it represents about
ideas and information; we're just not used to creating and interacting with
systems instead of stories. That is changing as software media like video games
increase in popularity.
But that's not the only way the newsgame could prove successful. Much like the
many interactive infographics and photo slideshows that get passed around the
Internet, the newsgame could serve as a hook for online news organizations to
draw in readers. As the format develops, the newsgame could help differentiate
one news agency from another. "Come to our website, we're the ones doing
something new and different." We're working on a new project with this
goal in mind, again funded by the Knight Foundation. Its focus is on creating
an authoring tool for small-scale newsgames meant to draw users into local
issues.
Another point: novelty is not really our goal anyway. When we first started
this research in 2008, we began by looking at the core values that drive
journalistic practice. We asked ourselves what video games excel at that and can
support these values in a meaningful way. Anything that doesn't advance those
goals doesn't deserve the name "newsgame" anyway. The newsgame may never replace the written story or the 6:00 news, but
if put into the right hands it could serve as an invaluable tool for tackling
complex issues while engaging readers. And perhaps over time, it will become
central rather than peripheral to civic engagement.
Q: What are the top things you hope a reader can take away
from your book?
First, the potential of newsgames is their ability to explain systems, not tell
stories. They are capable of handling a level of complexity that is difficult
to address with words or images. Newsgames not only address the who, what,
where and when, but they are especially suited for the why and how.
Second, there is a natural relationship between journalism and games. Newsgames
are not about hopping on the bandwagon of popular entertainment, but taking
pre-existing forms like crossword puzzles, news quizzes, editorial cartoons and
infographics a step forward. Journalism does not have to be dry to be
professional and these forms have proven news can be portrayed beyond the
written and spoken word.
Third, journalism is hard work. Newsgames are not some cure-all ready to remedy
the ills of a field in financial trouble. The games need the guiding hand of
the journalist to ensure that they are addressing journalistic values. Creating
a newsgame involves mustering the resources of the newsroom to reform civic
knowledge in a new way.
Q: Tell me about the cover.
The cover shows an early 20th-century newsboy holding a Nintendo DS handheld
gaming system instead of a newspaper. It communicates the current state of
journalism, a collision of outmoded ways of making and disseminating the news
and an uncertainty about what to do with new technologies. And it suggests just
how conservative adoptions of technology have really been in the news: the web,
blogs, Twitter, YouTube, all are just adaptations of print and video into
networks for digital distribution. The videogame offers something surprising
and unfamiliar and new, a new way of doing journalism, not just a new way of
sharing the same old stuff.
About the Authors
Ian Bogost is associate professor in the School of
Literature, Communication and Culture, at the Georgia Institute of Technology
and founding partner, Persuasive Games LLC. He is the author of Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of
Videogames and Unit Operations: An
Approach to Videogame Criticism and the coauthor (with Nick Montfort) of Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer
System (2009), all published by the MIT Press.
Simon Ferrari and Bobby Schweizer are doctoral students in
digital media at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
