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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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"The debate about newsgames' value as speech turns out not to be a conflict between support and detraction but rather a conflict between the games themselves and the games as cogs in someone's favorite discourse machine," writes Ian Bogost, Professor in the School of Literature, Communications, and Culture and Director of the Graduate Program in Digital Media, addressing recent debate in popular culture over the artistic and journalistic merit of newsgames (video games made to explore news events in a journalistic fashion) as well as video games in general.
Bogost suggests a solution to this dissonance: "It's not that games need to 'rise to the level' of books and films and the like, but that they need to spread like those media into all the nooks and crannies of human activity. The more deliberately creators populate such an ecosystem, the harder it will become for games to become pawns in the debates of others." Source: Kotaku, August 1, 2011.
