NEWSGAMES: Journalism at Play
by Ian Bogost, Simon Ferrari and Bobby Shweizer
MIT Press. 235pp.
Reviewed: 27 August 2011

Today is always a good time to review the function and practice of journalism – the word itself implies daily update and review. Swamped with information in so many modes and media, we might reconsider the boundaries of what we call “news” and how it converges with propaganda, education, and play.

Ian Bogost, an MIT alumnus, academic and partner in a videogame company, attacks this topic with the support of two of his graduate students in the Literature, Communication and Culture Department at Georgia Institute of Technology. He aims to suggest how the modes of engagement offered by videogame technology can be harnessed to support the mission of journalism, namely to inform and to stimulate critical thinking.

The book’s title implies that news and journalism are the same thing. We soon find there is a need to distinguish between services that aim to deliver reliable facts (the conventional concept of “news”) and those other branches of journalism whose function is to explore, explain, comment and provoke debate. This distinction is frequently under challenge, not only in the land of Fox News but also in our Australian media, when facts are selected or distorted for attention-grabbing or political purposes.

Reading this book, it transpires that the opportunity for game or videogame techniques to extend the scope of journalism is mainly limited to those extensions of journalism into comment and exploration. However, Bogost and his team extend their review to a few media technologies that, while not really “games”, allow a consumer to engage interactively with information sources.

These are the interactive descendants of the “infographics” that began developing about a century ago to give printed newspapers a graphical means to display correlated information. The history of the pie chart and the bar graph is surprisingly interesting. Bogost particularly commends efforts by the New York Times online edition in the field of “playable infographics”, whereby readers can choose various inputs to website graphical systems that alter fact-based displays of financial, political or social data.

Bogost’s point is that interactive infographics give a reader more ways to digest useable information from raw facts – surely a core function of journalism in all its forms.

The journalistic ambition to spread understanding (not just information) provides the link to journalism-related games. These seem to occupy a space somewhere between educational programs and factual reportage. In this territory, objectivity may be less important than emotive communication in keeping the participant engaged. This raises the problem that one person’s journalism may be another peron’s propaganda. Opinionated journalism is as old as the information trade itself, but overt opinion should be distinguishable from biased reportage masquerading as fact.

How can bias not be present in a “game” environment that presents a structured version of reality with no visible author? One answer might be that anyone playing such a game will know that they are experiencing an artificial world, and that the relation to reality is no more than allusive. But then, the same might be said of all forms of journalism, from newspapers to scripted “reality” television.

Many of the examples offered are, to my mind, educational rather than journalistic. These include interactive re-creations of historic scenarios such as the assassination of JFK and even Henry Thoreau’s wistful sojourn at Walden Pond, where the player chooses between options for action that are limited by historical facts. Any such immersion in a simulation of past events must affect the participant in some way – although I wonder how far any simulated experience that is free of consequences can really be compared to the physical experience that it aims to model. Even death is just a passing irritation, soon corrected.

Simulations that stop short of fictional role-playing might be more easily measured for effect. Budget Hero, from the American Public Media foundation, gives the player the option to set US national budget objectives, then play around with fiscal allocations for various taxes and expenditures to see how the whole situation will work out over time. Other fact-based simulations model scientific or economic processes behind such issues as oil supplies, a hailstorm, global warming, and other adjustable human interactions with the physical world.

A number of the games explored are from Bogost’s own company, tellingly named Persuasive Games. His agenda is clearly an idealistic and liberal one. Persuasive Games created a series of short games for the New York Times online edition that embodied commentary on current issues such as airport security, food pollution and Christmas consumerism. The model is something like an interactive version of satirical video mash-ups that are so popular on internet social media.

Bogost ruefully notes that, after the New York Times ceased publishing his firm’s games, comments on his site suggested people prefer “vanilla entertainment” to socially-relevant comment. This exposes the perennial journalist’s dilemma of balancing entertainment with instruction. The motivation of the fickle consumer can not be ignored.

A further category of games is about journalism itself rather than about the news. Some games have players respond to real-time updates of actual news events piped, via internet, into scenarios developing in the players’ simulated world.

Bogost concludes finally that newsgames are a way to encourage popular scrutiny of the economic, social and technical systems behind the news, of which the daily news items are only the passing symptoms.

The search for more effective ways to pursue journalism in contemporary society is admirable, but this book left me with several unanswered questions. If interactive games can be socially beneficial by providing models for understanding and acting in the real world, then what are we to conclude about the dominant interactive game culture that models violence, racism, theft and rape? When is a game a rehearsal for life, and when is it not?

Richard Thwaites was at one time head of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s national radio current affairs department.