Are news video games the next step in the evolution of journalism? According to Ian Bogost and the Georgia Institute of Technology they are. At the New Scientist, Bogost highlights two such games: Burger Tycoon in which players raise cattle in South Africa to produce fatty foods for global dissemination, and Escape From Woomera, a game about a real life Australian detention camp for illegal immigrants.
What say you, Rumpus readers? Can you envision a future where you play the news?
5 responses
I always wanted to be a drug addict celebrity. Playing a whale who has to dodge cargo ships might be fun too.
But what I’m really looking forward to is that Tom DeLay money laundering game.
“Australian” not “Austrian”.
Thanks Kevvo!
It’s promising but sketchy. It’s also a new name on an old dog.
Video games do precisely what good journalism should do: explain they systems by which a world works. However, the laws of a videogame rarely parallel the laws of reality. (Sid Meyer’s Civilization, for example, always annoyed me. As if there is only one direction for discovery, so a difference in cultures signifies losing the race to progress.)
I think games have been a tool for propagandists far longer than they have been a tool for journalists. (See America’s Army, which I consider a tame form of propaganda compared to, say, the free online “border patrol” game. What is harmful is not the suggestion that someone should shoot at immigrants. No player actually plans to do that. Rather, the harm is the subtle damage to a player’s understanding of who crosses the border, how, and why.)
It’s not all bad. The more models people have of how reality works, the more they have to choose from. Does war work like it does in Risk, in which once you conquer a territory it is yours, or is like “War on Terror, the Board Game,” in which you can create a terrorist in your enemy’s territory, but you can’t guarantee the terrorist won’t turn on you? In the end, however, these models will blend together in people’s minds, and how someone sees the world will depend on a brain’s absorbing a slurry of cues from reality and game algorithms.
When someone questions the model of reality a journalistic game creates, how will anyone separate the false from the thoroughly researched, except with facts? I suppose they’ll need to consult a journalist for those.
Click here to subscribe today and leave your comment.