How would you like to be a flu virus, mutating and spreading yourself through human populations? Or what about an evil oil baron unleashing havoc on the world via war and disaster? What do you think of playing the role of one of two young men who decided to show up at school in Columbine, Colorado in April 1999 armed with shotguns, rifles and handguns?
All of these are experiences you can have via a new genre of journalism called the newsgame. Nora talked to Ian Bogost about this emerging form. Ian is a video game researcher, critic and designer in Atlanta, Georgia. A shorter version of this interview will air on a future episode of Spark, but you can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3. [runs 24:40]
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When it comes to newsgaming or systemgaming, I can tell there is a huge craving for it, but there is still some amount of ways to go. The Phoenix Wright (being a lawyer) and Trauma Center (being an ER doctor) series games both gained instant popularity upon their release because the ideas of "career-based" gaming they presented were fairly nuanced for the "everyone is a space marine on the planet zrog" time. Sadly, the gameplay itself had nearly little to do with actually being a lawyer or a doctor. Phoenix Wright is not even a "game" in the traditional sense, but more like an interactive comic book detective story — and the simulation of courtroom/justice systems was laughable at best.
I look at gaming as a tool purely for education and self-improvement; yet all too often I see it end up in the hands of advertisers and political elites. Don't get me wrong — Bogost's rhetoric regarding gaming as a truly journalistic medium sounds 100% correct. Given the fragmented nature of news media, gaming might be the only way to really gain a deep understanding of something distant. But, take for instance his company's game about being an Oil God. Would that system naturally be an objective representation of oil system pricing, considering there is a shell logo on the list of his company's clients? Can we trust it to really be a factual system about an important topic if the organization who is funding the production of the game has particular viewpoint which it wants to propagate? That would be a critical assumption to make!
Compare Persuasive Games' "Arcade Wire: Oil God" to La Molleindustria's "Oiligarchy" if you would like a better idea of what I'm getting at. These are two games which use the exact same subject matter in the exact same genre (turn-based strategy/simulation). One takes the perspective that spikes in gasoline prices are caused by unforseen interruptions to a status quo. The other explains spikes in gasoline prices caused by systematic manipulation of that very same status quo. The difference between these likeminded games is somehow just far too vast.
All the same, I hope I'll eventually acquire sufficient ability to make my own systemgames some day. Right now I can only handle and complete smaller tabletop and card games on preset engines. (Just got one barely out of alpha at version 0.875, hoping to have netplay completely functional by milestone 0.91. Check it out if you have the time: http://sleights.revasser.net/)