Idea Lab

When a Game Only Looks Like a Game

by Bobby Schweizer
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

In our research on newsgames, we proselytize the power of videogames to model events in the world small and big, simple and complex. But there is, of course, a discrepancy between the values we espouse and newsgames that get made. Making games is difficult. As researchers, we critique them to encourage certain practices and discourage others. But it's just as important to understand what people actually make and why. One aspect we've largely ignored is the videogame as a form supposedly imbued with identifiable qualities. Games have become objects in the popular imagination to be referenced with little regard for...

• December 23, 2011
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Three 3D Newsgames Produced Within a Week of Bin Laden Raid

by Bobby Schweizer
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

In the course of researching newsgames over the past few years, we've been able to roughly categorize them into certain types, which we've previously written about on Idea Lab. These categories were based on how genres of games are able to support types of news stories. Current event games tend to be short, 2D, and built with Flash because it's easy to produce something playable quickly. Documentary games are often 3D and highly visual because they can afford longer production times. So while it was no surprise that a number of Osama bin Laden games were released soon after the...

• May 24, 2011
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Designing a Newsgame Is an Act of Journalism

by Bobby Schweizer
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

A common thread woven through our various projects in the Newsgames research group has been our subscription to the tenets of journalism. Our first endeavor was not related to games at all. We bought a stack of copies of Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel's "The Elements of Journalism" book and immersed ourselves in not just the business of news but rather the practice of news. Sure, we could have seen videogames as a way to add exciting features that would draw readers to websites -- and if we were an Internet startup, we probably would have -- but as...

• April 20, 2011
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How to Design a Simple Newsgame Authoring Tool

by Bobby Schweizer
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Our teams at Georgia Tech and UC Santa Cruz have been working on an authoring tool that helps journalists quickly create bite-sized newsgames. The Cartoonist has been the working title for the tool because our intention is to create games akin to editorial cartoons, in terms of the amount of information being conveyed and the style of representation. But despite this small scope, the promise of this tool requires intense research and design. Over the past half-year, we have been faced with a daunting question: How do you create something that can generate games for a seemingly endless list of...

• March 8, 2011
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Why Huffington Post's 'Predict the News' Game Is No Galaga

by Bobby Schweizer
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Fellow Knight News Challenge winner Chris O'Brien recently posted on this site about "gamifying" the news. The idea behind the  movement O'Brien is speaking of, which Brad Flora touched on in another recent Idea Lab post, involves adding incentives -- pop-up achievements for tasks completed, progress bars to fill, badges to display, online leaderboards for score comparison, and virtual goods -- to activities. The idea is to reward repeat patronage and reframe participation as if it's like a playing a game. A Brief History of Videogame Scoring Videogames have long used scores to track player performance. In 1976, Sea Wolf...

• February 2, 2011
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A Brief History of Newsgames: Combining News + Videogames

by Bobby Schweizer
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

The newsgames project, which this year won a News Challenge grant, began two and a half years ago with a single question: What is the relationship between videogames and journalism? With the help of the two dozen fellow students at Georgia Tech who've joined us over the past five semesters, we identified and explored seven categories of newsgames on our class blog and in our book, "Newsgames: Journalism at Play". Below is a brief overview of the book in order to encourage people to read the findings of our research. Current Event Games The earliest examples of newsgames were games...

• December 14, 2010
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Understanding How Political Cartoons Intersect with Newsgames

by Bobby Schweizer
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

We are midway through the semester and the newsgames project studio at Georgia Tech is running at full steam. Newsgames: Journalism at Play, a survey of the field of newsgames by project director Ian Bogost, graduate assistant Simon Ferrari, and myself, is out and is available online and in bookstores. We've spent the semester breaking down popular arcade and Atari games to find relevant structures for game generation, and identifying elements of meaning that we're calling "micro-rhetorics." Each student has also sought out related topics for analysis and critique on our research studio blog, which we update two to three...

• November 10, 2010
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Journalists Should Play and Discuss Newsgames Like 1378(km)

by Bobby Schweizer
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Evangelizing newsgames is not just about convincing journalists that they should create and use games to express ideas and inform the public. It's also about getting journalists to recognize newsgames that are created outside of professional institutions as works in dialogue with their field. Even if a person cannot produce a game on his own, newsgames can still be shared and discussed. Expending a modest amount of effort in this capacity would go a long way toward the adoption of newsgames as a form. 1378(km) Last week we wrote on our project blog about the media's reception of a German...

• October 21, 2010
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