The Journalism & Games Project

I am involved in three projects this semester that deal with games. The first is my thesis work which will span the whole year. The second is Celia Pearce’s game design and analysis class. I’ll be linking to a number of blog entries I have written for her blog soon. But I wanted to focus on my third project–the one I haven’t really mentioned yet.

At the beginning of the semester I was excited to hear that Ian Bogost would be starting a video games and journalism project studio (essentially a research group). I, like most people, assumed it would be on journalism about games. Since I would love to write about games for a living this seemed like a perfect match. But I found out I was a bit off in my prediction. It would not be about games journalism, but rather using games for journalism–the “newsgame” if you will. For anyone familiar with Bogost’s work, you recognize how this fits in with Persuasive Games lens. It’s been an interesting semester in the project studio because we’re basically creating this discipline from scratch. Of course there are examples of newsgames out there, but most of them fall short of their ideals. We are trying to understand how games can be made journalistic, how they can fit into the world of news, and what makes a successful newsgame.

Most of our work has been done on a message board where we can discuss our thoughts privately. Between this research and our discussions in class, we’ve made some reasonable progress over the past two months. It’s a difficult topic–one that leads us back to defining ‘games’ and ‘journalism’ as entry points to the whole discussion. It’s kind of like having the “what is art?” debate that ultimately dead ends in a lot of ideas but no conclusions. But now that we’ve gotten over a lot of the humps, I feel I’m in a place to start discussing the work. We just began our project studio blog and I took up the charge of writing the first entry. It’s about one of the basic topics we’ve identified as being important to journalistic games: discourse. Discourse, at first glance, appears to be the realm of the social: people discussing news with other people or with the producers of the news. However, as a fan of single-player games, I wanted to explore how games could be made to produce discourse between the player and the game.  I have yet to decide if it’s even possible to have single-player discourse, but I’m hoping that putting it in public dialogue will give me some ideas to pursue. So check it out and share your thoughts, will you?

Single-Player Discourse in Games: An Introduction