Games for Journalists

Dr. Brian Vaughan

EJTA Conference October 2014

–Eric Zimmerman, Game Designer, NYU

“The 21st Century will be the Century of the Game”

Gartner: Total market worth $93b in 2015

So what?• Its big, very big

• Its ubiquitous

• You cannot avoid games!

• So make use of them, make use of the gaming paradigm

• Take advantage of the extra modality: audio, video, haptic

Game: Engage in competitive conflict, within the rules, in order to achieve a victory condition

Serious Games: Applied game that is designed for something other than entertainment

• Educational

• Narrative

• Simulation of real world

• Fitness

• Edutainment: Education masquerading as entertainment

• Advergames: Games as advertisements

• Newsgames: Games about recent news events

• Gamification: Game structures, mechanics and rewards in a non-game setting to engage users/players

The Mechanic is the Message• Train:

• Typewritten instructions

• Train tracks & box cars

• Yellow pegs=people

• Goal: load them efficiently on to the train

• 2 Minutes to 2 hours

• Destination of train revealed=Auschwitz

• Each figure=100,000 Jews

• Exploring complicity is the real goal

• Complicity through procedural gaps

• Players fill these gaps themselves

• Exploration of human-on-human tragedy as a system

• Player observation

The Mechanic is the Message• The New World

• Slavery

• Síochán leat

• Cromwell’s invasion of Ireland

• Mexican Kitchen

• Immigration

• Cité Soleil

• Violence in a shanty town in Haiti

News Games• NarcoGuerra: War on drugs

• Turn-based, Risk like territorial control game

• Endgame Syria: Video card game

• Play as a rebel commander

• Darfur is Dying: Darfur conflict

• Family member of displaced family

• Camp management

• Snowden Run 3d: endless runner

• Collect sensitive information

• Interactive Investigation

• Pirate Fishing in Sierra Leone

• Use tools to investigate

• Mod of half-life using the source engine

• Uses an existing game engine to build a new game

• Goal is to escape from the detention centre

• Escape from direct provision hell

• Dodge politicians, police and immigration reform activists

• Collect right to work tokens

• Build up time to plead your case

Non-Serious Games as Serious Games

• Papers Please: Immigration border control

• Inspect documents and use tools to determine legitimacy

• Interrogation

• New rules added as relations change

• Spend money on family

• 20 possible endings

Tools for building games

• Behaviour based system

• Drag and drop based assets

• Non-programmers

• Rapid prototyping

• Cross-platform

• Cross-platform

• Drag and drop

Building Interactive Narratives

• Twine

• Create simple interactive stories for people to explore

• Text based game

• Compiles/publishes as html

• Include other web functionality

http://twinery.org/

• Link elements to build the story • Build as HTML with embedded CSS • Add additional web functionality

Text Adventures• Depression Quest:

• Interactive fiction game about living with depression

• Everyday life events and you have to manage numerous aspects

• Demonstrate to non-sufferers the depths of depression and its effects

• Show sufferers that they are not alone

TWINE• Uses passages: like levels, like stanzas

Taken from Brenda Neotenomie’s:http://aliendovecote.com/twine101

• Create new passages

• Enclose the name of another passage in [[square brackets]] to link it.

To link any text to a specific passage, split the bracket with a | symbol. Put the visible text on the left and the passage name on the right:

This is the surrounding text [[and this is the link|Passage Name goes here]]

• To add images, click and drag an image from your desktop into the main Twine window, or select Story -> Import Image.

To display an image in a passage, use the following format: [img[The Name of the Image]]

The power of the web

• Exported as HTML

• Can use powerful web technologies to enhance and augment

• CSS, HMTL 5, Java script etc etc

• Powerful interactive medium and paradigm

• Multiple platforms: mobile, desktop, TV, boardgames, card games

• Ubiquitous

• Multi-modal

• Allow complex, intertwining, interactive narratives

• Short-form and long-form: 2 minutes to 20 hours

• Some of the best games are created by non-games

Conclusion