highlights & comments

• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  examining the competition to see how the Raiders measured up. In

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Final Fantasy XII for the PlayStation 2 contains an entirely fictional world, one more like Middle Earth than Midtown Manhattan. But situations in the game take up the political dynamics of different state factions within this imagined universe. If the proper middleware existed, the game could represent relationships between neighboring states in conflict, applying an allegorical representation of current events to a fantasy world.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  It won't devise new ways to synthesize current events into computer behaviors that might be licensed for use in tomorrow's blockbuster entertainment videogames.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  This seemingly minor sorting method illustrates an obvious but unscrutinized way to experience traditional news.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  RSS feeds is a great way to take advantage of an existing information structure, but too often it is only used to regurgitate that information in a new format. The real question becomes: "What do we do with this information once we have it?" The answer is that we need to process that information into synthetic behaviors.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  The additions read as follows: Increased probability of prison riot event Reduced positive effects of legal aid policy Creationism policy now affects technological backwater and technological advantage situations Oil prices now affect the chances of the petrol protests situation Reduced effectiveness of free bus passes for retired people New Pirates Attacking Oil tanker event Liberals are now angered slightly by citizenship tests Stem cell research now boosts lifespan33 These dynamics correspond directly with headlines of the moment, but Democracy 2 interprets these events as new social dynamics, not just as isolated events.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  an allegorical representation of current events to a fantasy world. Playing

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  What if game developers felt compelled to integrate local politics or economics into their games, thanks to middleware systems that made such a thing easy to do?

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  events as new social dynamics, not just as isolated events. The

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  newsgame platforms might be modeled not on news stories, but on the systems from which news stories arise.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  What newsgames need most from journalism is its legacy of scrappiness, its heritage of feisty, unstoppable sleuths probing for information, piecing together dynamics of an unseen system, giving voice to an unheard flock.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Once the playthings of children, characters like The Legend of Zelda's Link and Super Mario Bros.' Mario are now blank canvases ready to accept adult scenarios like political scandal, insurance fraud, dysfunctional health coverage, spousal abuse, and more.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  illustrates an obvious but unscrutinized way to experience traditional news. News

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Newsmakers can also create platforms allowing the public to respond to games, through games.32

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Democracy 2 abstracts governance to public polling and slider-based policymaking. The relationships between decisions are depicted via screens of abstract line-connecters, rather than told through stories of specific experiences. The result may be difficult for many people to understand or enjoy.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  much of sports news involves the dramatic framing of data and statistics

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Democracy 2 ships with a folder full of spreadsheet files that its players can access and update. The same could be true for newspaper readers or for journalists and editors themselves.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Those who create newsgames don't "get the story," they "get the system" instead.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  successful newsgames might need to be created at scale, with frequency, to enjoy long-term success.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  When platforms work well, they disappear into the background. Newspaper journalists don't think about the newsroom or presses that facilitate the construction of their paper. Likewise, readers don't think about the wire services and trucking companies that facilitate their delivery. We don't dwell on the format of the evening news, or the operation of a Web server that delivers the bits that comprise a blog post. When platforms don't work, they advance into the foreground, where we can question, revise, or abandon them.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  With a subject like conflict in the Middle East, Brown and Burak placed a safe bet: it was unlikely that political and social resolution would come about during the game's two-year development cycle.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Play the News offers something different: not just a new way to package news in the form of a game, but a novel form of the news itself. Play the News is a platform for turning stories into prediction games-games that in turn encourage potentially sophisticated discussion about the possible outcomes of an event or situation.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Unlike fantasy football, in which a prediction round will always be completed by the end of the next week's game, Play the News operated on an irregular schedule. ImpactGames communicates with players by email when stories realize their outcomes.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Like Play the News, fantasy sports takes data and information from real-world events, in this case athlete performance, and turns them into points in a prediction game. The raw materials for fantasy sports are statistics, data created from the exhaust of professional athletics.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Creators benefit most from platforms when they choose them deliberately. Such volition has been uncommon on the Web, as media publishers have adopted it as a distribution platform without sufficient concern for what the Web does well and poorly. To cite but one case, the layout of the print newspaper doesn't fit well on a computer screen, which is better served by hyperlinked ideas that allow readers to dig deeper. Yet, most newspaper Web sites remediate the general form of the newspaper, with masthead, headlines, and jumps. Understanding how platforms work, where they excel, where they falter, and how people engage with them is a critical part of understanding the adoption of new media forms based on existing media types.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  They used the GOPPPL as a way to actively track league statistics, examining the competition to see how the Raiders measured up.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  communicates with players by email when stories realize their outcomes. Brown

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  perhaps most critically, what does this kind of game offer that is lacking in traditional news media outlets?

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  game. What kinds of stories make for the best games? How

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  This kind of reference transparency may seem more extensive than more traditional methods of citation, but it also risks occlusion. Just as infographics sometimes cite data openness as a rhetorical device to avoid synthesis, so simulations can make their references onerous to find or understand. Indeed, understanding the data used in Democracy 2 will overwhelm all but the most committed players.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  We comment shamelessly.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  game design puts system dynamics first, allowing specific examples to emerge from repeated plays.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  butter, rather than the spotty operation of industrial food conglomerates.36 In

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  with little regard for brand or authority. We comment shamelessly. We

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  ImpactGames faced unique challenges as it attempted to reframe news reading as a game. What kinds of stories make for the best games?

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  is to teach people how to construct and analyze processes."32 By

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Processing is the way computers express ideas.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  But typically, the form of journalistic expression does not afford sophisticated depictions of cultural logics. Newspaper columns, blog posts, or video segments can only tell a story, a single instance of a larger system: the Goldrick family foreclosure, rather than the dynamics of the local housing market;35 a batch of salmonella-tainted peanut butter, rather than the spotty operation of industrial food conglomerates.36

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  As he explains, "the purpose of my proposed first course in programming ... is not to teach people how to program a specific computer, nor is it to teach some new languages. The purpose of a course in programming is to teach people how to construct and analyze processes."32

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  resolution would come about during the game's two-year development cycle. Many

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  data to solve the economic woes of the newspaper business. The

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Crickler integrates such content but fails to link to it.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  These games simulate business processes like customer service. Some, such as Cold Stone Creamery: Stone City (which simulates both portion sizing and franchise economics) also contextualize those processes within the larger goals of the organization to help the player/employee understand the consequences and purpose of individual actions.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  do archive research, and how to operate within an editorial hierarchy. But

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Margaret Petherbridge issued in the third printing of the original crossword compilation during the height of cross-word fever of the mid-1920s: If you want to do any more work the rest of the day, put down this book now. If you insist on going ahead, say good-bye to everything else. This is your problem: Do you wish to own a book which will delight and distract you, and perhaps shatter the serenity of your home, for at least one hundred hours?15

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  "Nintendo thumb"

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  games can teach a mindset, a way of approaching problems through a set of rules, values, and practices. This is what videogame scholar and literacy expert James Paul Gee calls a semiotic domain:

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Amnesty International endorsed Pictures for Truth not to teach journalism, but to teach the difficulty of doing journalism in China.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  edutainment-entertainment software made explicitly for an educational context, like Math Blaster

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  One could view Dead Rising as escapist fantasy, but truly active engagement requires the player to evaluate the game world, making hypotheses about how to engage with it while testing different methods and strategies.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  ethnographic study of the virtual world EverQuest,

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  High school and college newspapers allow journalism students to learn about the workflow of a news desk, how to write concisely, how to take photojournalistic pictures, how to do archive research, and how to operate within an editorial hierarchy.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  the trivia game card format apologizes for an otherwise random collection of op-eds. And in one case, the quiz-like structure even helps emphasize the message.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  But can we rightly call Dead Rising a game that teaches players something about journalism? For such a claim to ring true, players would have to become critical of their play process, meditating on how the game constructs a reporter's experience.'

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  the player/employee understand the consequences and purpose of individual actions. It

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Murley's intentions are more speculative than pedagogical; his concept casts the game as method for "crowdsourcing," mining player data to solve the economic woes of the newspaper business.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  There's no definitive word on whether a first-person camera or a third-person view of one's avatar within a game world is best for building identification between the player and a virtual identity.11 But both create the same expressive atmosphere, an embodied experience of a credible world that lacks journalistic freedom.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  These game scenarios are effective teaching tools not only because they provide situations that journalism students don't often have access to, but also because they facilitate what Gee calls a "psychosocial moratorium": a space where one is free to experiment because of the reduction or removal of real-world consequences.22

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Players listen to these reports and compare them with their understanding of the "truth" of their own actions.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Although the creators of the game surely didn't intend it to educate players about journalism, their assumptions about the profession are embedded in the rules.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Should the space include pathways that pedestrians create by walking and matting down the grass, or just the concrete sidewalks?

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  A complete chronicle of the crossword is better left to books devoted entirely to that project, but an overview is in order, if only to underscore the surprisingly long history of this familiar riddle.' The crossword is around a century old (the first was penned in 1913), but the tradition of riddles from which it derives extends back millennia.'

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Thanks in large part to the word square and acrostic, puzzles had become an addictive pastime of the Victorian era; even the Queen herself appeared to have been enamored of them.' At this time, puzzles were valued for mental relaxation, for intellectual challenge, and for engendering a spirit of collegiality (thanks to the need for collaboration to solve them).'

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  affording

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Explanations of how something works can be described in written or visual argument, by mustering explanations and examples. This is precisely what Schlosser does in Fast Food Nation, and most documentaries and investigative reports do the same. But models can also address how things work, not through explanation or example, but by showing the operation of a source system directly.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Emotional hooks like this may absorb, but they do not satisfy.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Good investigative journalism not only asks not only the "five Ws"-who, what, when, where, and why-but also the procedural question: "how." Good reporting should elucidate how a situation arose, not just uncover the actors, events, and consequences of that situation.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  mise-en-scene,

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Alberto Cairo argues that a level of abstraction is necessary to preserve journalistic integrity when information is missing.17

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  A news story might become relevant only in the aftermath of an experience, whether it be tinged with joy, fear, desperation, or loss. Indeed, if citizens were able to experience the sensations of an experience through simulation rather than by description, perhaps they would better connect world events with the joys, fears, desperations, or losses in their own lives. Human interest games, we might call them.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Social realism finds its roots in photography and film, where it refers to artistic attempts to render the gritty reality of lived experience-not just the gloss of perfection found in Hollywood blockbusters or lifestyle magazine spreads, but also the trials and failures of hardship.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Games excel at handling multitudes.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  it elicited a negative political reaction, not just a negative social one.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  When Possley explains that the Consumer Product Safety Commission had recalled over a million cribs in response to the Tribune's investigation, readers and policymakers alike might consider the loop closed. But questions remain: how and why are government agencies understaffed? Is staffing really the problem, or is apathy and inaction the inevitable result of bureaucracy? Is there any reason to believe that a similar problem won't arise soon enough in another agency or corporation operating under similar logics?

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Likewise, it's detailed with the results of political resistance (a small section of graffiti on the Wall, for example), but it does not allow the player to enact such guerrilla maneuvers and experience the consequences.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  even though stories like Goltz's overflow with detailed and irrefutable facts, they don't necessarily explain how a problem came to be, how it perpetuates in the structure of a social system, and what effects it has on the surrounding community beyond a few examples. Investigative reporting requires journalists to uncover the seedy underbellies of situations to derive their behavior, but the result of such reporting usually involves descriptions of specific injustices rather than discussions of the general processes that underwrite the injustices themselves.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  PeaceMaker illustrates some of the hardest lessons of leadership of all: that tough decisions are not always popular; that what the public demand in the short run isn't necessarily the right answer in the long run; that responding with overwhelming force to punish every outrage produces nothing but more outrages. Knee-jerk reactions usually fail.31

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Documentary games allow players to experience spaces of conflict that are difficult to engage with in the abstract.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Even a relatively early 3D game like Doom offers a freedom of movement far greater than the Steadicam.14

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  linearity doesn't do justice to videogames' capacity to represent the behavior of complex systems. Linearity pushes a singular, official version of events that discounts other possible readings. But procedural documentary games use rules to model the behaviors underlying a situation, rather than merely telling stories of their effects.21 It is procedural reality that holds the most promising future of documentary games.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  It may well be moving and upsetting. But such a film would cover matters of bureaucracy and planning primarily to advance human interest. SimCity, as a game, works exactly in reverse: it abstracts specific human elements in favor of urban dynamics themselves.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  ludic

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Wynne's solution to the former problem was prescient: he prompted his readers to make their own crosswords, arguing that "it is more difficult to make a cross-word than to solve one."' The result was a nearly endless supply of puzzles, had at very low cost: an early example of what Web 2.0 proponents call user-generated content.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  the flagrantly manipulative work of Michael Moore.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Crosswords were everywhere. The World began running daily puzzles in the autumn of 1924 in response to demand. A Pittsburgh preacher presented his sermon in crossword form. Checkered fabrics became popular.' The puzzle had taken the world by storm.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  The notion suggests a question: can videogames represent actuality in the way that cinema, photography, and nonfiction writing have done?

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Their power for visual appeal and explanation is well acknowledged in journalism, but infographics still have not fully exploited computation as a medium for behavior as well as visualization.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Moving from telephone lines to satellite delivery systems, the Associated Press, the Knight-Ridder-Tribune News Service, the New York Times News Service, and the Gannett News Service began offering graphics just as they offered news stories by wire. Infographics not only improved readers' comprehension of information, they also sold papers, adding visual flare to an otherwise text-heavy medium.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  At its simplest, a digital infographic might layer ancillary information visually, such that additional detail is revealed when a user moves the mouse pointer over a particular object. But genuine digital infographics make interaction a part of understanding: analog infographics are read, whereas digital infographics are operated. Maish Nichani and Venkat Rajamanickam coin the term interactives to underscore the difference-explanation through interaction.24

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Richard Bartle's four categories of players in online games-explorers, achievers, socializers, and killers.43

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  This simulation made the outcome of the 2008 presidential election visually clear, but it also showed how technology can be used to clarify the meaning of data,

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  the graphic itself does little more than compile a lot of data in one place, wrapped in a clever interface

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  The journalist's role is to make sense of facts, but without author synthesis the data remain raw and undigestible. Though an interesting visualization may be visually appealing, forcing the user to do all the work putting it together results in research, not journalism.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  four categories of interactive graphics: narrative, instructive, explorative, and simulative.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Videogames offer a new model for infographics, one that might combine the analytical sophistication of Playfair's and Maynard's early infographics with the emotional context of later approaches.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  usage patterns "strongly social" and "more closely related to those of online multiplayer games than to a conventional single-user statistical tool.""

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  teaches users through trial and error, by directing their interaction.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  While game makers prize the trait as a virtue of good game design, replayability isn't necessarily a journalistic value unless it encourages broader and deeper understanding.47

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Pittsburgh Bike Map inspires an unusual kind of play, one that takes place both on and off the computer

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Between 1965 and 1980, the New York Times frequently published sophisticated infographics, becoming the main proponent of the form in newspapers for decades.21

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Perhaps that is what people are attracted to: the sheer amount of seemingly precise data.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  CNN National Correspondent John King seemed more interested in the novelty of the system than its potential as a reporting tool. He played with the multitouch features like a child with a new toy on Christmas morning, moving the map around to show off the technology rather than to use it for information.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  In a climactic moment, King used the map

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Web sites like Flowing Data and the aptly named Chartporn.org spread visualizations as entertainment. A "cool" visualization with a strong graphic design will just as readily spread as one that illuminates something fascinating and important about the data.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  At its heart, Budget Hero is a spreadsheet with a fancy skin. It is but one of many types of information graphics or infographics-visual depictions of data used for reasoning about information.2 Budget Hero offers a good example of what can make an infographic playable.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  a human mother designed to care for two at most.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  One must muster the same attitude when playing editorial games. Therein lies the difference: the editorial page provides a recognized context for opinion, often by highlighting a spectrum of differing viewpoints on a single page.37

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Even bad taste is sometimes a good thing: in the case of editorial cartoons, crossing the line is often necessary in order to determine exactly where the line is.36 Political correctness is helpful when it protects oppressed minorities from the often unconscious denigration of the privileged, but it also tends to limit the playful expression that can elucidate unseen facets of an issue. Sometimes, generating public debate about an underexplored issue is the whole point of the enterprise.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  current event games are used all too often as rudimentary Web site traffic-grabbers.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  For example, tending to eight infants at once as a single mother is an idea worth experiencing rather than just pondering.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Tufte warns, information graphics should not be used to "show the obvious to the ignorant"; instead, he urges us to see them as "instruments for reasoning about quantitative information."5

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Chartoons dress up displays of graphical data with cartoon-like illustrations and extraneous detail to make the graphics more visually appealing, a precursor to the high-gloss, low-synthesis graphics of the USA Today.17

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Budget Hero's interface is a bar graph drawn to look like a cityscape

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  The news infographic designer thus embraces the journalistic value of synthesis, condensing complicated information into a legible format.'

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  describe the uses of data culled from playthroughs of the game, analyzing trends such as player demographics, the most frequently pursued badges, popular bipartisan badges, and the policies and decisions that most players enacted.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Charts like the USA Today Snapshots present information, but they fail to provide instrumentation or to inspire reasoning.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Easy to Pick Up and Easy to Put Down

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  the game forces players to understand piracy by experiencing it in abstraction.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Frasca called them newsgames, a genre he described as "simulation meets political cartoons."'

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  few current event games are actually released within a day or two of the event they cover-a key period, after which many stories reach saturation.17

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Because they are short and compact, current event games have to work hard to ensure their players immediately understand the context and constraints of the topic and the game's approach to it. Some current event games explicitly state the facts via text or video, whereas others follow Frasca's lead and attempt to sway opinion through play alone.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  They also released the source code so other designers could make their own versions.' Tabloid games, because they are so easy to make, are often improved and reinterpreted by other amateur game designers.lo

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  One of the ways games can immerse players is through a well-crafted narrative structure; therefore, Frasca suggests focusing on simulation instead of storytelling. Simulation lends itself to multiple playthroughs, a wide variety of end states, and a flexibility of values.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  procedural rhetoric."

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Following playwright Bertolt Brecht's practice of breaking down theater's fourth wall, Gonzalo Frasca argues that players must be able to maintain a critical distance from the subject matter of a political game.14

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Frasca remarked that "the design of consciousness-raising videogames is not as simple as replacing Nintendo's Mario and Luigi with Sacco and Vanzetti."24

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Unlike stories written for newsprint or programs edited for television, videogames are computer software rather than a digitized form of earlier media.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  a procedural rhetoric of failure, a design that comments upon a political situation by denying players a victory condition.'

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Tepid, forgettable "edutainment" titles had further marred the public perception

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  geographically. In chapter 7, we explore new genres of community newsgames

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Wired attempted to integrate a game into actual journalistic coverage of a topic, not just to supplement a print edition with an online throwaway."

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  One strategy for drawing in potential players is to borrow tried-and-true game mechanics: match puzzle pieces, avoid falling objects, run and jump, point, shoot, and click. If players already know how to play a game, they might better absorb the news it contains.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Serious news coverage notwithstanding, it's worth remembering that games have been a part of the news for almost a century, since the first "word-cross" puzzles appeared in the New York Sunday World in 1913.13

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  games must be carefully framed to avoid confusion.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  balance timeliness with quality,

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  as entirely new inventions. In chapter 8, we explore newsgame platforms,

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  With this representational chasm in mind, Miguel Sicart argues that the "ideology of a newsgame ... can be found in the way the original topic of the news has been translated into the game system.""

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  we normally think of them as private affairs. We play games indoors,

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  In a way, this shared understanding of the lived condition of largely thankless over-work is a unique way in which journalists and game designers are linked.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  direct or indirect education in how to become a good journalist,

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  In game development, reskinning is generally denigrated as uncreative derivativism. But Calabouco Tetrico shows that serious commentary can arise from repurposing familiar games.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  More so than even popular and academic history books, archived newspapers preserve a record of daily, lived experience. Any current event game created becomes a peculiar ludic commentary on the trials and tribulations of a specific moment in time.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Some of the subtleties that make the system rich (and make the article fascinating) are lost in the game-a situation probably attributable to the designers' desire to make the game manageable, learnable, and playable in short sessions. Nevertheless, the article provides only a disconnected, mathematical account of piracy, while the game offers a synthetic experience of the practice, one that unifies the disconnected algorithms of the print piece into a holistic account.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Good games depict system dynamics rather than narrating specific accounts. Instead of telling a story about a particular pirate crew or hijacked freighter, the article characterizes the economic system of Somali piracy in general.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
• 
  Casey Gollan highlighted

  The result effectively simulates capture and negotiation, synthesizing the principles of the print spread into an experience rather than a description.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share