To kick things off, Raph Koster posted some interesting highlights from a presentation by Dmitri Williams:
* People who use voice-over-IP make stronger interpersonal connections in virtual worlds, but also tend to be more insular and meet less strangers. People who use text make somewhat weaker connections but talk more to strangers.
* The older you are, the more hours you spend per week in the world. That’s right — it’s not college students who spend the most time. The graph shows a nearly linear relationship between age and hours spent per week.
Williams is an assistant professor at USC’s Annenberg School of Communication who scored some of these research tidbits thanks to data from Second Life and Sony Online Entertainment. His personal site has a treasure trove of studies from online worlds.
I’m usually disinterested in media that picks at religious sensitivities. Maybe it’s because it seems too easy an avenue for being shocking and doesn’t usually require much cleverness on the creator’s part.
However, there is something charming about Molleindustria’s Faith Fighter. Intended to be a comment on using religious symbols to fuel violence, they describe their game this way:
Faith Fighter is the ultimate fighting game for these dark times. Choose your belief and kick the shit out of your enemies. Give vent to your intolerance! Religious hate has never been so much fun.
The game is styled like Street Fighter, but features religious icons as the competitors. Monotheistic symbols are evenly balanced with Far East ones, allowing Muhammad to square off against Ganesh. Even though caricatures of religious deities isn’t exactly reverent territory, Faith Fighter offers a sufficiently badass depiction to each. For some reason, this seems to take an edge off.
When considering games as a replacement to editorial cartoons, Faith Fighter brings up an interesting point. This game allows for a censored and an uncensored mode of play, the former covering Muhammad’s image during play. After the Danish cartoon depicting the Prophet caused an eruption last year, it’s interesting to see the carry over into the game space.
The choice offered by an interactive game is an interesting balance between sensitivity and artistic credibility. While a printed paper would be cumbersome to print in censored and uncensored versions, it’s a relatively easy addition when working in Flash. Also, offering the choice makes a more interesting point than if one was never offered at all.
With that said, I really don’t know if the option of censoring Muhammad’s visage is sufficiently sensitive from a Muslim’s perspective. The awareness that the depiction exists, even if one isn’t personally exposed to it, could still create tension.
Even more interesting, Molleindustria included a secret boss at the end of the game whose depiction could be as much of a headache for a creator as that of Muhammad. I won’t offer a spoiler though, you’ll just have to play it.
As 2008 begins, it could be important to do a higher level examination of what’s been going on with news and games as of late. Today, I wanted to look at three uses of games by major media outlets.
1. Almost a year ago now, The New York Times released two newsgames on their site. Both crafted by Persuasive Games, one was a comment on spoiled food scares and the other on immigration legislation. They were both very well done and I’ve covered one on this site.
One thing that has changed since is Times Select. At the time of their release, users had to pay for Times Select access. This has since been made free and it makes me wonder how much this affected the play they received. Narrowing down to the Times Select subscriber base and then down to those interested in playing a Flash game seems would be a big blow to the viral nature of Flash games. Sure, some people may have know about BugMeNot, but putting a new experiment behind that kind of wall seems a real waste and bad for research.
2. Well over a year ago, Reuters set up a bureau in Second Life. A full-time reporter works the virtual bureau and reports news from virtual world just as he would in the real life one. He interviews the residents and reports on both in-world and outside-world issues. In an interview with The New York Times, Reuter’s chief exec said this about their thinking:
This appeals to a younger demographic. Even for people who don’t go in and play in Second Life, it shows Reuters has a certain with-it-ness.
I agree about the with-it-ness. I’ve knocked Second Life in recent posts, but I definitely believe it’s been an extremely important step for virtual worlds. Things that have been tested and tried here will set precedents for next-generation worlds. Reuters jump into the space is an awesome experiment. The reporting is top notch and it digs in where Second Life press releases drop off.
Now, if we can translate some of what they’ve been learning to games. Second Life itself isn’t exclusively a game. The user can make it one or play games within its borders, but overall it isn’t a game. Virtual worlds that function only as games have much more rigid control of the experience and the freedom to create as one does in Second Life will never be as robust. With that in mind, jumping into bigger worlds and using more limited tools for journalism will require even more creative thinking.
3. Fatworld is probably the newest, biggest thing in the newsgame or persuasive game space. The game is a collaboration between PBS’s Independent Lens and Persuasive Games. In it, players explore how food and exercise choices affect their character and the virtual society around them. The game’s website sums up the advantages of delivering information through a game:
The game’s goal is not to tell people what to eat or how to exercise, but to demonstrate the complex, interwoven relationships between nutrition and factors like budgets, the physical world, subsidies, and regulations. Existing approaches to nutrition advocacy fail to communicate the aggregate effect of everyday health practices. It’s one thing to explain that daily exercise and nutrition are important, but people, young and old, have a very hard time wrapping their heads around outcomes five, 10, 50 years away.
The game plays out as you watch your avatar get fatter or healthier based on your food choices. Avatar’s can die and end up in their town’s cemetery. The player can continually re-enter the town as a new character and explore new choices. Choices also affect the town’s other residents as the player must run a restaurant to make money. The food you choose to feed people affects their health and size. This becomes an interesting situation of art commenting on life/life commenting on art as at the time of the game’s release, McDonald’s shifts the blame to video games as a cause of childhood obesity (a shift I don’t totally disagree with as I can vouch for lacking health benefits of constant indoors-ness).
Fatworld seems to be low on the mass media radar, but its creation seems to be part of a growing trend. I think games are beginning to become a buzzword among traditional media outlets for ways to bring in the younger demographics that they are struggling to engage. I think games are a really good idea, but there is amazing potential for poor implementation. It’ll be up to the forerunners designing games in this space to prove their ability to engage and inform in new ways.
Continuing to think about journalism in multiplayer environments, Metaplace looks promising. It’s Raph Koster’s latest opus and he wants everyone to be able to create their own multiplayer online game.
For those unfamiliar with Koster, he has as long a track record with online games as a developer could. He originally developed text-based MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons), when the technology only allowed multiplayer experiences to be typed through and imagined in one’s head (not necessarily a bad thing as these games are still being played out there). In the 90s, he was part of developing Ultima Online, the forefather of current MMOs (Massively Multiplayer Online (games)), like Everquest and World of Warcraft. He’s also the author A Theory of Fun, a standard book for the game designer’s shelf. Most of this to say that he’s an experienced thinker in the game design realm and there’s enthusiasm about Metaplace.
Metaplace isn’t a single game in itself. Instead, it’s a host for virtual worlds that community members create. Using just a web-browser, users can visit each other’s worlds and use simple tools to create their own. Initially free, users with popular and therefore bandwidth-heavy worlds will have to pay some hosting fees. However, users can also charge for their worlds and mitigate the cost or even profit from the worlds they create.
The browser-based nature alone puts it ahead of previous generation metaverses, like Second Life, where the user must download and install software. Web 2.0 worldviews and friendliness also seem to be in full effect in screenshots.
As for news delivery, there’s a ton of potential here. A reporter covering Sudan could set up a virtual space filled with symbolic artifacts that link to real stories about the conflict. A citizen journalist covering a local disaster, could set up a space that could virtually represent the situation and even park an avatar in the world to take updates from other citizens exploring the disaster through the world.
Metaplace is currently in alpha testing, but Koster has said that they will begin an open house in February. The public won’t be able to start creating yet, but we’ll be able to begin visiting the worlds the testers have been working on. From there, we’ll have to wait till April to begin experimenting with content of our own.
Quick sidenote: In the article that I linked above, the interviewer refers to these little user-made worlds as mini-MMOs. As this works out to mini-Massively Multiplayer Online (games), I’m hoping we don’t go down that coinage road. In lieu of finding out what we’re all going to call these, I propose miniMOs for these one-man-band worlds. I think it has a decent ring to it. It should be said that Metaplace’s creators say you can create a massiveMO as well.
Update: Thanks Dusan for catching the blatant spelling errors.
In class recently, my professor said that he thought the journalism potential of virtual worlds, like World of Warcraft was largely unexplored. Even though Reuters and NPR’s Talk of the Nation have set up shop in Second Life, I’m intrigued by the idea of news delivery in other game spaces.
Last week, Marketplace covered a growing trend of businesses abandoning their Second Life shops. Mark Hughes, a marketing expert they interviewed, had some harsh words about the venue’s potential:
The people in Second Life, they aren’t worth reaching. It’s just a weird place. It’s never gonna catch on. It’s a fad, not a fashion at all.
I hate to say that I’ve felt the same way about that particular virtual world. For all that’s been written about Second Life and for all the amazing potential of an experience that lets users create the majority of the content, I’ve always felt uncomfortable there. It’s a niche group of people.
So, are online experiences a fad or just Second Life in particular? I lean toward the latter and I think it might be worthwhile to explore other online experiences.
While World of Warcraft probably takes the lead in stories about game adiction, it’s drawn in a fairly widespread audience, recently announcing that it has grown past the 10 million mark (an achievement Second Life also shares, though the active user base is said to be around 500,000). Completely anecdotal, but I can’t name a person I know that plays Second Life. I don’t have enough fingers to count WoW acquaintances on both hands.
WoW, however, is a very locked down experience compared to Second Life and many of its Massively Multiplayer compatriates are similar. They aren’t sandboxes that allow endless user creation. You may get to pick out your avatar’s hair and enjoy a limited selection of what they wear, but overall the designers control the content. So, the approach for the journalist wanting to use WoW as a venue will need to be much more creative. One can’t go in and build a virtual news desk. One must work with tools that were only designed for very specific gameplaying purposes.
This is a good challenge though and one I want to dive into more on this blog.
So, I’ve been hunting through localized sustainability sites lately for another project I’m working on. In the process, I ran across OurTahoe.org. Designed by Reynolds School of Journalism grad students, this site does a lot well when it comes to clean design and web 2.0 feel. The mission is noble as well: help Lake Tahoe residents collaborate to improve the lake’s declining ecosystem.
However, I have a big qualm and it comes from a “game” on the site called TahoeLife. The problem is that this interactive flash piece really isn’t a game in its current execution. Upon starting, the player is told to that their job is to get the score as close to 50 as possible (which seems like a decent game-like goal). However, the following screens direct the player to select homes, energy uses, and transportation that match their real lifestyle. After selecting these, the player is given a final score out of 50 and then told how good they are at helping Lake Tahoe. So, rather than a game, the result is more like one of those 1-page quizzes from a checkout-lane woman’s magazine. This isn’t necessarily bad, but the fact that the site calls this a “game” multiple times is annoying at best.
Here’s the thing though. TahoeLife could become a decent game if the makers spent a bit more time tinkering with it. It could actually turn out a lot like Persuasive Games’ Points of Entry. Say the player was paired off against a computer and his job was to change his home, car, habits to get a better score than his opponent. This would provide a great chance for the player to see the relationships between different environmental factors and which ones had the greatest weight on the score. This exploration could also harness the strengths of interactive media. As is, TahoeLife is no more effective than if it were printed in a magazine. With a few tweaks, it could become a much more effective piece of multimedia.
Summer break is over.
Persuasive Games showed up in the mail last night. I had a quick chance to read the preface and I’m excited to dig into it. If anything, I look forward to osmosing a new framework for interpreting interactive news delivery. Ian Bogost’s premise is that games fit into the history of rhetoric by offering their own approach to persuasion. He calls this approach procedural rhetoric, saying interactive environments can deliver a point in ways other media cannot. I don’t want to speculate too much based on the small bit I’ve read, but I’ll be blogging through the content as I work through it.
Reuters is reporting that Americans think the media needs to chill out on the celebrity gossip.
This is based on a Pew Research Center for People & the Press study that showed 87% thought celebrity issues enjoyed too much coverage. They blame television for most of this and the Internet for little. This surprised me. Not because TV was the worst, but because 50cent banner ads and Paris Hilton news links seem to be a Net staple. Some of these banner ads have a game mechanic built in like, “Help Britney shave her head and get a pink Razr.” After the player uses a cartoon razor to make sure Britney’s head is thoroughly shorn, they “win” by being directed to an affiliate marketing site. 50 Cent is currently suing for such a game based on himself. In this game the player is encouraged to “shoot the rapper” to win a prize.
So, ads like these have an interactive mechanic and they are based on current events. Does that make them newsgames? Maybe. Zach Wahlen of Gameology.org wrote a great article suggesting that certain newsgames follow a form and function in line with tabloid news. He focused primarily on Game Show Network’s website, which has released a series of flash games on things like Mel Gibson’s drinking incident, the Mark Foley scandal, and Paris Hilton’s trip to prison. This is my favorite observation from the article:
Not only do most of these GSN games rely on celebrities and sex, but like tabloid news, they also revolve around a hook or punchline and are more concerned with framing a reaction to something having happened rather than reporting what actually did happen. In other words, when I call these tabloid gaming, I mean that not only in terms of their content but also their form. These are designed to grab your attention amidst a swirling, debris-filled solar system of casual games on the web. If they succeed in doing so, it’s through the audacity or relevance of their hook, not the quality of their production (which is relatively high, incidentally).
At this point, I’m not necessarily for a hard and fast taxonomy when it comes to newsgames. Instead, I like Wahlen’s point. As games with news content arise, we can evaluate their content and form through a lens that we use for other forms of media as well.
