I used to be a journalist, then I took an arrow in the knee… and started working on my first "newsgame". It was 7 years ago, and I was motivated by the feeling that journalism and video games had a lot to learn from each other.
On the one hand, journalism’s noble goal of turning the world into something understandable by everyone was very appealing to me. But we had trouble finding the best way to adapt to the digital age. My guess is we didn’t understand that a change of paradigm was at stake. Before the web, journalism was a matter of building linear discourses. We were thinking in a broadcast logic, from the issuer (the newspaper, TV or radio station) to the receivers (readers, viewers, listeners). But the Internet doesn’t work that way. It rather is an inherently interactive distribution channel. Therefore, we suddenly had to consider conveying news as a discussions rather than discourses.
On the other hand, I was fascinated by the self-explanatory nature of video games. Most of the time, you don’t really need tutorials to play a game – you understand it through experience. It is a naturally interactive media, with which players discuss to understand both what they are supposed to do and what the story being told is about. The first time you play Super Mario Bros, you are free to rush your Italian avatar straight into one of the pits that populate the level. Mario will die and you’ll have to start all over again, but thanks to this experience, you’ll update your knowledge of what you’re supposed to do. This is how discussions in games work: while interacting with an "operational reality", players gradually acquire an ever-sharper perception of the rules that shape the world.
The world of Super Mario Bros. is all about mushroom-eating plumbers, aggressive turtles and obese dragons. And indeed, a lot of people (me included) praise games with fantastic universes, as they often are used as a way to leave reality behind for a moment. Gaming in itself is a very real experience, but most games don’t say much about the world around us – at least not in a direct fashion.
As a journalist, I thought using games as a media to help people understand real news and facts might also be a good idea. I didn’t think they would be the perfect fit for all news stories, of course. Yet sometimes, for instance when we were trying to describe systems – that is to say, situations that involved many actors with interlocked interests – we, journalists, could find games useful.
To build such games, the primary journalistic work remained unchanged: you still had to dissect a subject, to expose its inner logics, to understand the causes and consequences at stake. The only difference laid in the way this work would be communicated. Instead of telling "what is", we had to create a machine that would show "what could be". Our models would be simplified, of course, but they would work according to rules similar to what we had analysed of the real world. We would then challenge players to reach a certain goal, and by doing that, they would acquire a deep understanding of the system itself. There seemed to be a lot of possibilities that could prove very rewarding both for the journalists to make and the audience to play.
The specifics of "Newsgame design"
After a few years of practice, it turns out my initial intuitions are confirmed. Yes, video games are a great tool to tell stories differently. Yes, interactivity is sometimes far more efficient than linearity, for instance to underline causal links, explain how systems work or involve an audience. And for those who wonder: yes, creating such games is super complicated.
Why ? Because interactivity demands a bigger effort than linearity. An article doesn’t ask for much: plug in your brain, read the text, try to understand it. That’s sometimes hard, especially on Monday mornings, but it’s also pretty straightforward. Games are more challenging in the sense that they won’t let anything happen without you. If you do not interact with them, you will not understand a single thing.
Journalists willing to produce good newsgames therefore face two challenges:
Create a game design efficient enough to justify the required effort. Is the game’s challenge interesting enough for the audience to actually want to play it?
Make sure that the game actually transmits the relevant information. Will the player get the necessary facts at the appropriate time in order to make the proper logical connections?
These two challenges are neither new nor really specific to newsgames design. But playing with information is restrictive. For example, a game with a focus on entertainment can afford to be received differently by different types of players. One may enjoy Call of Duty regardless of one’s stance on the pro-US militaristic values the game carries. A newsgame, on the contrary, has editorial responsibility on its content. Similarly, fun in “classic” videogames often relies on excessive, over-the-top situations, when a newsgame theoretically must always remain realistic.
Does this mean that "news" and "games" are difficult to reconcile? I don’t think so. We live in a world of systems, as emphasized by Eric Zimmerman. We can’t fully explain the world anymore without proposing simplified, easier to understand versions of it for people to explore. Today’s digital journalist got that, because more and ore of them grew up playing video games – they are used to system-driven narration and slowly import it in newsrooms.
Now, The Pixel Hunt isn’t a news organization. We produced a couple newsgames as commissioned works in the past, but that isn’t our main activity. We don’t have a large enough audience to monetize short, free games through advertising, and we’re not a big enough team to provide people with rich and diverse news coverage. Newsrooms such as the NYT’s or Le Monde’s have the infrastructure for that, not us. And in any case, I'm not sure I’d enjoy producing games in a hurry – yet haste is needed should you want to keep your newsgames relevant.
Then again, since its inception, The Pixel Hunt has been producing video games that share one thing in common: a more or less direct connection with the world around us. The latest project we work on with Figs, Bury me, my Love, is 100% in line with this dynamic. So if those aren’t newsgames, what are they?
Yeah right, what are you guys doing?
To answer this question, I’ll have to tell you a bit about The Pixel Hunt’s business model first. As a studio, we sometimes work for news organisations such as Le Monde or Libération, but our main clients are TV production companies. They contact us because they shot a documentary film and want to couple it with “a little something on the web”. They provide us with a lot of info on their documentary’s topic, and we design a game together. More often than not, the documentary and the game are aired simultaneously by one of France’s public network channels (mainly France Télévisions or Arte). Everyone may then watch the film and play the game for free, and even though they are often fairly independent, you get an even richer immersion in the topic if you do both.
So you may be tempted to say that we make documentary games. And you might find me annoyingly picky on semantics, but I beg to differ.
The problem with the name “documentary games” is that it directly refers to the documentary film, a linear storytelling form. Most of the time, a documentary is a “non-fiction” in which the author nonetheless subjectively describes a situation. It is built as a demonstration, as a way to take you from point A to point B. I am a big fan of documentary films, but I don’t think video games are suited for this endeavour – at least not with a similar method. Linear media and games just don’t work the same way. A game that wants to have a take on the real world should use the very essence of games to do so – not mimic films.
It’s funny that I found several quotes of game designers that helped me clarify my thoughts in… a documentary, Game Loading. I was happy to hear Nina Freeman (game designer of Cibele) call for more diversity in games stories – because there’s no topic games can’t talk about. I related to Ryan Green (author of That Dragon, Cancer) when he stated that designing a game about a real-world event made him see reality as a set of systems and mechanics. I shared Richard Hofmeier’s joy when he noticed that people making YouTube Let’s Plays about his Cart Life slowly evolved from mockery to empathy in the course of a playthrough. I saluted Christine Love when she explained that the most important part of her work as a game designer is to try to get people to see things from another perspective. I sided with Davey Wreden (co-author of The Stanley Parable) and his claim that facing complex, unusual scenarios in virtual environments helps us be stronger in the “real” world.
These testimonies helped me build a definition of the kind of games we, at TPH, want to make. I tried to phrase it through a series of rules they abide by.
They make a direct reference to the real world
They describe the world through a credible model of its mechanics
They allow the player to manipulate this model, and thus to see things through an unusual perspective
They differ from reality insofar as they allow for non-permanent consequence, thereby encouraging the player to fail and try again – and get better.
What we learn in those games sticks with us as real human beings
I propose the term “Reality-inspired games” to describe this genre. And even though they aren’t new (think The Oregon Trail), I’m under the impression that in recent years, we have seen more and more of those. Here is a small, subjective selection of recent titles that, to me, fit in this family.
Papers, Please - a game in which you play the role of an immigration officer in a clearly soviet-union-inspired world.
Firewatch - a game in which you play as Henry, a guy whose work is to watch a US national park for wildfires.
The Beginner's Guide - a game in which someone has you playtesting a series of short games allegedly created by a mysterious artist he seems to be found of.
That Dragon, Cancer - a game about a child diagnosed with a brain tumor and the way he and his family cope with it.
Cibele - a game about falling in love with someone while playing a MMO in the late 2000’s.
Cart Life - a game about trying to make ends meet while living off petty jobs.
Her Story - a criminal investigation where you try to understand what happened by parsing videos of interviews of the prime suspect, the victim’s wife.
This war of mine - a war game in which you, for once play not as a soldier but rather as a group of civilians trying to survive.
For me, all those titles and many others qualify as “Reality inspired games” because they follow the above-mentioned set of rules. I’ll now try to explain how.
