Picture this. One morning, you visit the Guardian home page to find a headline article about, let's say, a natural disaster in south-east Asia, or mass civil unrest in a Central American state. Next to the text is a link to a game about the story, designed to provide further information and insight. Do you follow it? Do you play?
Games that explore political and social issues have been around since the early days of the medium – the 80s and 90s saw dozens of titles about nuclear conflict and Cold War politics with titles like Theatre Europe and Conflict: The Middle East Political Simulator.
In the late 90s, however, the arrival of web plug-ins like Flash and Shockwave soon gave rise to a new era of browser games, cheap and quick to produce, with a ready-made worldwide distribution agent: the internet. It wasn't long before designers were using these to quickly comment on and investigate real-world events.
In the mid-2000s leftwing Italian site Molleindustria started producing titles like The McDonald's Videogame and Tamatipico about corporate greed and the plight of workers. Elsewhere, game designer Gonzalo Frasca set up the site Newsgaming, producing titles about 9/11 and the 2004 Madrid bombings.
But a recent event has brought the subject of newsgames into the wider consciousness again. Earlier this week, a war simulation entitled Endgame: Syria was rejected for inclusion on the iPhone App Store. Developed over two weeks by British studio Auroch Digital, it puts players in control of the rebel forces as they pursue different military and political objectives.
Apparently, the basis of Apple's rejection was a section of the App Store user guidelines forbidding games that, "solely target a specific race, culture, a real government or corporation, or any other real entity". This would seem to rule out the whole concept of newsgames as a breach of terms.
Based in Bristol, Auroch Digital is a small digital media consultancy which has also organised a series of game jams – two-day game development competitions – in the region. Earlier this year, founder and game designer Tomas Rawlings started thinking about how the rapid prototyping techniques used in jams and hack days could be applied to produce titles that explored current affairs.
"The first game jam I took part in was a revelation for me," he says. "I started thinking more about different ways this could be applied. I honestly don't know yet where the balance is between the time of development and the time of topicality, and what mix works for a newsgame. It is very interesting finding out though."
Rawlings has set up a new website, Gamethenews, to distribute these experiments and has been backed by the University of Abertay via its Prototype fund which seeks to support innovative gaming projects. There's already a new title available on the site, My Cotton Picking Life, about child labour in Uzbekistan, and Rawlings is currently working on something about the war on drugs in Mexico. All the games are distributed for free on PC and Android devices. But it looks like iPhone will be off limits.
Reaction to Apple decision
Industry reaction to Apple's decision has been mixed, but when the Guardian ran a story on it earlier this week, there was a familiar strain of revulsion at the very idea of games dealing with topical issues. "How to turn the death and suffering of innocent Syrians into mindless entertainment," read one tweet. It's a reminder of the global media horror surrounding filmmaker Danny Ledonne's game Super Columbine Massacre RPG, which sought to analyse the motives of killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Many newspapers assumed it was a piece of cheap exploitation, rather than an attempt to understand the psychology of the boys in a format familiar to teenagers.
Ian Bogost, a professor of interactive computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has been designing and blogging about newsgames for several years. His own studio, Persuasive Games, creates titles for public policy makers, educators and corporations, dealing with current affairs and issues. He has also written a book Newsgames: Journalism at Play, about the emergence and future of the phenomenon. He sees the roots of this revulsion lodged in widely held perceptions about games.
"What this comes down to is a problem of familiarity and convention," he says. "When you stop to think about it, there's really no reason to believe that film and television aren't inappropriate media for exploring real-world issues and events. I mean, Michael Bay made a film about Pearl Harbor, even. But we're more accustomed to non-fiction film and television because there are more examples of them. There's also more criticism and commentary that hashes out the conventions and aesthetics of documentary, non-fiction, and dramatic televisual media.
"Meanwhile, in games, we tend to see non-fiction topics on the fringes. Gears of War isn't even trying, of course, but even Spec Ops: The Line isn't really non-fiction either. Without a set of examples that move players to be affected by non-fiction games, and without more widely published and read criticism about why such games are useful, its no wonder they find themselves unsure and afraid. That may change over time, but it won't change by magic, through some kind of slow maturation process that arrives by osmosis. We need more games to make it happen".
Recently, we've seen another often marginalised medium go through this process of experimentation and acceptance: comic books. The likes of Joe Sacco's Palestine, Art Spiegelman's Maus and Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis have shown how the graphic novel format can add depth, detail and emotion to raw stories of death and war. In these works, the conventions of the comic book format are both exploited and subverted to wrenching effect.
"I think the problem is the word 'game'," says Rawlings. "It has cultural connotations of triviality. However, as games have grown up as a form, we can show they don't have to be about only entertainment, they can have other roles too.
"Before Joe Sacco's excellent war reporting, you might have thought a comic was only for kids. After reading his work, you can be in no doubt that this gives another take on events. I think games are also at this junction point of exploring how they can do more".
Influence of news outlets
For Bogost, the issue now is just as much about the legitimacy of the developer as it is about the form itself. "The Endgame Syria project seems interesting, but it's not coming from a major news outlet," he says. "It's not necessarily that the New York Times or the Guardian are automatically capable of producing better newsgames – rather it's that they are already established as respected voices in journalism, and thus anything they make automatically overcomes part of the mental block for players and editors alike. The things the NYT publishes are automatically journalism, or at least they are until proven otherwise".
Acceptance, especially via a major news outlet, must be within reach. Hugely successful consoles like the PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo Wii, together with the advent of powerful smartphones, have turned video games from a geeky pastime to a pervasive media – around 40% of the UK population now plays games on consoles, PCs or smartphones.
Games are now being adopted by hundreds of major organisations outside of the entertainment industry. Museums and galleries use them to publicise new exhibitions and provide more information on their collections; NGOs and charities use them to highlight current funding drives and engage with younger audiences. The very mechanics of games, the systems of compulsion and reward that we find so compelling, are being ripped out by savvy corporations to "gamify" their communications and services.
The digital age is one of interactive rather than passive media consumption. Why shouldn't news work in the same way? Newspaper sites have been prodding in this direction for a while, producing interactive charts, utilising apps like Google Maps to produce explorable illustrations of key stories. There has also been a move toward crowd-sourcing certain aspects of data journalism: in 2009, the Guardian launched an app allowing readers to download documents relating to the MP expenses scandal and were encouraged to search for the most interesting claims.
Meanwhile, we've seen the growth of citizen journalism, through blogs, social media and sites like Demotix and Blottr. Of course, these examples aren't games, but they have engendered an idea of news as a participatory process.
It might be just a case of presentation. If a piece of interactive journalism is termed as a simulation rather than a game, would that help? Perhaps, but Bogost sees another barrier to the rise of newsgames: the experimental intransigence of the major media outlets.
"In the Newsgames book, we wrote about my own experiences at Persuasive Games working with the New York Times on editorial games circa 2007. The problem came down to organisational politics: even when the Times was spending actual money on games, the will to publish them effectively wasn't there. It wasn't there because nobody had prioritised it, and the newspaper was struggling just to keep up with its ordinary editorial duties".
Fading interest
Jan Schaffer, executive director of J-Lab, an institute that funds innovative journalism projects in the US, has seen a similar drop-off of interest. "It is my impression that the conversation around newsgames was a bit more prevalent in the early part of the century," she says.
"J-Lab did an early newsgames workshop in 2002, for instance. We've seen various news organisations like Minnesota Public Radio and the New York Times come up with state and federal budget calculators: the last one from the NY Times was around 2010. The GothamGazette.com had some nice interactive games, but nothing recent".
So why has interest faded? "I think it's solely because of resources," says Schaffer. "You need creative technologists on staff to build these games. They are time-consuming to build and a game may only pertain to a particular news issue. So it's a lot of effort for something that isn't evergreen. Strapped news organisations have had to prioritise and I think instead we've seen a lot more in the realm of interactive maps and searchable databases and data visualisations".
Bogost agrees that funding is an issue, but thinks that many news outlets just don't have the right mindset: "Even when the opportunity for revenue was put on the table, the NYT couldn't, or wouldn't, figure out how to carry out such an experiment."
Perhaps this is why newsgames have proliferated online as small projects engineered by teams of just a few coders and designers, rather than as a mainstream new medium. But it's a shame, because they could be enormously effective in an era where children are now native digital media consumers.
Games as a learning tool
"Games are great systems for learning and exploring," says Jo Twist, CEO of games industry trade body UKIE. Twist was previously a commissioning editor at Channel 4 Education, producing web games based around political, historical and social issues.
"Games are about decision making, about consequences of actions. And while you are playing, you are picking up facts, pieces of the puzzle, learning tactics, because you have to, and want to, in order to progress to the next level.
"Well-written scripts or beautiful graphics can compel the player into wanting to explore more and complete more challenges – Bow Street Runner was really good at doing that. The format won't work if it is executed poorly: the gameplay must be really compelling for anyone to play it. But well-designed games provoke your curiosity and make you want to know more in order to progress."
In practical terms, the big problem with newsgames is time – they need to be produced and distributed quickly to remain topical. But that is getting easier. Endgame: Syria was built using the accessible development package GameMaker, which takes out a lot of the programming slog and allows very rapid prototyping – Rawlings' game represents around two weeks' work.
Bogost has also overseen a project named Game-O-Matic, designed by students at the Georgia Institute of Technology in conjunction with the Expressive Intelligence Studio at UC Santa Cruz. It's essentially a tool to facilitate the quick and easy production of journalistic games without any coding or development experience.
Once the tools are there, it could be that games become the new blogs – a means of self-expression and socio-political comment. For newspapers, though, there may have to be a radical re-think: journalism as a trade in the traditional sense is fading into history, and increasingly the major media sources are having to reinvent themselves as digital platforms; they will have to develop a culture of R&D, they will need to think like San Francisco startups. That's not just because the means of consuming media has changed, it's because mega-corps like Facebook, Google and Apple have taught an emerging generation that information is a software product to be shared and interacted with.
Beyond all this is a simple truth that games are brilliant formal systems that allow us to detect and explore patterns. They teach us things in the way our brains love. Of course there are issues of ethics and morality to be wrestled with, but these are about content rather than format.
Fundamentally, newgames represent a means of sharing information via a format that huge numbers of people are engaged with; it is not unwise and frivolous to explore those possibilities, it seems unwise and frivolous not to.