Last year in Germany, the games studio A Good Evil got together with the Cologne game lab to organise a two-day newsgame
hack. Media companies from all over Europe were invited over to join
coders, form teams and create short, simple video games around current
affairs issues. The Guardian was there, joining in with the fascinating experiment in interactive journalism.
This year, we’re going a step further, teaming up with the Rezzed games festival
to help run and judge a news game jam. Taking place in London next
week, the jam will run over the course of the event, challenging teams
to design games, based around a story from Thursday’s paper. We’ll then
take a look at the entries on Friday, with judges from co-sponsor
Creative Assembly as well as the Guardian.
As a primer, here’s a quick guide to the art of writing newsgames,
written with the help of Tomas Rawlings from Auroch Digital in Bristol, a
studio that has worked on several of its own interactive news titles,
such as Endgame: Syria and NarcoGuerra.
Choose the right subject
“You need to choose a topic where you can deliver something that the
linear media cannot or is not,” says Rawlings. This may be a local story
that you know a lot about and isn’t getting coverage elsewhere, or a
big story that you feel could be explored through a game.
“Most people producing news games right now are amateurs rather than
journalists,” says Rawlings. “There was one produced recently around the
situation in Ukraine, it was just an Angry Birds-style game where
you’re throwing things at various political figures. It was quite fun,
more of a satirical cartoon than a news game, and there’s nothing wrong
with that.”
It’s also important to bear development process in mind. If the story
is going to pass in a couple of days, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to
produce a game in time.
Make the most of interactivity
“It’s all about replayability,” says Rawlings. “Games can put you in
the shoes of someone you’re not. The idea behind Endgame: Syria was that
there are lots of different competing factions, so the player can take
one set of decisions, see the outcome, then take another.”
Choose the right platform
“If you want rapid dessiminaton, the web is still the best way,” says
Rawlings. Some form of Javascript or HTML 5 is the best bet at the
moment. We’ve developed smart phone apps, but the Apple App Store takes
seven days. The Android store is better, you can pass something through
in a couple of hours, but the web is immediate.”
“The problem with HTML 5 is, it’s a comparatively new protocol. There are packages like GameMaker: Studio that would allow you to make something comparatively quickly, but it’s still very tech heavy. That’s one of the issues.”
“If you’re not a developer, ideally you should find one to work with.
Otherwise you need to re-engineer something that’s already out there.
Loads of people publish free Java Script tutorials – in fact, the game
that the Guardian’s writer made at the News Hackathon, took a Flappy
Bird tutotrial from the web and re-engineered it as something else. News
does that all the time – news takes popular catchphrases and uses them
to make a catchy headline. Using popular tropes is a way to communicate
with people.”
There’s also the interactive story creator, Twine,
but Rawlings wants to see the development of tools that can help
journalists with no experience of coding to produce a news game within a
couple of hours.
Market it though social media and on game sites
“There’s a still a novelty factor to newsgames,” says Rawlings. “If you wrote an essay about Prism
on your blog, it’s going to be hard to get traction unless you’re
saying something remarkable. But if you did a game about Prism, that’s
unusual.
“There are plenty of sites like Kongregate where you can post HTML
objects, so you can explore those. Also, social media is very important.
Even though we we couldn’t distribute Endgame: Syria on the Apple App
Store, we had a version on Facebook, we had an Android version, we had a
free download version on sites like Indiecade. You need to distribute
widely.”
Be prepared to defend your work
“When you make a newsgame you into into a whole new world of
controversy,” says Rawlings. “When we released Endgame, we had people
telling us that we were clearly on the side of the regime because the
game was difficult so we were trying to put people off siding with the
rebels; then we had people saying that, because you play on the rebel
side, the game is pro-rebel.
“So you hit all those journalistic issues to do with bias, but then
you also hit the issue of it being a game. That happened a lot with
Narco – people said ‘how dare you treat this serious issue as a game’.
You have to be prepared to stand by your work, even more than if you’d
have written a song or an essay. You need to say, no, a game can be
sensitive to the material.”
