On Newsgames’ Newsworthiness

In a recent post over at the Geor­gia Tech Jour­nal­ism & Games Project (Raid Gaza! Edi­to­r­ial Games and Time­li­ness), the inde­fati­ga­ble Ian Bogost holds up a recent edi­to­r­ial game, Raid Gaza!, as exem­plary of the kind of crit­i­cal work games (“news­games”) can do for journalism.

Like edi­to­r­ial games should, [Raid Gaza] takes a strong posi­tion. But unlike so many, it also offers coher­ent game­play that is related to the con­flict it critiques.

His insights here are typ­i­cally acute, and deserve to be read. But I have reser­va­tions about the strong posi­tion Bogost him­self takes with respect to the empti­ness of what he calls “tabloid” games.

“Indeed, news­games pro­duced very rapidly, like the many small ones about the recent George W. Bush shoe throw­ing inci­dent, risk becom­ing tabloid games, lit­tle mean­ing­less point­ers that com­mem­o­rate an event only to draw atten­tion to it rather than to com­ment upon it. These games often cap­i­tal­ize rhetor­i­cally: the pay­load of a game about throw­ing a shoe at Pres­i­dent Bush is the very idea of a game about such a thing, rather than any kind of com­men­tary on the event or its meaning.”

On his water­coo­l­ergames blog, Bogost points to one such game, Gaza Defender, with disdain.

I’ve just been made aware of another game on this topic, Gaza Defender. The player is asked to “Defend The Gaza Strip from the Zion­ist Bombs using your AK-47.” It’s less remark­able as a game and no more thought­ful a com­men­tary than the many whack-a-mole clone news­games we’ve seen in the past.

Implicit in his Bogost’s dis­missal of this thought-less genre of games, of course, is his faith in the advent of a pro­ce­dural lit­er­acy: A savoir-lire among the peo­ple. Bogost is wor­ried that, dis­con­nected from any rep­re­sen­ta­tive or sim­u­la­tive engage­ment with the world they por­tray, whack-a-mole clones—tabloid games—don’t pro­vide the oppor­tu­nity for any kind of crit­i­cal response in the player. As games, he there­fore deems them devoid of value.

the advent of a new tech­nol­ogy and its atten­dant rhetorics does not require the ouster of every­thing that came before.

But the advent of a new tech­nol­ogy and its atten­dant rhetorics does not require the ouster of every­thing that came before. The advent of the writ­ten word did not require us to aban­don oral­ity. Instead, the two tech­nics became imbri­cated in our every sig­ni­fi­ca­tion. Bogost’s cri­tique of Gaza Defender is unnec­es­sar­ily dis­mis­sive, and ignores the fact that the game is still a polit­i­cal text, in spite of the qual­ity of gameplay.

I think it a mis­take, for exam­ple, to extract the game itself from the con­text in which it is pre­sented. The game itself is embed­ded on a page that fea­tures maps depict­ing (one) his­tory of the Pales­tin­ian / Israeli con­flict; a link to a Dona­tions page at the Red Cres­cent web­site; a link to down­load Adobe Flash; an embed­ded stream of music from a Pales­tin­ian musi­cian, Mawaal Al Quds. The page includes a tool to share or book­mark the page via any num­ber of well-known social net­work­ing sites. This is more than a whack-a-mole clone.

Admit­tedly, a sim­ple shoe-throwing game may not take advan­tage of the com­plex­i­ties of the sim­u­la­tive, and it may not be a sophis­ti­cated form of “pro­ce­dural rhetoric.” But it is a voice that asks to be heard.

What’s more, I find myself drawn again to what M. Badiou says about the­ater: We go not to be cul­ti­vated, but to be struck. “Theater-ideas” are expe­ri­en­tial, not nec­es­sar­ily critical-intellectual. Are we cer­tain that there no value in arm­ing a player with a shoe and say­ing, “let fly”?