Newsgame


Newsgames, also known as news games, are a genre of video games that attempt to apply journalistic principles to their creation. They can fall into multiple categories, including current events, documentary, simulations of systems, and puzzle and quiz games. Newsgames can provide context into complex situations which might be hard to explain without experiencing the situation first hand. Journalists use newsgames to expand on stories so the audience can learn more about the information from in an immersive way.
This genre of game is usually based on real concepts, issues, or stories, but the games can also be a hybrid representation of the original research, offering players a fictional experience based on real-world sources. They can also be thought of as the video game equivalent of political cartoons. Miguel Sicart describes them as games that "utilize the medium with the intention of participating in the public debate".
According to "Newsgames: Journalism at Play," written by newsgame innovators Ian Bogost, Simon Ferrari, and Bobby Schweizer, the authors define newsgames as “a term that names a broad body of work produced at the intersection of videogames and journalism.” This includes a number of subcategories that dive into different ways to incorporate gaming elements into journalistic work, whether they be long-form documentary news games, games that simulate real-world systems, interactive infographics, electronic literature, or quiz/puzzle-based games.

Examples

The format started with a game called September 12th by Gonzalo Frasca, published in 2003. In September 12th, you are positioned in a plane in the sky, reticule on a village in a Middle Eastern setting. You are searching for a terrorist. When you spot him, you need to kill him, that is your mission. But the reticule is broad, and the village busy with regular civilians; women and children included, collateral damage is unavoidable. Of course you shoot when the terrorist is in a quiet area, but a time delay between your shooting and the missile arriving, could cause the area to be not so quiet anymore. When the village is hit, you might have missed the terrorist, you are sure to have created a lot of damage, and a regular civilian is turned into another terrorist. Instead of reducing the number of terrorists, your action increased their number.
This marks the start of the format, games in which sides which are not reported by regular news are to be experienced. Not only reflective on our actions, but most of the time also controversial.