Games for Journalists
Dr. Brian Vaughan
EJTA Conference October 2014
–Eric Zimmerman, Game Designer, NYU
“The 21st Century will be the Century of the Game”
Gartner: Total market worth $93b in 2015
So what?• Its big, very big
• Its ubiquitous
• You cannot avoid games!
• So make use of them, make use of the gaming paradigm
• Take advantage of the extra modality: audio, video, haptic
Game: Engage in competitive conflict, within the rules, in order to achieve a victory condition
Serious Games: Applied game that is designed for something other than entertainment
• Educational
• Narrative
• Simulation of real world
• Fitness
• Edutainment: Education masquerading as entertainment
• Advergames: Games as advertisements
• Newsgames: Games about recent news events
• Gamification: Game structures, mechanics and rewards in a non-game setting to engage users/players
The Mechanic is the Message• Train:
• Typewritten instructions
• Train tracks & box cars
• Yellow pegs=people
• Goal: load them efficiently on to the train
• 2 Minutes to 2 hours
• Destination of train revealed=Auschwitz
• Each figure=100,000 Jews
• Exploring complicity is the real goal
• Complicity through procedural gaps
• Players fill these gaps themselves
• Exploration of human-on-human tragedy as a system
• Player observation
The Mechanic is the Message• The New World
• Slavery
• Síochán leat
• Cromwell’s invasion of Ireland
• Mexican Kitchen
• Immigration
• Cité Soleil
• Violence in a shanty town in Haiti
News Games• NarcoGuerra: War on drugs
• Turn-based, Risk like territorial control game
• Endgame Syria: Video card game
• Play as a rebel commander
• Darfur is Dying: Darfur conflict
• Family member of displaced family
• Camp management
• Snowden Run 3d: endless runner
• Collect sensitive information
• Interactive Investigation
• Pirate Fishing in Sierra Leone
• Use tools to investigate
• Mod of half-life using the source engine
• Uses an existing game engine to build a new game
• Goal is to escape from the detention centre
• Escape from direct provision hell
• Dodge politicians, police and immigration reform activists
• Collect right to work tokens
• Build up time to plead your case
Non-Serious Games as Serious Games
• Papers Please: Immigration border control
• Inspect documents and use tools to determine legitimacy
• Interrogation
• New rules added as relations change
• Spend money on family
• 20 possible endings
Tools for building games
• Behaviour based system
• Drag and drop based assets
• Non-programmers
• Rapid prototyping
• Cross-platform
• Cross-platform
• Drag and drop
Building Interactive Narratives
• Twine
• Create simple interactive stories for people to explore
• Text based game
• Compiles/publishes as html
• Include other web functionality
http://twinery.org/
• Link elements to build the story • Build as HTML with embedded CSS • Add additional web functionality
Text Adventures• Depression Quest:
• Interactive fiction game about living with depression
• Everyday life events and you have to manage numerous aspects
• Demonstrate to non-sufferers the depths of depression and its effects
• Show sufferers that they are not alone
TWINE• Uses passages: like levels, like stanzas
Taken from Brenda Neotenomie’s:http://aliendovecote.com/twine101
• Create new passages
• Enclose the name of another passage in [[square brackets]] to link it.
To link any text to a specific passage, split the bracket with a | symbol. Put the visible text on the left and the passage name on the right:
This is the surrounding text [[and this is the link|Passage Name goes here]]
• To add images, click and drag an image from your desktop into the main Twine window, or select Story -> Import Image.
To display an image in a passage, use the following format: [img[The Name of the Image]]
The power of the web
• Exported as HTML
• Can use powerful web technologies to enhance and augment
• CSS, HMTL 5, Java script etc etc
• Powerful interactive medium and paradigm
• Multiple platforms: mobile, desktop, TV, boardgames, card games
• Ubiquitous
• Multi-modal
• Allow complex, intertwining, interactive narratives
• Short-form and long-form: 2 minutes to 20 hours
• Some of the best games are created by non-games
Conclusion