The Mumbai attacks of 2008 — popularly remembered as 26/11 — are branded into public memory thanks to the embarrassingly gratuitous TV news coverage. For years, the smoking tower of the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, audio clips of gunshots, and, of course, Ajmal Kasab, remained the definitive images of those nightmarish days. What really happened — the players, the chronology of events, the unfolding of the terror — remained nebulous, and was mostly pieced together through hearsay. Then, in 2013, investigative journalists Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark published the most authoritative account of the attacks in their well-received book, The Siege .
Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark
The duo soon went on to turn the book’s narrative into an interactive online experience — or newsgame — that puts the player at the centre of the events on that fateful night in November. Using hundreds of high definition photographs, including the interiors of the hotel, it combined journalistic narrative and gameplay, with real audio recorded over semi-animated characters. Players navigated several potential routes to safety as the action unfolded around them. Hosted by websites such as The Guardian , The Sunday Times and Rediff, Levy shares that it clocked over hundreds of thousands of players.
The game has since been taken down because of the large amount of server space required to host it. But 10 years later, Levy is back at it again, this time with an upcoming newsgame that recreates his latest book, The Exile (also co-authored by Scott-Clark) on Osama bin Laden’s flight after 9/11. “There’s an audience that the mainstream is clearly not reaching, and hence we have to be clever,” says the journalist. “Something dressed up as a game can also touch upon issues of justice and human rights. For instance, you can bury the issue of torture deep into a puzzle game.”
Journo-play
If you are a video game junkie with a fondness for the adrenaline-boosting pace and multi-million-dollar graphics of Grand Theft Auto , you are likely to skip over the newsgame — broadly defined as any game that is based on the news, either with a journalistic purpose (designed to inform) or an activist/editorial one (designed to persuade). Uruguayan game developer Gonzalo Frasca, who created September 12 , one of the pioneer games of the category, is widely credited with coining the term, modelled after the “advergame”.
September 12
September 12 , which was played by more than a million users (and which Frasca continues to receive hate mail for) is set in a Middle Eastern village. You, the player, are in the sky, positioned to shoot terrorists. Inevitably, when the player spots and shoots the terrorist, innocent civilians also die. There is no winning, which is exactly the point the creators tried to make about the war on terror.
In the mid-2010s, mainstream media outlets such as The Guardian participated in and organised newsgame “jams”— providing designers and developers with a news story and giving them 48 hours to develop a game based on it. With then-recent protocols such as HTML 5, these were considered innovative, helping media outfits co-opt more technology into traditional journalistic methods. However, the cost of development, along with the rapid pace of news cycles has hindered the newgame’s ability to become a more widely-used tool.
There are notable exceptions, but many newsgames tend to be simplistic in their design and presentation, often by choice. In late April this year, ProPublica , the American nonprofit newsroom specialising in investigative journalism, released The Waiting Game — an interactive experience that allows players to experience firsthand the arduous process of seeking asylum in the US. After choosing one of five possible characters based on real-life stories, (including a Bangladeshi man who is persecuted for marrying outside his religion and a student protestor from the Democratic Republic of Congo), the player merely has to keep clicking to read about the highlights of each day spent. If the player tires of the unending clicks (often over 600), she can give up and fast forward, but is reminded that that was never an option for these asylum seekers.
Lindsay Grace
In response to this observation about the simplicity of the medium, Lindsay Grace, Knight Chair at the University of Miami and a researcher in news and games, says, “I’ve argued for years that newsgames shouldn’t endeavour toward the industry standard. They should be the modern version of the editorial comic or political cartoon. The medium is young, and it doesn’t make sense to expect Disney quality animation from something that needs to be produced in 48 hours.”
What then does a newsgame do that editorial or journalistic prose cannot? “Experiential depth, making a point in a way that only play can,” says Grace, who is also a frequent speaker at the Games for Change festival. Al Jazeera’s 2016 web-based app, #HACKED: Syria’s Electronic Armies , is an apt example. Players work as investigative journalists alongside Juliana Ruhfus — whose work helped form the basis of the game — taking them deep inside Syria’s cyber war. They collect information in a limited time by contacting activists, hackers and coders, decide whether to go undercover or pay for information. The ability to make decisions provides players with more comprehensive insight than a news documentary typically would, forcing them to acknowledge how nuanced the situation is.
Key to narratives
In 2010, when Ian Bogost, Simon Ferrari and Bobby Schweizer wrote their book Newsgames: Journalism at Play , these interactive experiences were lauded by both the journalistic and gaming communities. Today, despite notable examples, public interest has waned. Even though the cost of game production is lower, Frasca, who himself has moved on to learning games, believes, “Nobody has found a good business model for them. Maybe there isn’t one”. Grace believes that factors such as the decline of regional journalism and rising economic pressures faced by traditional newspapers are to blame.
However, to fill that void, there is a growing number of people outside the journalistic world using “newsy” narratives to tell their stories and share opinions. For instance, game designers have worked on powerful stories about migration such as Bury Me, My Love (developed by Florent Maurin, a former journalist).
Peter Willington
While examples of virtual reality being used in newsgames are few (often due to rising costs), Peter Willington of Auroch Digital, the UK-based Game the News initiative which has worked with the BBC and WIRED on developing newsgames, believes that 3D reality will allow for more interactive and immersive experiences. “We have experimented with VR ourselves, and the work we created shows great promise in the field of interactive documentary,” he says. Grace concurs, citing projects such as Ferguson Firsthand , which allows users to experience eyewitness accounts of the shooting of Michael Brown in Missouri (an incident which sparked outrage about police brutality against African Americans). However, as Grace points out, “the problem is cost and commitment,” going on to add: “They require more of a commitment by those who interact with them (for example, putting on your headset, getting the app, etc).
Challenges notwithstanding, this mixed-media approach is what excites Levy. With The Exile , he wants to get “a Netflix-like audience and create a narrative that’s more rigidly based on truth”. Not only will it be a game, but also a film narrative in a language that’s global. “We want to reach more people and immerse them in new experiences,” he says.
