Teaching Games as Journalism: Pedagogy and Practice

Presentation to the NSF C-PATH Distributed Expertise Colloquium, Villanova University, June 3, 2013

A guide the acronyms and some other helpful references:
JPW- journalism/professional writing major at The College of New Jersey
IMM – interactive multimedia program at TCNJ
DE – C-PATH Distributed Expertise project NSF Award Abstract
Wolz’ Simple Storyteller

On teaching game design in a journalism class, Part 4: Newsgames as literary journalism

In the  last blog entry on my newsgames class, I reported on my students’ remix of my intentionally buggy, incomplete Food Stamps game. That exercise served multiple purposes:

  • It provided an accessible example of the challenges of conceiving a newsgame, and for defining requirements for such a game as journalism and as a game.
  • Splitting the students into groups focused on specific aspects of the game (story, media, gameplay) afforded an opportunity to reinforce and extend ideas in their texts through collaboration and peer teaching.
  • It provided a natural segue into guiding students into the development of their own games.

One of the first challenges of getting students thinking about the requirements for their own game projects is that I found no literature on how one actually reports and organizes information for a newsgame, not to mention the ethical standards that ought to apply.  Game designers are accustomed to thinking conceptually not literally, so they take liberties that potentially violate the canon of journalism ethics. This has led to some interesting discussions with colleagues. For example, in 2008, my computer science colleagues and I were planning the Interactive Journalism Institute for Middle Schoolers, one of my colleagues had one of our research assistants build a Scratch game that offered a crude representation of the issue of global warming. In the game, clicking on the aerosol raises the earth temperature until the planet explodes:
Scratch Project

I expressed concern about the scientific inaccuracy of the game, and we had an extended discussion about how literal the game needed to be. Interestingly, the project generated nearly 700 views and dozens of comments and remixes, including a debate about global warming. In addition, both this researcher and another student colleague built a number of interesting prototypes, including this game about campus cafeteria food options:
Scratch Project

With this experience and my magazine writing background in mind, I opted to teach the students to think of the reporting and storytelling aspects of the game as a kind of linear, multi-threaded literary journalism. Literary journalism combines the factual reporting of journalism with much of the artistic freedom of literature.

Reporting

We reviewed the reporting process of collecting data from secondary sources and primary sources, interviewing, and organizing information in cluster diagrams. I had them give me abstracts and annotated source lists, as I would in a magazine writing class. Because we lost the first two weeks of classes due to Hurricane Irene, this process was somewhat truncated, but we did spend some time on interviewing and vetting sources. We also spent a lot of time on copyright, ethics, libel and defamation rules. We also talked about the fact that narrative newsgames are often built on a degree of fictionalization and the creation of composite characters – practices that would be considered unethical in literary journalism.

We talked about ways of mapping story structure to game mechanics. And we talked a lot about new journalism with its emphasis on scene-by-scene construction, changing points of view, dialogue and experimentation in narrative structure. We  did close readings of Gay Talese, Susan Orlean and Jimmy Breslin.

We talked about strategies for fulfilling or confounding audience expectations in order to create suspense and engagement. I used clips from the 80s TV show, Moonlighting, which does this brilliantly:

 

Parodying Dr. Seuss:

Taking an irreverent approach to a classic, also breaking the fourth wall:

As we brainstormed about their game ideas, Moonlighting also helped me introduce them to genres that might be suitable for the storytelling for their games, but with which they were unfamiliar. For example, I suggested that the conventions of film noir might be worth exploring for one group’s game about the workings of Ponzi schemes.

With the students’ permission, I soon hope to share some examples of the ways in which they applied these ideas to their games.

On teaching game design in a journalism class, part 3

UPDATE: December 6, 2011. Obviously, I wrote the post below several weeks ago. An end-of semester update coming soon.

 

We are now just past midterms this semester, and I can share the work done by the  News Games class to remix the Food Stamp Game. As I have described in the two previous posts in this series, I created a very rudimentary, glitchy, incomplete game in Scratch designed to simulate the experience of shopping on a food stamp budget. My idea was to have the students critique the game and remix it both as a game and as journalism.  The image at left is a screen shot of the flash-based prototype they created.  We had less time to work on this project than I had anticipated because Hurricane Irene and our Labor Day schedule forced a late start to the semester.  Still, students reported that they found the experience valuable, both as an introduction to the course, and as a way of building community.

In addition to their contributions to the game, students wrote reflective essays critiquing their work as journalism and as a game.

The focus of their effort was on enhancing the storyline, as well as improving the esthetics and the gameplay. With more time, they wanted to create more player profiles  (a single parent with children, an unemployed adult, a retiree, etc.) to illustrate varied scenarios under which people acquire Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits.  They also would have make hotspots out of more of the items, and they would have added a corner store or bodega to the shopping options.

From here,  the students moved toward developing their individual game projects, which have turned out to be quite varied. In thinking through how I expected them to incorporate journalism into the game design and development process, I adapted my approach to teaching students to do long-form magazine writing. I will elaborate on this in my next post.

 

On teaching game design in a journalism course, part 2

In my last post on the newsgames course I will be teaching this fall, I began to discuss how the need to respect the journalistic intent of a newsgame translates into requirements and constraints upon the game’s design and production. In this post, I want to  delve into that topic more deeply, using principles outlined in Tracy Fullerton’s Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Designing Innovative Games, and applying those principles to a game that I consider particularly successful, MSNBC’s “Can You Spot the Threats?”  game about the challenges of screening airport baggage.  Finally, I will discuss questions that I will raise with my students about my partially finished “Food Stamps Game,” which I introduced in the last post. The intent of the Food Stamps Game is to simulate the experience of trying to buy a week’s worth of groceries on a $30 budget, about average in terms of what states allow a single adult participating in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) which is the current name for Food Stamps. (Eligibility for benefits and benefit levels vary, and are based on complex criteria. See references on benefits at the end of this post.)

Fullerton defines a game as:

  • A closed formal system that
  • Engages players in structured conflict and
  • Resolves its uncertainty in unequal outcomse (p, 43)

MSNBC's game about airport baggage screening successfully incorporates dramatic and formal elements.

Here, an aside: It should be noted that Fullerton’s definition of a game is at slight variance with that employed by the authors of the other text that I plan to use in the course, Newsgames: Journalism at Play, which I discussed in the previous post. The Newgames text considers animated infographics as games, where as Fullerton is more restrictive. I bring this up because this is an interdisciplinary class in which some of the students are already familiar with Fullerton;s formulations. I may need to take these differing perspectives into account in order to build a common intellectual climate within the class.

Part of the value of Fullerton’s definition is that she breaks it down into components that can be understood as operational requirements.  Games have what Fullerton describes as formal elements (such as rules, playing pieces, boundaries and outcomes), dramatic elements (premise, setting, character and a dramatic arc), and system dynamics (the way the formal and dramatic elements interact). Please note that Fullerton’s definition of these categories is more extensive than I have presented here. This list is only  for the sake of illustration and discussion.

Applying Fullerton’s rubric to MSNBC’s “Can You Spot the Threats” game helps us to understand more about her categories, as well as the characteristics of a successful simulation-type game. The game starts with ominous music and a voiceover narration about the ways in which airport baggage screening procedures changed in the United States after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Then you are told that you are about to experience what it’s like to screen baggage for two minutes. A series of actual images of luggage generated by screening equipment scrolls across the screen, and you have to pick out the bags most likely to contain guns, knives or explosives. However, the pictures are frustratingly blurry and vague, as can be seen above. You can stop an image, zoom in, and change the black-and-white image to color, but the images are still non-descript. Take too long, and the passenger murmuring in the background rises to a fever pitch. Move too quickly, and it’s likely that something dangerous will slip through. At the end of two minutes, you get a score based on the number of bags screened, the number of dangerous bags detected, the number missed, and a score.

In Fullerton’s parlance, there are formal elements – rules, resources (the bags, the controls), boundaries (the time limit, for example) and outcomes. There is a real-world premise, a story in with characters (you, the baggage screener, and the passengers),  a setting, and a simple dramatic arc. The flash program functions efficiently, and the interface is clean.

“Can You Spot the Threats?” is one of the most effective newsgames I’ve seen, both When I had a class of about 24 students play this game in 2003, they said they gained a new appreciation for the difficulty of the baggage-screener’s job, and motivated them to read the accompanying web feature article. My campus is an hour’s train ride from Ground Zero, and the 9/11 attacks were still evoked a visceral emotional response from my students. They said they found it easy to accept the game’s premise, and they felt anxious as the blurry images rolled across the screen and passengers began to complain that they might miss their planes.

These are some of the ways in which the Food Stamps game is unfinished and needs revision.  As some test users report, the boundaries of the game aren’t always clear – for example, a script that should come up when a buyer runs out of money doesn’t yet work properly. There aren’t enough dramatic elements and the system dynamics could use some work. These will be some of the things that will be fodder for discussion with students in the fall.

Arguably, the flaws in this game, and the ability to download and remix the code in Scratch, makes the Food Stamps game useful as a tool for highlighting this game and its design process as an example of computational thinking. I will elaborate on that in the next post.


Endnotes

References on benefits. For more information on how states calculate Food Stamp benefits, please see examples below:

  1. USDA SNAP Eligibility page
  2. Texas: Food Stamp Benefit Estimator
  3. Illinois: DHS Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program
  4. MassLegal Services. 2011 Food Stamp Advocacy Guide Part III. Eligibility
  5. Hawaii Financial  and SNAP Benefits RIghts and Responsibilities
  6. Louisiana Department of Children and Family Services: Economic Stability Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program
  7. South Carolina Department of Social Services SNAP Benefit Calculator
  8. 2007 Congressional Food Stamp Challenge
  9. US Food Policy “Living on a Food Stamp Budget” (This is the specific source of my $30/week figure.

Course syllabus as of July 13, 2001

     

    The Food Stamp Game: a test case for teaching computational journalism, part 1


    This fall, I am teaching a class, “Serious Games for News, ” in which journalism and interactive multimedia students will analyze and design various examples of “newsgames.”  In their book,  Newsgames: Journalism at Play(MIT Press, 2010) Ian Bogost and his colleagues use the term Newsgames to mean, broadly, using game design techniques to “do” journalism – that is to report, present and or comment on the news. That broad definition takes in everything from crossword puzzles to videogame-like simulations and alternate reality games of the type created by futurist Jane McGonigal. Since the students in the class are journalism and interactive multimedia majors, not computer science students, I see the class as a practical exploration of computer science concepts relevant to journalism, as well as an opportunity to learn about and test the possibilities of this rapidly developing journalistic medium.

    Newsgames: Journalism at Play

    The journalistic focus of the class will be on two pressing issues in Trenton New Jersey, the city just blocks away from the location of our college -pollution and food security. Trenton has experienced the difficulties that have beset many industrial American cities: disinvestment, environmental degradation, and a crumbling infrastructure. Enrollments in the federal supplemental nutrition assistance program have risen precipitously in the last five years. How can newsgames make the issues more visible, more comprehensible, and more amenable to citizen dialogue, engagement and resolution?

    As part of my preparation for the class, I thought I would create a sample newsgame  in Scratch for the students to critique and remix. The the game below challenges players to buy a week’s worth of groceries on a food stamp budget – about $30/week, according to my research.  (The title reflects my age – when I was growing up, people getting government assistance to buy food got a coupon book from what was called the Food Stamp program. Now, they get an ATM-like card called an “EBT card,” and the program is now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.)

    The version below is in the user testing phase and will probably undergo some refinements in the fall, but I do not intend to present it to students as a finished product. In addition to some technical glitches, I think it has some important design flaws. I don’t think it has enough story elements to make recreate the experience of having to shop with an EBT card. (what . I have some ideas on how to make it more realistic – swap out the images for images from Trenton, add voices and back stories of real people, add more items to better illustrate the trade-offs people have to make..

    Part of the conversation that I want to have with the students is to raise the question of how much information needs to be built into the game, and how much would need to be part of another story package. Maybe this is the wrong focus for a game about food insecurity in Trenton  – perhaps the focus should be on applying for benefits, or running one of our over-stretched food pantries. Perhaps it can be part of a suite of games around this theme.

    The idea is to get the students to first try to improve on what I’ve done, and use the strength and weaknesses of my approach, along with the guidance from the texts, to develop their own ideas.

    In this series of posts, I want to share some thoughts about what I expect my students to learn from working with this game and creating others like it.

    A Note on the Use of Scratch

    I chose to use the Scratch programming language for this class for the following reasons:

    • It has a low learning curve, but contains many of the features of more sophisticated  languages
    • It allows programmers to import their own still images and audio, which means that we ought to be able to achieve a strong documentary effect on the games we produce.
    • The Scratch website makes it easy to organize student work into galleries, and the uploading feature of the software has built-in version control, so it’s easy to see how projects evolve.
    • Interactive games and stories can be prototyped in Scratch relatively quickly for larger scale production in a subsequent course. We have done this successfully for several years at The College of New Jersey.

     

    In reflecting upon the game design process in the context of journalism pedagogy, and on the use I expect to make of this game in particular, a series of guiding questions and considerations emerge that I want to share here.

    Learn more about this project

    Game design as journalism: general questions and considerations

    • What’s the journalistic goal of making this or any other newsgame?As with text, video, audio, still images and static information graphics, the value of news games as journalism is a function of editorial judgment and skill. Regardless of the medium, the focus is on the story one is trying to tell.

    My goal with the food stamp game is to find new ways to share information and provoke conversations about poverty and the problem of healthy food access in poor communities. The actual experience of shopping with an electronic benefits card (EBT card for short) is something that many Americans, and thousands of Trenton-area residents experienced for the first time during the economic downturn of the last few years. They have joined an often-invisible army of millions. In 2008, the Columbia Journalism Review considered the need for fresh ways of shining a spotlight on the problems of the poor:

    “How can a reporter cover that most persistent of problems, poverty, today without making it boring and predictable, or guilt-tripping readers and turning them off?”

    Hypothetically, simulations of how poor people attempt to meet basic needs might be a way of engaging news consumers and encouraging further exploration of the issues raised. To test this hypothesis, I plan to have students consider how the Food Stamp game might be improved both as a work of journalism and as a computing artifact. As the course evolves, I expect that other approaches to these and similar projects to emerge.

    • What kinds of stories and issues lend themselves best to newsgames and especially, to which type of game? Should the game stand alone or should it be combined with other forms of storytelling and exposition?

    Using Wired.com’s “Cutthroat Capitalism” interactive feature and simulation game about the business model behind Somali piracy as an example, the Bogost text notes that game design techniques open up ways of revealing complex systems. Both the feature and the game make the point that piracy continues off the coast of Somalia because the shipping companies targeted find it more profitable to risk being pirated and pay ransoms than to change their shipping routes. For their parts, the pirates also find the potential wealth to be garnered from crime to be more lucrative than the alternatives available to them, despite the risk of arrest or violence.

    The feature uses the expository technique of process analysis, a method for explaining the how or why something happens or is done. This is a common technique in magazine writing, especially for articles designed to impart personal advice, or to explain how a big news event happened. tt frequently lends itself to a very structured layout with accompanying graphics. (This Jan. 1992 Black Enterprise package, “The Big Comeback” which I worked on with Dawn Baskerville, is typical – it offers advice on how to recover after falling into debt.)

    The Wired.com narrative feature, though, tries to do something more ambitious, which is to make an economic analysis interesting and accessible.

    Wired’s Cutthroat Capitalism feature story and game broke new ground

    It is organized into four sections:

    1. The Hot Zone:Pirates Know Plunder Pays
    2. The Attack: Shippers Brave Shortcuts Through Pirate Waters
    3. The Negotiation: Offer or Counteroffer, Shoot or Stand Down?
    4. The Resolution: Sealing the Deal and the Getaway

    From the perspectives of computer science and game design, Wired.com structured and highly visual approach to the narrative was highly conducive to the kind of abstraction needed to create a game to complement the feature.

    The process analysis method contrasts with the human-interest angle, another popular feature writing technique for approaching complex issues. Human interest stories help us understand what it feels like to be caught in the middle of a complex event, as Alfred Lubrano of the Philadelphia Inquirer does beautifully in his 2010 series on hunger in Philadelphia’s first congressional district.  Lubrano shows us hardworking parents rendered incapable of feeding their kids by sudden job losses, and spotlights a dedicated social worker struggling to help them. The series had an impact, too – readers responded by helping one mother find a new job and an apartment.

    In theory, a well-designed game could complement a strong human-interest series. The food stamp game is one example of such a complementary

    A Portrait of Hunger - by Alfred Lubrano
    Alfred Lubrano’s Philadelphia Inquirer series on hunger inspired readers to help one struggling mother find a new job and home for her family.

    effort. Other examples might be designed around the challenges faced by a social worker struggling with a burgeoning caseload,  or a social entrepreneur looking for ways to bring jobs and a healthy environment back to the community.

    • How do the journalism goals of the game translate into design requirements – and constraints- for the game?

    Creating a game from a complex narrative, whether real or imagined, requires a level of abstraction that can have all kinds of unintended results. The interactive story Façade has been hailed for the sophistication of the artificial intelligence that allows the gamer to participate in a drama whose narrative arc bears an impressive similarity to the Edward Albee masterpiece, Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf. In 2007 and 2008, I asked a number of students and others to play Façade and observed the results. After watching about 40 people between the ages of 15 and 45 participate in the story, I saw a consistent tendency to “game” the story. Instead of becoming immersed in the drama, players did things that they thought would skew the game one way or another, often with results they found hilarious. I think that this was partially a function of the rudimentary quality of the 3-D graphics (a compromised necessitated by the processing requirements of the AI.)  It became obvious that the experience of Façade is nothing like that of the drama that inspired it. This may be fine in this instance because the two works stand apart from each other, but a similar result in a game with a journalistic purpose threatens to trivialize the story or issue that it is trying to elucidate.


    Clearly, then, the journalistic success of The Food Stamp Game project requires careful attention to the dramatic elements – or the storytelling experience of the game, along with the formal game elements (such as rules) or the technical requirements. For a further understanding of these challenges, I will have students turn to the guidance in Tracy Fullerton’s Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games along with some of the project management techniques that my colleagues and I have developed in seven years of teaching game design at The College of New Jersey. I will discuss this in a subsequent post.

    Acknowledgements: This work draws upon research funded by Microsoft Research and National Science Foundation grants 0739173 and 0829616