The web people are better dressed than the music people this year, futurist Bruce Sterling said in his SxSW closing remarks.
Not just better dressed but wealthier, hungrier, more optimistic, I thought.
Austin, Texas is where thousands of representatives & enthusiasts of technology, film and music gather every year to talk about their craft and make a dent in the global tequila supply. I attended in 2012 for my second time and these are the trends that I think are worth reporting on. [...]
I have been researching newsgames for the last 8 months with a view to making my own newsgame project, a multiplayer wordgame I’m working on with an online media partner, the best it can possibly be.
The first thing I discovered is that there is a fundamental mismatch in the way news and games are produced. Newsrooms are set up to turn out stories within minutes if necessary. Game studios require weeks, months or even years (a lá Duke Nukem Forever) to be brought to market. So if news is fast, and games are slow, how do you produce a newsgame that can “win” in the online news environment? [...]
One of my professor, Jay Rosen‘s, greatest preoccupations is the gap between breaking news and our understanding of its larger context. Our Studio 20 journalism group at NYU has been addressing that problem by creating original works of explanatory journalism (explainers) and prototyping new explanatory techniques for our media partner, the non-profit investigative news site ProPublica.
“The Fracking Song” is an explainer I worked on with David Holmes, a colleague in the Studio 20 class. Based on ProPublica’s investigative series on hydraulic fracturing, “Buried Secrets”, the song attempts to explain some of the facts and also the controversies surrounding the fracking process, so that users are better equipped to understand the news they receive about the subject. [...]
“The game layer is coming,” he said, and everyone in the room believed him.
At SxSW 2011, the young CEO of SCVNGR, Seth Priebatsch, expressed what was arguably the most important prediction of the illustrious tech conference: that the experience of real-life would more and more be organised around game-like structures and technologies.
Bobby Schweizer is a researcher for Georgia Tech’s Newsgames Project, which is currently developing a newsgame authoring tool for local newsrooms, codenamed The Cartoonist, in conjunction with the University of California, Santa Cruz and the Knight Foundation. Schweizer is also the co-author of Newsgames: Journalism at Play with Dr. Ian Bogost and Simon Ferrari. I chatted to Bobby about the challenge of making newsgames an accessible medium for regular journalists.
Information is cheap. It has to be, if a fourteen year old with no security clearance can learn state secrets with a regular dial-up connection. Thanks to WikiLeaks, we all can. But as more and more information is liberated on the internet – by everyone – the piles of it we are left to sort through are overwhelming.
If it no longer falls to journalists to discover, or even publish that information, what good are they at all?
I am a digital journalist interested in researching, discussing and making games. Dream Pollution is a home for everything I produce, whether in games, media or music.
