Cartoon Journalism
Just been reading last weeks’s special section in New Scientist on ‘Storytelling 2.0’ and I have to say there are a few things I have _issues_ with. Fortunately I don’t have to rant about how the collaborative digital medium isn’t going to usher in a new era of literature, because Nick Carr already has. However, I do take issue with the article on games as a new form of journalism. I have no issue with the journalism of the article, just with the sense of the people behind one of the games highlighted, and especially this quote:
Like a political cartoon, the game is highly opinionated, but it presents its opinion through the rules of the game rather than through images and words.
Oh my!
So truth isn’t really their overarching concern, and the bias is subsumed into the very fabric of the medium rather than being overtly described in images and words. It should be obvious to anyone that that isn’t journalism, and just as obvious what it actually is…
And the thing is, I don’t have an issue with ‘games as journalism’ at all. In fact I think we desperately need better ways of explaining complex systems. From food production to the global arms trade, from recycling processes to career paths - so much of our world is schrouded in opacity, sometimes willfully obfuscated by special interests, sometimes simply under-investigated. Games surely provide an excellent medium for allowing people to explore these systems - many games *are* highly complex simulations already, and provide excellent environments for self-directed exploration, allow the expression of complex contingent and/or time-shifted interactions, engourage players to spend large amounts of time engaging with them - all things that other media are unable to do.
But the thing that makes them valuable - the thing that makes them journalism - is surely a close, unambiguous relationship with the truth.
