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Diversity of Journalisms. Proceedings of ECREA/CICOM Conference, Pamplona, 4-5 July 2011
The first experience of newsgames was made in 2003, when the Gonzalo Frasca, a
former Uruguayan journalist and academic researcher of technologies related to video
games, led a team of developers and created one of the first name games: "September
12 th ", which tried to raise public awareness after the attack on the Twin Towers on
September 11, 2001.
The Spanish newspaper El País was also responsible for the publication of one of the
first newsgames - the Play Madrid - on the terrorist attacks in Madrid in 2004. A few
days after the tragedy, the game was already available on the website of the
newspaper. Then it came the game “Food Import Folly” by The New York Times
Newspaper, about the lack of control over food imports in the U.S.
Another prominent example is “Prime Minister Forever”, a game that allows players to
assume the role of a political candidate in the presidential elections in Australia. To
succeed, players must become familiar with a simplified version of the Australian
political system. While the player manages his own campaign, he has to obey the
electoral rules governed by the game during the season. The player is free in the
actions they perform, but not in the rules to be enforced.
Even in the political issue, the CNN news network launched in 2007 the “Presidential
Pong”, a game in which you can play ping-pong with the candidates for the presidential
election that year. Each candidate has his skills developed in accordance with the
outcome of the election campaign in the real world. In 2009, Wired magazine also
created a video game to understand the actions of Somali pirates on merchant ships in
the waters of the Indian Ocean, called "Cutthroat Capitalism ". In this game, the reader
could become a pirate, capture a ship and negotiate the ransom.
It’s also important to notice that many commercial games use current information or
historical facts as background for his narratives, such as Return to Castle Wolfenstein,
Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30, Rome: Total War,
etc. . Historical references or current events are experienced through the visual
elements embodied in the game and in his own argument.
According to Treanor and Mateas (2009), some features are common to all the
newsgames, regardless of their gender: created in response to a current event, release
date close enough to the event to keep it relevant, able to be understood in a couple of
minutes, intent to influence the player to a particular viewpoint (persuasive), and the
identification of a problem and often the involving of a solution rhetorically
communicated through images, sound and game.
Another important feature points Silva (1999) when he says that virtual games allow
users to interact in various aspects at the same time, such as memory (visual, auditory,
kinesthetic), the temporal and spatial orientation (in two and three dimensions) ,
sensory-motor coordination (wide and thin), auditory perception, visual perception
(size, color, detail, shape, position, handedness, complementation), logicalmathematical,
linguistic expression (oral and written), the planning and organization.
The Newsgames propose a subversion of the issue and availability of traditional news
(Seabra, 2009). The new proposal also subverts the traditional narrative of the games,
to establish a new paradigm for storytelling in video games: it opens the possibility for
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