By Thomas Huang
I have no doubt much will be written about this week’s debut of “Grand Theft Auto IV” — most likely framed in menacing and cautionary terms.
But let’s take the popularity of such games and explore their potential for interactive, player-directed storytelling: News organizations will increasingly experiment with video games — or computer simulations — to help players learn about news events and trends.
Imagine, for example, learning more about the Gaza Strip conflict by not only reading about it, but playing a political video game. Well, such a game, “PeaceMaker,” has already been developed at Carnegie Mellon University.
Using video games for journalistic storytelling is not far-fetched. The New York Times last year published a game to help readers understand immigration legislation that was up for debate.
“Serious games” are already being developed to help players learn about health, social, political and economic issues. Check out these sites to learn more about “serious games”:
Paul Grabowicz, a professor at the University of California-Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, is working on such a game with his students, using funding from a Knight News Challenge grant. With their “Remembering 7th Street” project, Grabowicz and his students hope to create a virtual replica of an Oakland street known for its jazz and blues club scene in the ’40s and ’50s.
“A newspaper or other local news organization needs to be more than just a pipeline for informing people about current news and events,” Grabowicz wrote in the MediaShift Idea Lab blog.
“It also should provide context for people to understand their community and its history. A video game can do that, by letting people re-live the history of their communities and understand not just what’s happening today but what came before.”
As news organizations experiment with journalistic storytelling in video games, they must also deal with this critical question: How can these computer simulations best reflect diversity?
The “Remembering 7th Street” project is one positive example. Grabowicz sends his students out into the community to gather historical information so they can present the street’s African American heritage in an authentic way.
But as Aly Colon pointed out in a previous Diversity at Work piece, diversity is not well-represented in most video games. And when it is, it typically comes in the form of a stereotype. Even worse, some games traffic in hate.
“Today there are a lot of games — many of them available for free — that make no bones about spewing racist, sexist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic beliefs, often wrapped in attempts at humor,” write Dr. Lawrence Kutner and Dr. Cheryl K. Olson, directors of the Harvard Medical School Center for Mental Health and Media and co-authors of Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that we censor such games or demand political correctness in, of all things, violent video games. What I’m suggesting is that if part of our mission as journalists is to educate our readers about diverse communities, and if we venture into the world of journalistic video games, then we’ll need to find a way to marry the two. Part of that will depend on how diverse the staffs are that produce video games — and how well schools are developing such diverse talent.
Editor’s note: This is the first of a two-part series about using video games to tell journalistic stories.
