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Games Among the Winners of the Knight News Challenge

Posted by Hsing Wei on 06-24-10

One of the winners in the $2.74 million 2010 Knight News Challenge, a contest funding ideas that leverage digital technology to inform specific geographic communities, is a games for change project.  Ian Bogost (Georgia Tech) and Michael Mateas (UC Santa Cruz) collaborated in the conception of Cartoonist.  Growing partly out of research for a book, Newsgames, the project is premised on creating games that revive engagement in local current issues.

“People may have appeared to read the paper for the news, but many bought the paper for the funnies or the crossword, getting the news as a bonus along the way.  The comics and the crossword are more orthogonal to current events, but the editorial cartoon offers a more direct vector into civic matters, particularly for local issues that might not be as familiar or visible.”  According to Bogost, local editorial cartoonists have been casualties of local newspaper cuts; cuts which moreover accelerate the downward spiral in print news readership.  Mateas and Bogost’s proposed solution is Cartoonist, an authoring system for the rapid creation of current event games, playable editorials.  The system will allow users to take a current event, define topics and roles, and generate simple games representing the event components’ relationships through game mechanics and visuals.  By enabling the creation of newsgames that represent a story as an interactive system, they aim to support online news sites in introducing readers to and deepening their interaction with local issues.

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