It’s being said that we dream every time we’re asleep and just don’t always remember them when we wake up. I can count all the dreams I’ve had in the past year on one hand and they were all pretty strange with people that I know in different roles and situations acting completely atypical. I keep telling myself I ought to write the dreams down yet once I sit down most of it is gone and the fragments make even less sense than the dream itself did.
Some days ago I had another vivid dream that made no sense at all.
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I dreamt that a government official had announced during a press conference with representatives of all the game companies that game developers worldwide would receive substantial financial backing if they all developed one game and each provided daily DLC updates depending on their region. Once he had finished explaining the rough outline in a couple of sentences massive discussions started between the different companies and the noise level in the hall was unbearable.
The government official tried speaking, but even though the microphone had previously transmitted his voice loudly across the room it had become nothing more than a whisper and so everyone missed his explanation until he said “based on current news”. Suddenly the room was quiet enough to hear a pin drop to the floor and everyone who had gotten up and stood together in groups or leaned over the chair had stopped in mid motion and just stared to the front in disbelief.
Several minutes passed until a representative from Ubisoft raised her hand and said, the hand still raised, “Excuse me, could you repeat this, please?”.
The government official, worried about the surprising reaction by the assembled crowd, started talking again, his voice shaking: “As I said, it has been unanimously decided by all the nations in the world that games are no longer allowed to contain fictional material. All the companies now have to work together with the creation of one game that will contain daily DLC updates based on current news. People no longer just have to watch or read the news, but play the news to feel more of a part of it.”
It was like a storm erupted in the hall as everyone had started laughing.
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It definitely is one of the more ‘out there’ dreams, isn’t it? I spent a good few days trying to think on how my mind came up with it, as surely there couldn’t be any real world relation to it? As a last ditched attempt I decided searching my Google Reader archives thinking that if there’s a relation I would have read it via RSS.
And one of the first search combinations I tried yielded a result:
“BlackBerrys, iPods and Kindles are not enough anymore. Let’s add a joystick to the expanding repertoire of tools available to news consumers. [...]
In order to interest readers and keep them interested, news organizations should come up with ways to incorporate news in video game format without extricating the two.”
Whilst I obviously had far richer detail and fleshed it out a bit, or rather a lot, in my dream, the basis is still there. There really is an idea to combine news with gaming and use the medium gaming as a news source. Sure, it’s along the same lines of having campaign adverts for Obama ingame, but it still is a completely ‘out there’ idea.
I agree that a large majority of people don’t show sufficient interest in current affairs, but inserting them into games seems the wrong way to go at it. Rather traditional news reporting should be made more easy to pick up as it’s very difficult understanding most things without knowing the entire backstory. This is also something Charlie Brooker mentions in his new TV series ‘Newswipe‘.
One of the best ways is how BBC news does it. Every article on there contains one or more paragraphs at the end briefly summarising all the related events to date as well as links to the archive on the right hand side. For example the latest story on the Madeleine McCann disappearance includes:
Madeleine was almost four years old when she disappeared from a holiday flat in Praia da Luz, in the Algarve, on 3 May 2007.
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Coming back on the gaming story some of the comments left at Kotaku sum it up quite well:
So let me get this straight. There is a idea that would allow people to “Play the News?” WHy on earth would anyone want to do that? “The Prime Minister has raised the Tax on Fuel today!” Would we have to press a Button to continue and raise it? I want to play games, not do Virtual News. #
I don’t honestly like the prospect where an individual can say they learned about current events because they played a game. Even if print journalism is dying, at least you can say you got your information from an established outlet of news. #
Better online support and user/reader interactivity is key, but I’m not sure “games” like this are the way to go. If it’s just raw, unbiased information you want to get out, do it in small blurbs and easily digestible chunks–that’s what the internet is all about. As a previous commenter said, I don’t think this could be done without a bias, and even if it can, it would make a terribly boring game. I’d rather just read an article. Not to mention the development time these things take–it’s not news anymore by the time they are finished. This is only going to work for larger, ongoing stories. #
instead of spending funds on this kind of thing, wouldn’t it be better spent on more reporters instead? #
By incorporating videogames you are bringing more senses and ruining news. You change importance you change focus. You will not play Konami’s new wargame to find out about Iraq, you do that in support of other information.
I read the dying breed of newspaper, and even that is broken down into very few good papers; The Guardian over here, NY Times over there and a few others, and to mix these with the tabloidesque gaming industry will never work.
Games can be taken seriously so let them develop on their own. They’re not interactive movies. They’re not forms for journalism. They are nothing more than videogames.
Keep the arts apart. #
How do I get passed the giant enemy Lion in level 3? #
