Videogames and Current Affairs: Interactive Headlines

British TV program Have I Got News for You is my favorite show. On the surface, it's a topical panel-based quiz show, but it attacks the week's news with such knife-like sardonicisim that since 1990, it's grown from political humor and Leno-type observation into a riotous, hugely influential fixture of British culture – so influential, people's careers can live or die by it.

Recorded the day before its broadcast, it's a great example of current affairs entertainment. Its short production schedule is critical to its success; with longer production times the show wouldn't be topical, and no-one would care how funny or scathing it was. These days, audiences demand currency from the media, entertainment or otherwise. We want live football, today's newspaper, this week's gossip. As possibly the most topical of all mediums, the Internet has come to dominate our lives, feeding our appetite for leading-edge information. As a result, instant access to current affairs is fast becoming the oxygen of modern society.

Yet within this current affairs-dominant atmosphere, videogames have barely even registered. Game content characteristically has little to do with contemporary issues, instead featuring bearded wizards, scantily-clad warrior girls, big explosions and witty one-liners, all of which bear little relevance to our reality. In mainstream gaming, socio-political relevance comes mostly from the Modern Warfare and Grand Theft Auto series; the former vague and exaggerated, the latter – albeit excellently – broad and prone to stereotype. And while Kojima's Metal Gear Solid series does offer stronger commentary than these, its point of view often gets lost in the designer's penchant for the absurd.  

Some people think games should be like movies, they're not to commentate or react but to entertain, to provide fantasy and escape. But in addition to entertaining us, movies can also be topical, often powerfully so. Documentaries in particular, like Super Size Me, Fahrenheit 9/11 and even the ostensibly light-hearted mockumentary Borat fearlessly address our society's foibles. But the nature of film prevents it from being truly current. Movies often demand lengthy production times (sometimes lasting years) which make it impossible for the biggest blockbusters to deal with what's going on in the moment.

Production times are an even bigger issue for games, which explains the hesitance of the big publishers to embrace timelier concepts. By contrast, indie developers are driving a creative renaissance, making small games about anything and everything. Their efforts, coupled with increasingly widespread digital distribution, are bound to change the face of gaming and point to the day when games will address more grown up things. But is this kind of wholesale metamorphosis possible in the foreseeable future? Gaming's near-incestuous relationship with the Internet argues that it can. After all, indie cult hero and quickie game developer Jonatan Söderström says it usually takes him only a few days to make a game. But maybe he's just one eccentric Swede. Maybe for now, the idea that games can be topical and that game development can be quick is unrealistic. We are talking about the outlook for mainstream games after all, not indie games. Nonetheless, it isn't completely false to say current affairs can't be a part of gaming, nor that gaming itself can be current, but it might be already happening.

Change is already here

A prime example of this is the Xbox Live game 1 vs. 100. OK, stop sneering. Yes, it's a quiz show clone. Nevertheless, thanks to the 360's online capability, it does offer up-to-date questions for players to answer, representing a rare example of extremely current gaming. And thanks to the game's wide range of questions, it is also broadly relevant. Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10's 'Play the Pros' represents another example of up-to-the-minute gaming within a more established game series. The series lets players compare their scores against the ones real-life pros like Woods, Montgomerie and Singh have made in a recent tournament, or even against the scores they're making live. Astonishingly, in-game course weather can even reflect the corresponding live, real-world weather. In a third example (that in fairness, could be dismissed as advertising or product placement) remember when President Obama's election billboards besieged our game worlds last year? Didn't it make games feel more contemporary for those of us who were seeing Obama's billboards plastered all over our real-world cities? OK, on second thought, maybe the value of that one's questionable.

Anyway, like it or not, these examples represent the first inklings of an inevitable convergence between current affairs and gaming. Think of the possibilities: running a Sim City version of a real-life London city with mirrored developments and events. Or how about playing through the murder mystery you watched just last night, or downloading that YouTube exercise video on Wii Fit, or bringing Beyoncé's new music video to a Project Natal version of Dance Dance Revolution? While this might seem unlikely in the immediate future, one need only look at the breadth of convergence iPhone apps offer, or how the music industry continues to respond to the Guitar Hero and Rock Band franchises to see that the future of interactive entertainment is already here. Regardless, while all this is exciting, it's but one side of the coin. The idea of integrating current events into gaming is appealing, but still lacks the currency and substance of a show like Have I Got News for You. So far, gaming as a whole just isn't prepared to offer a reaction to current affairs; it doesn't offer commentary on them—just convergence.

Thus far, the most famous example of a game providing topical, indeed controversial commentary, is Danny Ledonne's 2005 Super Columbine Massacre RPG! which depicted the tragic Columbine High School shootings of 1999. You play as the two gunmen who killed 12 students and one teacher, taking out victims in Final Fantasy-like battles, battles interspersed by flashbacks of significant, purportedly influential events within the gunmen's lives. Not surprisingly, the game got a mixed reaction. Some saw it as exploitative and harmful, while others deemed it art, a challenge to game developers to use the medium to tackle difficult subjects. One such supporter was game designer Ian Bogost, whose defense of the game as valid artistic expression prompted calls for him to be terminated from his post as associate professor at Georgia Tech.

Bogost continued his professorship undeterred and since then has worked on a number of other noteworthy projects. He launched News Games in 2008, A Georgia Tech blog in which he and his students discuss the journalistic potential of videogames. His own blog, Water Cooler Games, discusses the latest social, political and news-based videogames —typically small Flash-based games. Bogost is also the founding partner of Persuasive Games, a development team specializing in games with agendas. Persuasive Games makes both original and client-commissioned games for organizations like Shell Oil, The New York Times, and U.S. Aid. You might have played their game Killer Flu, a simulation which portrays the realities of how pandemics evolve, or Fatworld, a game that highlights how our socioeconomic status affects our eating habits.

Readers of Bogost's work will know that these small current affairs games have come a long way over the last decade, and not just within the Persuasive Games realm. There have been plenty of other games sanctioned and promoted by high profile outlets like Persuasive Games' own clients, and the field overall has expanded,  particularly on Newgrounds.com, the YouTube equivalent for Flash games. Some of these games have even found mainstream coverage like the aforementioned Super Columbine, Bogost's co-developed September 12th, and Raid Gaza, which is based on the Gaza strip conflict. Persuasive Games' titles while topical, typically deal with long-standing issues rather than specific events, such as America's obesity problem (Fatworld), or how human rights are affected by security rules in American airports (Airport Insecurity, Jetset: A Game for Airports). Games made shortly after specific current events tend to be more comical, like the Shoegate games which have you either playing as Bush dodging the shoes or trying to hit him with them. I know which side I'd prefer to be on.

Clearly, there's an interest in developing topical games and playing them, so why haven't they moved into mainstream gaming? Why are there no current affairs games on Xbox Live or PlayStation Network? The major problem is funding. Finding an individual investor to fund and distribute a game is easier than persuading Sony, Microsoft or even Valve (with Steam on the PC) to digitally distribute it. This is mainly because major distributors do not see the monetary potential in these agenda-based games. Then there's the issue of critics who suggest current affairs games favor agenda over entertainment. On top of this, the big console companies generally prefer to steer clear of the controversy a game like Raid Gaza might generate.

Looking ahead

For now, developers may have to look to the iPhone if they want to quickly produce a current interest game on a mainstream platform. But even then there's a problem, one that affects all of the major digital distributors: approval. Even if you're able to quickly develop a game, getting approval from the distributor takes time, and this can affect the timeliness and therefore the impact of the game. One need only look at Bailout Bonanza on the iPhone, which satirized the bailouts of banks last year and the huge money involved. By the time the game was released, further developments in the story had lessened the game's impact. This issue would likely be magnified on Xbox Live and PSN, as both Sony and Microsoft have rigid approval guidelines.

Production schedules, funding, timely approval—all these issues stand in the way of gaming becoming as current as other mainstream media. And while these are formidable obstacles to game evolution, the biggest hurdle facing topical games at present is the entertainment factor. After all, think back to Have I Got News for You. While other British politics-based shows like Newsnight and Question Time enjoy strong ratings and certainly hold influence, Have I Got News for You is the only one with a prime-time slot on BBC 1. Many viewers' interest in politics grew from watching Have I Got News For You, and because of it they now watch other, more serious shows. Thus far, games have no analog to this. They're either entertaining or topical—rarely both. When we point to Modern Warfare 2's 'No Russian', with its clumsy execution and even clumsier attempts to deliver a political message, we should realize that gaming can do so much more. Like Professor Bogost, many gamers believe fun shouldn't be the only prerequisite to making a game and that current affairs can become an integral part of gaming. We just need the right game to come along and prove it.