Gaming as Journalism
LATimes.com is is “talking with the USC game lab about coming up with new story-telling formats,” according to LATimes General Manager Rob Barrett (full disclosure: used to work with Rob at ABCNews.com) on OJR.com. I think the game lab Rob refers to is the engineering school’s GamePipe project, which has a serious component but doesn’t mention news on its Web page.
Wow. Folks are always talking about devising “new ways of telling stories” for the Web, but this is one of the few real outside-the-box explorations I’ve seen mentioned specifically. How would it work? Could you enter a gaming environment and see how an Iraqi battle appears to the soldiers there (I’ve seen a game like that, based on real events, I was told)? Instead of relatively flat graphics and panels, would you be able to, say, navigate through three-dimensional representations of technological or scientific stories?
The possibilities are mind-blowing. Maybe there’ll even at some point be an interchange between news divisions and gaming companies or brokers (see bottom of page).