This just in. Playing the news
Gonzalo Frasca
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Gonzalo Frasca is a video game theorist and developer, currently researching serious gaming at the Center for Computer Games Research at IT University of Copenhagen. He publishes the game research site Ludology.org and is editor at Game Studies, an international journal of computer game research. He is also a former head of video game development at Cartoon Network LA and webmaster/journalist at CNN International. Frasca co-founded Powerful Robot Games, a studio known for its work on election video games as well as its newsgaming.com project – an area Frasca will introduce us to in receiver. Let him convince you that games are the new news.
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In 2004, a Pew Research Center report stated that an increasing number of young people in the US were getting their news about local and international events from comedy TV programs. The most popular was "The Daily Show" – hosted by Jon Stewart – which is self-described as a provider of "fake news". Certainly, mixing satire and journalism is not new but Jon Stewart's success is unheard of in the history of TV journalism. It would be too easy to attribute the show's appeal to the fact that it is indeed very funny, but that is just part of the story.
The Daily Show's secret is that it does not take itself seriously. If you think about it, journalists are usually afflicted by the same pedantry that is common among doctors. Both are respected members of our society because they deal with extremely important matters ("Life" and "The Truth", respectively). Don't get me wrong: I like to make fun of doctors but I'm quite grateful to them if they manage to alleviate my pain whenever I am sick. Similarly, I do not hold a grudge against journalists (I used to be one myself). My problem with newspeople is that they believe that there is such a thing as objective truth. And that is just plain silly.
Young audiences simply do not buy into objective news coverage. Our youth is extremely media-savvy, much more than previous generations. They know all about spin. They know that they cannot trust photographs because they learnt how to use Photoshop before going to high school. They know that objectivity is a myth because they are sick of reading inaccuracies about themselves on their friends' blogs. YouTube and digital camcorders made them realize how camera angles and editing can manipulate "the truth". Young audiences know that media lies to them all the time not just because of the shameful post 9-11 news coverage by the US media. They also know it because they constantly run into what look like respectable emails or websites but are instead internet hoaxes and phishing tricks.
Believe it or not, this lack of respect towards serious journalism is a very good thing because it opens the door to alternative – but still rigorous – ways to understand our realities. Comedy is one of them. Video games come next.