Georgia Tech Plays Video Games to Save Journalism

Ian Bogost, the primary investigator of the Journalism and Games project at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has found the question of how journalism and games intersect to be “much bigger than I originally thought.”

Mr. Bogost, an associate professor in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture, teaches in the undergraduate Media Computation and the graduate Digital Media programs. He is also a founding partner at video game developer Persuasive Games.

His goal is to investigate how video games can work within, and perhaps help rescue, the ailing field of journalism. His graduate students ask questions such as: Is there anything in the game-development process that could be applied to the practice of journalism? Can games be used to make an editorial statement? Can the lauded “citizen journalism” model be considered a game and managed as such? Would it help bring new life to a failing industry?

“If we wanted to design games to interact with journalism” — such as building one with storytelling resources that could be leveraged into longer-form articles and investigative reports, for example, or one that would explore the next equivalent of adding a crossword puzzle to raise sales — “how would one go about doing it?” Mr. Bogost said.

Mr. Bogost founded Persuasive Games, and wrote a book of the same title, to show how games can make arguments. Video games, he argued, can be a new form of rhetoric through rule-based procedures and interactions. This interactive medium can teach, cajole, challenge, and collect information.

Using this concept of games as both a medium and a tool, Mr. Bogost centered the Journalism and Games project to explore what each area has to contribute to the other, he said. And the answer may be nothing, he added. But given the number of newspaper closures and downsizings recently, he hopes to contribute something positive. —Dan Turner