It’s difficult to believe the two things I am most obsessed with have combined to form a hybrid-uber obsession, but here it is.
Screw reading the news. Let’s all learn how to play the news. Play the news? Yes. Play it. Like a video game. What a freaking neat way to present big-picture data. As an example, I’ll present something tweeted during a recent #newsgames conference: http://playspent.org (with nods to @ThePixelHunt.) Play that for a few minutes and you’ll see what I mean.
As a writer with a pro-wordy bias, I believe there are things non-fiction can do very well. Narrative, for example. I would argue that even movies rarely have more power to engross than well-written prose. But when an editor comes up to me and says: “Jen, I need you to write a 2,000-word big-picture look at poverty based on this latest data from Statistics Canada,” well, I start to feel a little ball of anxiety-fuelled acid rise from my small intestine. That’s hard. Making readers care about institutional data, frak, that’s really, incredibly difficult.
Journos do have a few methods we can use to trick readers into feeling an emotion. We find human interest angles and weave them into the data, teasing the numbers into a narrative string. We’ll sex up the writing. We’ll pair the package with great photography and big, sensational headlines. Sometimes it works. Other times it doesn’t. Because, let’s face it, facts and figures are boring, even if the implications of that data are stunningly relevant.
Which is why http://playspent.org, created by the Urban Ministries of Durham, was just so neat. No purple prose. No schmaltz. Hell, not even good graphics. The game just presented the data in a way that forced the reader, or player, or whatever, to care. As I played, I felt a creeping claustrophobia akin to my early uni days when I worked as a temp, had $60 in the bank and a loaf of bread in the fridge. No matter how rich you are, or how much you attribute your personal success to your own innate awesomeness, most people with a soul would find it difficult to play this and not feel empathy.
Newspapers, why aren’t we doing this? Never mind, let’s just do this.
(PS - For an excellent write-up of Play Spent from someone much smarter than me, check out Ian Bogost’s blog here.)
