“We wanted to give readers a sense of what it was like to be a Somali pirate, if from a superficial level,” said former Wired editor Pam Statz, who commissioned the game.
Cutthroat Capitalism is one of several video games developed in recent years not just for entertainment, but for the specific aim of delivering news. In 2009, the BBC published a game called Credit Crunch to help illuminate the causes of the financial crisis. The New York Times has published a game to illustrate the difficulty of preventing outbreaks of food-borne disease from the perspective of an FDA inspector, and an immigration game in which players compete to award green cards under the system proposed by the 2007 McCain bill.
Although the movement to deliver news through games is still a fledgling one, it has attracted the interest of academics, media, and advocates all drawn to a perhaps surprising promise: that video games, when done well, have potential to do something new for our understanding of world events. With its speed and color, a video game is understandably attractive to news organizations looking for new ways to capture an audience. But for readers, or players, it can do something deeper as well: force a different kind of reckoning with the world, allowing people to see the news as a realm of choice and complexity rather than packaged information.
“The fundamental thing about video games that excites me is the ability to simulate complexity, to characterize systems and how they behave,” said Ian Bogost, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
To see games this way gives us not only a new way to appreciate the news, but a new way to think about what our brains are doing when we play a game: how much they are absorbing, whether or not we understand it at the time.
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