Keine Experimente. No Experiments. That was the election campaign slogan of the CDU, the German Christian Democrats in 1957. They did very well with that slogan, which became a familiar quotation ever after. Most of the time used with an ironic undertone.
Teichoscopy versus Literacy
If you have a closer look at the situation of the Media in general and Journalism in particular you get the Impression that the general approach – well at least in Germany – is just like that. Keine Experimente.
The latest german example is the Berlin Wall Video Game ‘1378 (km). Instead of embracing new immersive ways of history examination the german media bashed the whole project with a strange mixture of misunderstanding and eyebrow raising highculture talk. Andreas Rosenfelder (FAZ) obviously saw the necessity to explain the ancient greek concept of Teichoscopy instead of trying to understand the work of Jens Stober. I liked Bobby Schweizer´s take on it:
Audiences do not have the videogame literacy needed to understand these works and producers do not have the tools to adequately demonstrate their importance. While claims have been made about the lack or presence of maturity in videogames as a medium, the fundamental issue in play with 1378(km) is not related to the game industry, but rather to journalism as a profession
Understanding our world
This blog is supposed to be a place to discuss the relatively new concept of Newsgames. I am not sure who came up with that exact term. Maybe it was Gonzalo Frasca – at least you find his page about Newsgaming when you look around. It has been looking very deserted for quite some time now. But you can find some sort of definition there:
Newsgaming is a word we coined for describing a genre that is currently emerging: videogames based on news events. Traditionally, videogames have focused on fantasy rather than reality, but we believe that they can be a great tool for better understanding our world. Since newsgaming is so new, it has to find a voice of its own. Therefore, most of our games will be in part experimental.
So, here we are. Experimental. Let´s get rid of the ‘No’ in front of the Experiments. Or in german: Experimente, Ja! BTW: Please excuse my poor language skills. I am not a native speaker and i will never ever learn the rules concerning the usage of capital letters.
