Michael Doret/WIRED

The result is seductive and memorable, but does it satisfy?

In its print form, “Cutthroat Capitalism” is an eight-page info-graphic, styled in the blocky bold colors of an NES-era cartridge video game. Interspersed among the pixilated illustrations are a buffet of equations, text boxes, org-charts, and diagrams, loosely tied together by the story of the September 2008 hijacking of the Hong Kong-flagged chemical tanker, Stort Valor. The game aesthetic sets readers up well for an actual browser-based game, which accompanies the online version of the story.

A narrative map

While the economics of Somali piracy have been covered before, notably by NPR’s Planet Money, Carney’s graphics attempt to simplify the phenomenon into what feels almost like a how-to manual. After a brief text introduction, we’re thrust into the piece’s version of scene setting. “The Hot Zone,” is a map of the region showing the locations of pirate attacks. We also see, in equation form, that the pirate’s wage is seventeen times that of the average Somali. With context out of the way, we move on to the action in three explicitly labeled acts: The Attack, The Negotiation, and The Resolution.

“When you talk about telling a story with equations, it’s very difficult to find the kernel,” says Carney. He and his editor had to impose a narrative to make the piece work, attaching minimal compartments of data and reasoning to an almost stock, three-act spine. “Writing it was different than a feature,” he says.

“The Attack” is part business plan, part video-game manual. We get the “Shipper’s Math,” an inequality that must hold true if the shipper is to sail through Somali waters. The “Pirate’s Math” gives a rough formula for figuring out when to attack. Finally we get the “Insurance Company’s Math” wherein we see a back-of-the-envelope calculation for the probability of being attacked. The section concludes with a brief Q & A with an unnamed pirate. The questions and responses are one of three interactions Carney’s piece has with actual human beings—the second being a brief interview with a security contractor and the third a chat with the Stort Valor’s captain. The story continues through the final two acts in much the same manner, giving formulas, for example, for how to choose a ransom amount and how to get away safely.

Courtesy of Siggi Eggertsson/WIRED

If there is an underlying mechanism that drives the parties in the piece, Carney lays it bare, a logical approach for a story about economic decision making. One wonders, however, how much nuance must ultimately get folded into such abstract simplifications.

“While we did learn about piracy as a business, we didn’t learn about the investigative hook that sold the article in the first place,” says Carney. He had originally pitched the story as one of collusion between insurance companies and security contractors. This dynamic is present in the disconnected boxes of the Negotiation and the Resolution, but it’s very much up to reader to make that connection.

“I like the story, I think it came out well. But in the end, you can tell a story better when you have words to deal with, instead of being restricted to graphics,” says Carney.

Playing the game

The “Cutthroat Capitalism” game keeps the same visual feel of the print piece and parallels its structure. In The Attack, the player navigates a boat in Somali waters from a top-down perspective, trying to intercept passing ships. Once intercepted, the player is taken to The Negotiation, where he makes ransom demands and can choose how to treat hostages in the attempt to move the transaction along. The player eventually either coerces a decent ransom payment and makes a safe getaway or overplays his hand and invites a Naval intervention, the two outcomes possible in The Resolution.

“The game is much more basic than the article, but what it does is draw in a reader and tells them a story in a different way,” says Carney. “Someone who plays it isn’t necessarily going to learn a lot about pirates. They might walk away with the idea that piracy is a business.”

Carney hopes that the article and game support each other, rather being an either-or proposition. For the player of the game, the article provides much more detail about what is actually happening. For the reader, the game invites a stroll in the pirate mindset, if only superficially. “It makes the reader think about that a little more viscerally than if he had just read the article,” says Carney.

Road testing the project

Shashank Bengali, a Nairobi-based McClatchy reporter, has interviewed and written about Somali pirates in the past. By email, he told the Storyboard that while the article and game presented an abstract view of a very human situation, he thinks it is a good way to communicate the economic story. 

“A lot of reporters have written about why Somalis went into the pirate business, because of the lawlessness and hopelessness of their country. This story tells us why they stay in the pirate game: because it’s good business,” he writes.

The human part that gets left out, according to Bengali, is that young Somali men simply have few employment options. “Piracy succeeds not just because of business calculations and structural issues in the shipping industry, but also because there’s no great alternative for young Somali men,” he writes.

Carney admits that he had to leave out many of the fruits of the six months of reporting that went into the piece. Given his prior narratives on black market skeletons and Indian crime bosses, one suspects this story could easily have taken a more traditional form. Carney seems happy to keep experimenting, however. Regardless of how stories are delivered, he says, “I think there’s inherent value in really strong content.”

Narrative journalism draws many of its core principles from novels, films, and short stories. Elements like character development, scene-setting, and a narrative arc work whether the tale is true or made up.

Games, however, are different.

“There are characters and stories in games, just like there are characters and stories in linear media, so it feels like you’re dealing with something that’s in the same ballpark,” says Chris Swain, associate professor at the University of Southern California’s Games Institute. “But I actually believe that they’re very different.”

Swain has designed a number of so-called “serious games” that aim to let players feel what it’s like to be inside of a real-life situation.

He says that the key difference is who’s in control of the timing and sequence of events.  In traditional media, an author meticulously crafts the reader’s experience through pacing and cadence and shifting attention.  In games, the player is in control.

“The hardest question in game design is ‘what does the player do?’,” asks Swain.

In entertainment games the action is often run, jump, shoot, but these are just a few of the available verbs.  The choice of what actions are available to the player craft the experience and communicate the point.

Swain has created an exercise in map-making called The Redistricting Game.  In it, players draw and re-draw voting district lines in a bid to influence elections for either Democrats or Republicans—player’s choice.  “You learn the fine points of redistricting by taking the same actions that a redistricter takes,” he says.

The counties and politicians are fictional, but a player’s actions and consequences convey the realities of representative democracy.  To add historical context, a short article accompanies eachmission as optional background material.

Swain believes that 90% of the reason a person plays a game is for the actual mechanics of the world and actions a player can take.  He thinks there is a real danger in forcing too much explicit story if it comes at the cost of game play. “The story has to emerge from the actions that the player takes,” he says.

The effectiveness with which a game could tell a true story depends on how well the actions a player can take correspond to the actions available to the real world person whose role the player inhabits.  Players understand a story in a deeper way because they are doing things that parallel the characters’ actions.

While the Redistricting game allows players to understand a complicated though perhaps dry issue, the game Peacemaker tackles a more emotionally charged subject: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Peacemaker places the player in the role of either the Israeli Prime Minister or the Palestinian President.  The game uses actual footage from events, such as the aftermath of a suicide bombing, or suppression of violent protest, to immerse players into the situation.

Playing as the Palestinian President, the first challenge is to respond to civilian casualties from Israeli tank shelling.  The player has a wide range of options that fall broadly into three categories: security, political, and diplomatic.  Formally ask Israel to stop? Import arms to defend the populace? Build a tourist attraction?  The player must decide what to do, relying on the advice of different advisors.  The game is complex, even on the “calm”setting—the easiest of three difficultly levels.

Asi Burak, Peacemaker’s lead designer, observes that for many people the Middle East conflict seems like “background noise”—a series of events with little connecting thread.  He thinks this is because people don’t have a good sense of the full context and the different stakeholders.  A game, he thought, would be the best way to communicate the complexities of the conflict, because it would force a person to make decisions and get immediate feedback.

“There’s something in the interactive experience that forces you to have a stake in the situation,” says Burak.

In the two years since its release, Burak has gathered a number of stories of how Peacemaker affected its players. “I’ve seen players sweating—I’ve had players tell me that they cried,” he says. “If they lose, it’s because they made certain decisions.  It becomes emotional.”  He thinks this emotional connection rises out of the action/feedback response loop and, allows a player to grasp the story of the conflict at a fundamental level.

“People came to us with the same phrase—so many times—that they understood in a few hours of playing the game, more than they understood after months or years of listening to or watching the news,” says Burak.

Both the Redistricting game and Peacemaker put a player into the middle of a big, complicated story.  One can read long-form accounts of the iniquities of democracy or the complexities of Middle-East peace, but these games put players into the heads of characters, engaging with a story at a different level.

A player’s decisions are incorporated into the story, so one could argue that he has more on the line than a reader.  If he fails, it’s his own fault—a reflection on his personal understanding of the issue.

“You understand the story in a deep way because you’ve actually tried to play it,” says Swain.

[After playing both The Redistricting Game and Peacemaker, I can see how they might be the fore-runners to more immersive and interactive journalistic narrative. They are both ambitious and impressive in scope, but feel like first steps, rather than a mature form.

The gameplay, for one, is less visceral than a typical player might expect. For example, the action in Peacemaker, is more Oregon Trail-style decision making than HALO hand-eye coordination.  This could make it hard to win the attention of a gamer audience.

It’s early though, and journalistic games will no doubt evolve. Back in the 1970s, few who looked at Pong’s blocky squares could have imagined that it would grow up to become Wii-tennis.

Coming soon: we'll break down Wired's Cutthroat Capitalism. But in the meantime, if you do check out these games, be sure to let us know if you think they have any role to play in the future of narrative journalism.]