It’s A Long Way From Kung Fu Grip.

Action Reporter

The Houdini thing below is having its first protoplaytest in a couple of weeks. We’ll see how that goes. But there’s one other project I’m excited about that I forgot to mention. It’s about war journalism in the era of the citizen journalist, the blogger. The date is 15 years from now. The civil war has entered your town. Some of your friends took up arms. You took up a cellphone camera and a secure server. The inspirations are Max Headroom and DMZ. The concept’s got a lot to be worked out, but most of the game will likely have to do with dealing with information suppression and figuring out how to make and fight propaganda.

In the interest of that, check out the war reporter action figure pictured at the top of this post. Think about how cool it is that there’s an action figure who comes with a camera and laptop. Notice that you can stick different logos on the camera to subtly distinguish your perspective on the war and its reporting.

0 thoughts on “It’s A Long Way From Kung Fu Grip.”

  1. The whole idea of bringing one’s version of what’s happening right now to others at the risk of death, with the possibility to influence people all the way up to the major political level… vertigo!

    The other reason is that I had sketched a few notes for a game with a similar idea, but with the atrocities of war already well behind us.
    Themes like how the victims get to talk about what happened to them when memory and powerful political actors (oppressors and third parties) are against them, historians and journalists trying to navigate between the alternative truths of a past that is rapidly fading away, those third parties under great pressures on a completely different scale, etc.
    Possibly a three player game: victim, “hider of truth for good reasons” and journalist/historian.

    Problem is, I have very little knowledge of actual stories of that kind, so I’m pretty stuck. I’ve just the notion that what happened in the Balkans or Rwanda could be quite inspiring.

    Thus, reading about a similar game in development is pretty exciting to me!

  2. Yeah, Guy, that’s where the idea first came from. Just forgot to mention it in the post. DMZ got me really hot for the idea, though, as did War-Fix.

    Christoph, yeah, finding real inspiration for “how Journalism saved the world” is kind of hard. Transmetropolitan does it by assuming that a) public opinion really matters and b) people read the news.

    I want to do some research into Viet Nam War-era journalists, too; arguably, they were the ones who made it possible for the citizens at home to stop the war.

  3. Well, I think the world is a parody of the real world. I don’t think it’s fucked up in new ways; it’s the same ways, but cartoonishly large. Identity politics (race, religion) become a manufactured race and religion. Government corruption becomes… well, more government corruption. The leap that Ellis makes (I always confuse him with Ennis) is that a lone journalist β€” a writer, even β€” can get everyone’s attention fast and effectively.

    What’s “CR :P”?

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