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NarcoGuerra – Auroch's game about the Mexican drug wars

How to make a news game in five steps



Auroch Digital has made a series of news games, analysing real-world stories like Syria (Endgame: Syria) and the drugs war in Mexico (NarcoGuerra). Last month the studio was invited to speak at the News Game Hackathon, a kind of current affairs game jam, organised by independent game studio, the Good Evil.

The Guardian was there, along with several other major news organisations, and there was a strong belief that games have an important and innovative role in the future of journalism.

So how should you approach making a news game? Here's a five-step guide:

Choose the right subject

"You need to choose a topic where you can deliver something that the linear media cannot or is not," says Rawlings. This may be a local story that you know a lot about and isn't getting coverage elsewhere, or a big story that you feel could be explored through a game.



"Most people producing news games right now are amateurs rather than journalists," says Rawlings. "There was one produced recently around the situation in Ukraine, it was just an Angry Birds-style game where you're throwing things at various political figures. It was quite fun, more of a satirical cartoon than a news game, and there's nothing wrong with that."

It's also important to bear development process in mind. If the story is going to pass in a couple of days, it's unlikely you'll be able to produce a game in time.

Make the most of interactivity

"It's all about replayability," says Rawlings. "Games can put you in the shoes of someone you're not. The idea behind Endgame: Syria was that there are lots of different competing factions, so the player can take one set of decisions, see the outcome, then take another."

Choose the right platform

"If you want rapid dessiminaton, the web is still the best way," says Rawlings. Some form of Javascript or HTML 5 is the best bet at the moment. We've developed smart phone apps, but the Apple App Store takes seven days. The Android store is better, you can pass something through in a couple of hours, but the web is immediate."

"The problem with HTML 5 is, it's a comparatively new protocol. There are packages like GameMaker: Studio that would allow you to make something comparatively quickly, but it's still very tech heavy. That's one of the issues."

"If you're not a developer, ideally you should find one to work with. Otherwise you need to re-engineer something that's already out there. Loads of people publish free Java Script tutorials - in fact, the game that the Guardian's writer made at the News Hackathon, took a Flappy Bird tutotrial from the web and re-engineered it as something else. News does that all the time – news takes popular catchphrases and uses them to make a catchy headline. Using popular tropes is a way to communicate with people."

There's also the interactive story creator, Twine, but Rawlings wants to see the development of tools that can help journalists with no experience of coding to produce a news game within a couple of hours.

Market it though social media and on game sites

"There's a still a novelty factor to news games," says Rawlings. "If you wrote an essay about Prism on your blog, it's going to be hard to get traction unless you're saying something remarkable. But if you did a game about Prism, that's unusual.

"There are plenty of sites like Kongregate where you can post HTML objects, so you can explore those. Also, social media is very important. Even though we we couldn't distribute Endgame: Syria on the Apple App Store, we had a version on Facebook, we had an Android version, we had a free download version on sites like Indiecade. You need to distribute widely."

Be prepared to defend your work

"When you make a news game you into into a whole new world of controversy," says Rawlings. "When we released Endgame, we had people telling us that we were clearly on the side of the regime because the game was difficult so we were trying to put people off siding with the rebels; then we had people saying that, because you play o the rebel side, the game is pro-rebel.



"so you hit all those journalistic issues to do with bias, but then you also hit the issue of it being a game. That happened a lot with Narco – people said 'how dare you treat this serious issue as a game'. You have to be prepared to stand by your work, even more than if you'd have written a song or an essay. You need to say, no, a game can be sensitive to the material."

