Ian Bogost over at Water Cooler Games discusses the release of a game based on the Paris riots. He refers to an emerging genre, “documentary games†and leads us to discover a few we may not have encountered previously.
I’ve been increasingly interested in so-called documentary games (or docu-games), such as JFK Reloaded and Escape from Woomera and Waco Resurrection. In fact, Cindy Poremba and I wrote an article on documentary games that should be out in the coming months (click over to her blog for more links on the topic, to which she is devoting her Ph.D. research)
I’m really interested in the rationale and development approaches to these games – most seem to be simple single player games at this stage but I’m sure over time this will shift into multi-user environments.
I’m thinking that the use of Gamemaker could be turned to making more socially aware games – most of the discussions of Gamemaker at education conferences are about learning to make the games and the coding sequences as they relate to programming – but why not layer another level of learning upon the process? This follows on form my recent mention of Thomas Malaby’s New Approach to Gaming and subsequent mentions over at socialstudygames.