Are Browser Games Filling the Same Role As Political Cartoons? 33
Amazon's Game Room Blog is running a piece asking whether modern browser games are coming to occupy the same purpose as political cartoons. The article was inspired by the variety of shoe-tossing games that sprung up after President Bush's recent run-in with an irate Iraqi journalist, as well as the games satirizing aspects of the presidential campaign and candidates. Quoting:
"The games are certainly no works of art, but they were not designed to be awe inspiring. They were instead designed to capture the moment, and immortalize it from a particular point of view that people in this particular time can appreciate, or at least recognize. ... just like the satirical editorial comics of our own past, these snippets of code will offer a window into the past, and the individually conceived past moments that it consists of."
yes, and some additional pointers (Score:5, Informative)
In the academic field of game studies (analogous to film studies, though much smaller), the idea of games as rhetoric/etc. has been discussed for several years. Probably the most prominent academic who also makes games in that vein is Ian Bogost, who explicitly describes a lot of what he does [bogost.com] as making "playable editorial cartoons". The New York Times for a while was actually publishing them on its online editorial page, strengthening the analogy (until a change of editor). He also happens to have a book on the somewhat broader subject of games as a means of commentary/expression/rhetoric, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (MIT Press, 2007).
There is also an index here [gatech.edu] of editorial-style "newsgames", i.e. games about recent news events released in a timely manner that make some editorial commentary about the event.