Endless mode: Exploring the procedural rhetoric of a Black Lives Matter-themed newsgame

Abstract

A week after the back-to-back police shootings of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling in early July 2016, a game developer, who goes by the screen name Yvvy, sat in front of her console mulling over the headlines. She designed a newsgame that featured civilian–police interactions that were plucked from that reportage. She entitled it Easy Level Life. The newsgame is fashioned in what developers call ‘endless mode’, where players are challenged to last as long as possible against a continuing threat, with limited resources or player-character lives. This case study explores the procedural rhetoric of Easy Level Life to investigate how it condemns police brutality through play. Using Teun van Dijk’s concept of ‘news as discourse’ as the framework, I found that this newsgame followed the narrative structure of a traditional newspaper editorial very closely. I explain how the situation–evaluation–conclusion discursive model best describes how Easy Level Life conveys its political ideologies. I conclude by suggesting that this discursive model should perhaps become a benchmarking tool for future newsgame developers who aim to strengthen their arguments for social justice.

Postscript: Gaming While Empire Burns

“…For if the writing of this postscript began in the shadows of pandemic lockdown, we finish it under the fiery illumination of the torching of the Minneapolis police station and the massive, international multiracial demonstrations in support of Black Lives Matter (BLM)’s insurgence against racist police violence. These events are being registered in gaming in the complex and contradictory way that would be expected of a digital culture formed by the encounter of empire and multitude, with responses encompassing widespread expressions of support for BLM from a gaming industry suddenly anxious about the politics of its player base (Epic’s removal of police cars from Fortnite is a case in point) (Needleman, 2020; Smith 2020b); the critique of such “blackwashing” gestures as “too little, too late” (Jackson, 2020; Johnson, 2020); and the mobilization by BLM and its supporters of game elements in an outburst of digital activism accompanying the battles in the streets (Hyun-Su, 2020; Richardson, 2020).…”