The Uber Game — The Financial Times
One piece of unique and interesting journalism that I thought I would look into, was the Uber Game, that was produced by The Financial Times in 2017. The game is incredibly creative, and is based on real life reporting and interviews with Uber drivers in San Fransisco.
The narrative is based on a feature produced by Leslie Hook, and is about the life choices Uber drivers have to make to make ends meet. The game encourages you to play as a character and make choices throughout the game based on real life decisions and budgeting made by real people. The game informs the audience in a new way and encourages them to emotionally understand the story. As Manovich (1999) explains, most narratives and games are similar, where the audience must uncover the underlying meanings, or its algorithm. The Financial Times said in a review of the game, that they believe games are an important but under-explored use of interactivity within journalism. As well as this, interactions within the content we produce is crucial for the commercial side of publishing (Bradshaw, 2017) and this helps push stories up through the ranks in search engines.
The game is a mock up of reality, and the audience is able to feel and understand emotion and conflict relating to that story, as well as learn more about the complexity of the subject. For example, depending on how the game is played, can lead to feelings of anger and disappointment, which is similarly experienced by the real people reported on in the story.
In this game you can see the importance of temporality within the actions of the events. The story is told in chronological order, which are the events that occur in the day to day lives of an Uber driver. Some events in the game are more prominent than others and therefore the choices made in the game are not always equal. This therefore contributes heavily to the pacing of the story. For example, there is more emphasis on making decisons about budgeting to fix the car when it is damaged, and having enough time to complete more ‘rides’ or go home to help your son with his homework.
The game also gives a sense of control to the user, because of their conscious decisions, meaning it is their actions that create the consequences that may occur in the game. As the Uber game is based on real anecdotes and stories collected by a journalist, the choices that a user makes mirrors a life choice made by real people, and therefore brings them closer to the story. It is common to think games as solely mimetic, because the user plays as a character and puts themselves in the shoes of someone else. You as a game player are largely mimetic because you are choosing the actions the character makes. However, it is also diegetic because the context of the game is explained to the player that is seperate from the actual gameplay. Ian McCamant, a gaming blogger, argues that games actually blur the narrative lines of mimesis and diegesis. He further explains that games lie somewhere in the middle of text and physical game play.
At the end of the game, there is a link to the article produced by Leslie Hook about Uber drivers and their lives in San Fransisco. When reading the article, there are stories that have been picked up and used in the game. The game has therefore allowed the user/audience to bring themselves closer to the story and become immersed in it. However, I think this could have been presented better. The text navigating the reader to the actual article was really small, so many people may have clicked off the page before reading the full story. If there is anything that could be improved, it would be making the link to the article more obvious to the reader.
- Bradshaw, P. (2017) The Online Journalism Handbook: Skills to survive and thrive in the digital age. 2nd edn. Abingdon: Routledge.
- Manovich, L. (1999) “Database as a symbolic form” From Millennium Film Journal №34.
- Fulton, H. (2005) Narrative and Media. Cambridge University Press.
- https://www.ft.com/content/c9a8b592-a81d-11e7-ab55-27219df83c97
- https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/IanMcCamant/20160303/267101/Between_the_Lines_Games_and_Diegesis.php
- https://source.opennews.org/articles/how-and-why-financial-times-made-uber-game/
