What do text-based newsgames have to do with journalism? An account from Gem Model perspective

Jan Alyne Prado

doi:10.5007/1807-9288.2021.e77835

Abstract

The article aims to discuss text-based newsgames as a multimodal artifact, having in mind the goal to systematize their expressive processing and rhetorical strategies as possible tropes for journalistic processes and practices. For that, we have adapted some of the main layers/elements of the GeM Model (Genre and Multimodality), proposed by Bateman (2008, 2014), to analyze a Brazilian text-based newsgame called “A Teia”, having in mind its material regularities and semiotic modes. The game portrays the reality of a woman who has to decide what to do upon situations of continuous domestic violence and abuse carried out by her partner. In the design of trajectory of “A Teia”, the player follows a rhetorical cluster made of a non-linear sequence, according to an event/circumstance upon which the player has to decide, and so on. Another goal of the paper is to contribute for the assessment on how procedural rhetoric of digital text-based newsgames touches crucial aspect of journalistic practices, functions and values.

Highlights

If, on one side, “the existence of a genre in a culture is considered a relatively stable communicative strategy both for achieving some relevant social purpose” (BATEMAN, 2014, p. 239), on the other, the programmable properties of digital media, and its modular nature (MANOVICH, 2001), have expanded the possibilities for genres to disappear, hybridize or colonize one another.In this sense, we discuss text-based newsgames as a potential genre for journalism, having in mind the goal to systematize expressive processing and rhetorical strategies of multimodal artifacts as tropes for journalistic processes and practices
We seek at adapting some of the main layers of the GeM Model (Genre and Multimodality), proposed by Bateman (2008, 2014), in order to systematize rhetorical strategies of a Brazilian text-based newsgame called “A Teia”1, compared to the material regularities of other prototypes of the same kind, in order to “extend out multistratal view of genre as patterns of patterns in a way that moves more readily across multimodal artifacts” (BATEMAN, 2014, p. 249)
Following Bateman’s suggestions, it is useful to ask “what semiotic modes2 are being mobilized in the service of what kinds of rhetorical strategies” in order to find 1

Summary

INTRODUCTION

On one side, “the existence of a genre in a culture is considered a relatively stable communicative strategy (as well as psychological and strategic function) both for achieving some relevant social purpose” (BATEMAN, 2014, p. 239), on the other, the programmable properties of digital media, and its modular nature (MANOVICH, 2001), have expanded the possibilities for genres to disappear, hybridize or colonize one another. The GeM model has been systematized as a multilayered of descriptive resources to analyze a static document page, we consider that some of the layers are valid for describing text-based newsgames, in the sense that they are colonized by other genres and by journalistic functions and practices, namely: the rhetorical strategies (semiotic modes), the material (canvas) and the game mechanics. Rather than following a definite linear sequence, the reader can point and click, to reach rhetorical clusters on distinct navigational pages, instead of in a fixed and linear sequence In this sense, text-based newsgames’ semiotic modes share similarities with multilinear narratives of fictional books, called book-games, in which the reader can make choices by jumping to the corresponding page set by the plot, depending on a “challenge” or situation. We believe that these prototypes may accomplish experiential meaning, whose recipient interprets the phenomena of the world as categories of experience

EXPRESSIVE PROCESSING

FINAL CONSIDERATIONS

NOTAS DE AUTORIA