MSNBC’s newsbreaker game

David Johnson April 18th, 2007

I spied the link over at fimoculous and had to scope it out. Part of the “fuller spectrum of news,” newsbreaker is a ye olde paddle controller brickbreaker game harkening the days of Atari 2600 yore. Resplendent with the new “spectrum” color swatch branding, the twist is that as you pop swatches by bouncing the ball around, headlines fall out and as they are caught, they get decked in a rail on the right so you can read them. Ok, yes, I’ve been talking about media companies getting serious about games for a while, but I’ve been talking about serious games. I’m certainly not slighting casual games or even novelty interfaces that gank old skool arcade style such as newsbreaker, but the idea is applying solid factual information and journalistic principles to the power of interactive, virtual space for telling stories in a whole new way. That being said, newsbreaker is something brave, something new, and something worth commenting on after you’ve toyed with it. There’s also a screensaver thing there, but I admit, I’m not ready to commit: Active Desktop Channels and Pointcast burned me so badly I am still not ready for such a relationship, even after all these years.