Ian Bogost at last week's Games For Change:

"Journalism is hardly dying, in fact, it's possible that it couldn't be killed. The idea of informing and educating a public, such that they can make independent decisions, is something that is so endemic of a democracy, that we would have to take down the democracy to kill it. Instead, what's changing is the way that we communicate with one another."

What do you think? Do you agree that journalism cannot be killed?

Full transcript

Can video games save journalism? And it's a wrong-headed question, and in order to illustrate why I think it's a wrong-headed question, I'll draw an analogy, and that analogy is the railroad.

Between 1945 and 1965 in the U.S., the country really changed from being a railway nation to an automobile nation. And it's true to some extent that before World War II, urban populations, city centers were sort of already moving out of the city, but largely what we called railroad suburbs, where walking and streetcars were still a primary means of getting around. But eventually, suburbanism became automotive, and those main streets gave way to shopping malls and supermarkets and drive through what-have-yous. But what's interesting about this is that it's not so much that transportation died or had to be saved; it just changed.

And it changed remarkably and radically, of course. And it changed the way that we live, and the way that we work and the way that we play, possibly forever. And some of those changes were good. Certainly the American sense of individualism in the automobile came in part from this and the automobile was in part responsible for this in the interstate highway system and so forth. But of course in part for the worse, not necessarily in a city like this one, but where I live in Atlanta or in many other cities around the country, the death grip that the automobile has put on us has really changed our lifestyle for the worse.

So the railway may have given way to the automobile and then again to something else, but it wasn't transportation that died. And I think this is the same truth we should think of in terms of journalism.

Journalism is hardly dying; in fact, its possible that it couldn't be killed. The idea of informing and educating a public such as they can make independent decisions is so endemic to a democracy that wed have to take down the democracy to kill it. Instead, what is changing is the way we communicate with one another.

These news games, or these things that we are tentatively calling news games because we don't really know what they are yet, this is sort of our first foray, our first trip down the proverbial highway. And were trying to figure out exactly what that means. So that's the way that I see this. And these experiments--and I'll call them that--even though they are completely full-fledged examples of this emerging genre, are giving us one taste of this future of news communication, of information communication. And it's worth considering not just what we see in terms of how it might change the way we produce and consume news, but also how we feel about those changes and what it will mean to live in a society in which the newspaper becomes an artifact like the steam engine, something that we think of fondly but that no longer exists.