A bit late, I suppose, but I wanted to post my notes from the Documentary Games panel at last month's Games for Change festival.

These are rough notes, but they should be sufficient to give you a gist of the sessions. You can find them after the jump.

Susana Ruiz
USC

Every documentary is a construction. The idea that it represents truth is a fuzzy notion. But documentary games are fuzzier. Right now it's more of a notion or an inspiration. The term is new even though it has been written about. We're in the process of figuring out what it might mean.

There's not a community of practitioners making documentary games. That presents some challenges. Here are some key questions:

(1) Do any of the issues documentarians grapple with apply to games? E.g. truth-seeking, advocacy, objectivity? If so, how so?
(2) What potential is there in the idea of the game designer as a documentarian.
(3) As system of rules, what are the boundaries of what documentaries can explore?
(4) What sorts of people are needed for successful documentary games?

Emily Verellen
Fledgling Fund

Social change through creative media, specifically documentary. It's 90% documentary and 10% other creative media. This year we funded our first game. We are interested in the space and intend to do more.

The question that comes to us is, how do you get viewers of a film from passive to active? We see films every day that move us to tears and laughter, but how do you get someone to take that next step. We wanted to get into the gaming space to have the games work with the films to help people take that leap from passive to active. Maybe a game would provide a sort of bridge... we want to experiment with that a bit.

One of the ways we choose and assess work is based on "dimensions of impact" (<a href="http://www.thefledglingfund.org/">see website</a>). Everyone wants to prove that an investment does anything. We have a model that works for us and that might be transferable.

The first thing we look at is: is the work quality? did it get press, get into festivals, awards, distribution deals, etc. Is it a high quality piece of media?

From there, we can learn about how did the public assess the project? Is there increased press coverage? is it reaching the society page? Who is reading about it? How are people talking about the issue in new ways?

The third area we look at is Increased public engagement. Are people logging on to your website to learn more. Are they going to events. Connecting media to a larger issue. Force feed people the actions... have you succeeded in telling them what they can do.

Next, how has this media engaged with a larger social movement, avoiding recreation of the wheel. More collaboration. The collaboration we see in the business world create meaningful collaborations, how can we do that to?

Steve Anderson
USC

There are really interesting tensions that play themselves out in an interactive media program in a film school. I was going to be the computational bridge between lens-based documentary and computational documentary.

Want to remind ourselves of the bad 1990s when theorists tried to import old theories onto digital media and games. The more interesting model is less in the critical sphere and more in the practical. We can look at someone like . There are a number of multiple threaded or nonlinear narratives

We've seen this more successfully in motion graphics, music videos.

An interesting thing was happening in documentary at the same time. Ian Flitman's Hackney Girl is a generative documentary about his girlfriend as she moves back into Turkey. The documentary is made of thousands of clips created in an algorithmic way (database narrative).

Soft Cinema, Lev Manovich, database-driven potentials in documentary and narrative content. Where the Hackney Girl was about content-based trajectories, soft cinema does it based on formal constraints, color luminosity, etc.

Also the Labyrinth Project, tracing the decay of fiction, bleeding through layers of Los angeles. taking an incredibly rich amount of documentary material and making it available in a documentary format.

The problem is that they are incredibly expensive and sifficult to product.

Other examples: Florian Thalhofer, Korsakow System, 2002 , did a project about chronic alcohol syndrome about losing short-term memory, so he developed a narrative database engine that reproduced those patterns of discourse. This became a low-barrier of entry to database documentaries.

More: He did a project called Love Story. It can be continued to be added to. Originally developed in Director and reprogrammed in Java at Concordia. 13terStock, a portrait of a housing project. Jonathan Harris's the Whale Hunt, a project is about multiple points of entry in looking at the contents of a photographic documentary Public Secrets (Sharon Daniel, Eric Loyer) Public secrets about women in california prisons.

Tracy Fullerton
USC

(I didn't take notes for Tracy's talk, which covered her early work on a Walden adaptation/documentary game. However, Stephen Totilo covered it over at Kotaku.)