In Warco, a first-person shooter video game that’s been in development for four months, the “shooter” is a documentarian armed with a camera. The brainchild of Tony Maniaty, an Australian journalist who has reported from regions like East Timor and post-Soviet Eastern Europe, the game was originally envisioned as a kind of training simulator. After teaming up with filmmaker Robert Connolly, and then with a couple of coders and artists at Defiant Games, it’s starting to look more like a blockbuster FPS that turns the war correspondent into the hero. To transform battle footage into a compelling story, gamers film the action but also spend part of the game talking to other journalists in a hotel and then editing the footage together (one hopes, not on Final Cut X).“It’s also about navigating through a morally gray world and making decisions that have human impact,” Defiant’s Morgan Jaffit explained. “It’s about finding the story you want to tell, as each of our environments is filled with different story elements you can film and combine in your own ways. It’s both a story telling engine and an action adventure with a new perspective.”Will taurine-fueled gamers be convinced to trade their AKs for HVXes, to swap the military definition of “shooter” for the journalist definition? It won’t be clear until the game comes out. Not surprisingly, Defiant Games, the Australian company behind Warco, has found no distributors yet, though this is the kind of thing that one gaming executive said, “we as an industry should be making.”Connections
viaArs Technica
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