The other night.. when I was a Darfurian refugee

After prolonged procrastination and mostly insignificant text colour alterations, I have finally created my blog. I would love to say that I feel prepared and enthused to attack this blog with insightful and witty posts which will see my success in JOUR1111. Truth be told, I am distressed and a little intimidated. It makes me nervous to share my writing and thoughts on the web, and even more so after reading the excellent blogs from other, more techno-savvy students. The extent of my usual posts has been limited to Facebook and bebo (a very long time ago, I assure you) and I have never sought to start a blog or even twitter. Nevertheless, here we all are and I'm giving it a crack.

I’ve decided that my first post should discuss our most recent lecture (Monday, week 3). Skye Doherty, our guest speaker kept it short and sweet - and by sweet I mean packed with information. She had a lot to say and little time to say it but I held everything to great value and interest. Being a rambler myself and also someone with a short attention span, I greatly admired her ability to keep people engaged for so long.

Although it was only briefly mentioned, the idea of ‘newsgames’ grabbed my attention. In fact I found myself playing a 14 year old Sudanese girl called Elham from Darfur into the early hours of Tuesday morning. The site is called Darfur Is Dying and was very eye opening. Running from Janjaweed Militias on no sleep at all sure gets your heart racing. 

While journalism in the form of games will never be more that an additional media platform, it is a great way to engage large audiences (especially youth) in some of the world’s most pressing issues. Ms Skye Doherty discusses games-based news and what it means for journalism on her website. Games such as September 12th and Cutthroat Capitalism might just make you rethink your view of the world and violence and what it it does to people. I also find it interesting to see how quickly Journalism has developed alongside modern technology. In mentioning ‘newsgaming’ as a developing concept to my Mum she replied, “what like board gaming?”

She’s a crack-up my Mum. No, it's our future and it will forever change the way we view and are affected by journalism. I can't wait to spend many more late nights playing games and forming new worldly insight.