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Al-Jazeera turns Sierra Leone documentary into a choose-your-own-adventure-game

They come in the night and literally steal the food from the mouths of the poor, by slicing through the nets of local fishers who live on the shores of Sherbro Island in Sierra Leone. They are illegal trawlers from South Korea, who use the cover of dark to flaunt international treaties and harvest their catch from the protected breeding grounds and environmentally sensitive mango groves of the West African coast.

How do I know this? Because I’ve been playing Pirate Fishing, a newsgame developed by one of Al-Jazeera’s investigate journalists, Juliana Ruhfus, which has been released to mark World Maritime Day.

In Pirate Fishing, you essentially watch clips from Ruhfus’ own investigation and have to film an illegal trawler at work. It takes the framework of a typical adventure game, as you click on evidence to add it to your notebook and earn badges for being thorough.

The game elements are admittedly a bit thin, you’re cast as a junior investigator, but for the most part you’re completing a checklist of tasks by watching videos so you don’t have a lot of influence on the outcome. The gamification part is based around collecting badges as a reward for “investigating” extra background details. That’s one thing I love about newsgaming, though: the way details like background information about the area can be layered and explored at will.

Indeed, simply presenting the documentary – which will also be shown as a two part feature in a more traditional manner – makes the subject matter engrossing and given the novelty of newsgaming, will probably gain the issue more exposure than a straightforward TV investigation. Perhaps I suffer from voiceover fatigue, but being in control of the bits I watch next in the order in which I’m interested feels natural.

Pirate Fishing itself is quite lengthy, and covers Ruhfus’ painful interactions with the Sierre Leone government as well as locals, but you can get through most of it in half an hour or so. Go have a look here.

[Via – Wired]

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