Category: Games

How Times & Galaxy Turns Journalism into a Game Mechanic

Summary

Times & Galaxy’s unique Build-A-Story feature lets players tell the story how they see it.
Copychaser Games’ Creative Director shares how his past as a crime reporter shaped the game’s approach to journalism.
Times & Galaxy is coming to Xbox in mid-2024.

Ever wanted to experience the rush of breaking news? In Times & Galaxy, you’ll chase down scoops as the newest robo-intern of a trusted holopaper. Your assignments might initially seem less than glamorous, like intersolar cat shows and underground dirt fairs—you are an intern, after all. But what, and how, you report is up to you: by picking your way through branching conversations and exploring each level, you’ll discover hidden information, new sources and surprising quotes, allowing you to craft your story your way through the game’s unique Build-A-Story feature.

“Branching conversations are the bread and butter of a lot of larger Western RPGs, and they are, in many ways, what you do as a reporter doing an interview,” Copychaser Games Creative Director Ben Gelinas explains. “You have to decide what to ask, and how to ask it to get the information you need.”

Gelinas knows that from experience: before he began writing for games—with credits on Dragon Age: Inquisition, Mass Effect 3, and Control, among other titles—Gelinas was working as a crime reporter for a daily newspaper in Canada. Drawing on his past career offered new opportunities for well-established conversation systems.

“In Times & Galaxy, we’ve turned information into a collectible,” he adds, “which excited me from a narrative standpoint. It’s always so tricky to combine narrative elements with gameplay.”

The Build-A-Story feature breaks each story down into five parts: headline, lede, nut graf (a summarizing, ‘in a nutshell’ paragraph), key quote, and color context. Your options for each will expand as you pull quotes from conversations and scour levels for context and clues. Depending on how you frame what you’ve discovered, your story can turn out sensational, informational, or “alien” interest—each with lasting consequences for your paper’s reputation and readership.

Gelinas notes that it’s not so much about finding the “right” answer as it is deciding how best to present what you find.

“I didn’t want to do a binary,” he says. “I didn’t want to do ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Having three extremes makes things more complicated. And these are all pulled from types of journalism that people do in the real world.”

In his reporter days, Gelinas noticed how different newspapers, covering the same story, would produce very different takes on the same thing.

“We were all reporters doing our jobs,” Gelinas notes. “But the result was different depending on who was reporting and the overarching goals of the newspaper.”

So when it came time to gamify journalism in Times & Galaxy, Gelinas built his narrative team mostly out of former and current journalists, with histories in alt-weeklies and student journalism, to lend their lived experience with the craft—and to help shape the 100-plus memorable characters that populate the game, both on and off the news ship.

“For whatever reason, journalism attracted, and still continues to attract, some of the most interesting people you’ll ever meet,” Gelinas says. “I wanted Times & Galaxy to reflect that: I wanted to fill it with very memorable weirdos… And then you get to join them and decide what kind of weirdo you are.”

Times & Galaxy will come to Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S in 2024.