Unbound Creations’ Headliner: NoviNews explores the impact of the media and fake news on society. Players take the role of a ‘headliner’, which is like a chief editor at a news outlet. The player must decide what stories and angles to publish, and their choices have wide-reaching effects in the game world. Reject stories about creating national healthcare services? People get sick in the street. Approve stories on the benefits of synthetic recreational drugs? Addiction runs rampant.
These stories aren’t presented as obviously ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ choices: the game lets the player’s own ethics and morals guide their decisions – which can create a peaceful society or burn it to the ground.
Curator Notes
This is a fun little entry to get people to question the nature of the news that we view each day and what it means to curate the news – it’s not accidental. There are choices there and in the game you play as an editor who has to publish five or six stories a day and pick which angle you’re going to take. And your choices affect the world, for good and bad. It’s a little binary, without much grey, but that’s more and more speaking to the realities of the world we live in, we seem forced into extremely oppositional world views.
– Assistant Curator and Programmer Arieh Offman
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Headliner: NoviNews trailer.
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Previously on display
11 February 2022
ACMI: Gallery 1
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The Story of the Moving Image → Games Lab → GL-03. Cluster 3 → GL-03-C05