Headliner: Novinews imagines a future where the news still matters

On November 10, 2019, Bolivia’s military enacted a coup against then president Evo Morales. After nearly 14 years in office, Morales was forced to flee to Mexico where he was offered asylum as the country he called home was plunged into violent reform. It was a horrific perversion of democracy in a year already marked by US president Trump refusing to cooperate with congressional investigations and thousands being beaten and tear-gassed in the streets of Hong Kong as China attempts to annex the state. But despite the overwhelming facts of Morales’ ousting, the story presented to those outside the country was very different.

Published in the New York Times following Morales’ exile, an opinion piece signed by over 300 scholars proposed that Morales had "shed his legitimacy,” and that "forcing him out became the only option.” This strangling of the facts presents the coup as justified and necessary, despite disregarding the election results of Bolivia’s people. Responding to this article, The Nation deftly wrote that "the military coup in Bolivia is a crime…no one who believes in democracy – much less the flagship newspaper of a nation that claims to be the hemisphere’s arbiter of democracy – should ever support a military coup against a democratically elected government.”

Screenshot courtesy of Unbound Creations.

The news is often proposed to be raw and unbiased. Following agreements made in the wake of WW1 propaganda campaigns, journalists and the public began to hold the news to a higher standard of truth and fairness. But language is inherently political, and this façade of journalistic objectivity created an environment wherein articles published in papers like the New York Times are taken at face value. It is untenable to meet every story with skepticism, but the opposite is a culture wherein the news is a monolithic force of public opinion where facts only loosely apply.

An expansion on the ideas of experimental newsroom simulator, Headliner, Unbound Creations’ Headliner: Novinews (here on simply Headliner) is a hyper-compressed exploration of how society reflects the stories it tells, and what this means when the powerful hold all the pens. Set in Novistan, a fictional country where it always rains and genetic modifications are commonplace, Headliner tasks the player with choosing which stories run on the nation’s largest network, Novinews. These stories range from policy endorsements to crime reports, whether arguing for public healthcare or making veiled threats against bordering countries. Novistan’s political system is on the brink of collapse and this is reflected in the news coming out, but its the framing of this news that will over 14 days shape the future of the nation.

Immediately, Headliner begs comparisons to contemporary distrust of the news media and the intense ideologies of different publications. On the first day as headliner, Novinews’ chief states plainly that what is important is not the stories themselves but the politics of the organization. In short, Novinews is unilateral in its viewpoint, and if that viewpoint contradicts the interests of the state or the investors there will be consequences. Headliner is not a simulation, it’s a parable.

It is challenging to imagine a culture that could so quickly tilt to the far left or right due to a single publication, but if you take Headliner as the inevitable end of our current news system it becomes far less fantastical and uncomfortably prescient. Already, we have the Times misrepresenting foreign issues, Fox News inciting racial violence and xenophobia, and Infowars fabricating stories out of whole cloth to thousands of viewers. It is a terrifying time to be trying to parse the paper, but it is even more terrifying to imagine what comes after fake news and neoliberalism.

To this point, Headliner offers only possibilities. It does not consider, for instance, citizens revolting against the news or choosing conspiracy theories over actual reporting. Headliner feels like a game made for the Bush era, where the news as an institution was still largely unchallenged even as it helped perpetuate lies about the war on terror and the reality of climate change. Again, Headliner functions more as theory than parallel to our news system, but where it excels is highlighting how much power is wielded by those with a platform to speak.

Though the player is rarely criticized by the public for the stories they publish, they remain almost wholly in control of Novinews’ voice. It doesn’t matter, for instance, how much the player cares about their immigrant coworker. If they publish stories stoking racism and isolationism no personal feelings will shield her from state sponsored deportation and detainment. Headliner forces the player to confront the consequences of their beliefs, rejecting the common gaming trope of being able to talk your way out of any situation. Frequently, I was confronted with how little a story could be controlled after it was released, my own significance immediately diminished after leaving the office.

Headliner may be incapable of incapsulating the whole of the news ecosystem, but it succeeds at calling out the responsibility journalists hold to the truth. Even as access to publication has becoming easier with the internet, there is still a remarkably small number of people who hold an immense amount of power over what is published and the angle presented. Headliner is not a call to reject journalism outright, but to recognize that we should remain critical of the stories we are told; that they are written by people, and thus can either push us further into the dark or chart a path towards a future we will all, one way or another, inhabit.

Headliner: Novinews was reviewed on Xbox One using a code provided by the developer. It is available on Xbox One, Playstation 4, Nintendo Switch, and PC.