Illustration by Alex Bedder.

These questions regard last night’s episode of HBO’s Girls. Please answer the prompts with specific examples from LAST NIGHT’S EPISODE, though supplementary material will be accepted as a secondary source. Please write legibly. No. 2 pencils only. You have an hour to finish this test. See below for questions and sample responses.

1. The celebrity cameos on Girls are starting to seem fraught with significance. Is this an attempt to subtly imply that Petula (played by Rosanna Arquette) is--behind the literally bunny boiler faux-hippy persona--“desperately seeking" a different life? Her flirting with her (maybe) gay son's (maybe) boyfriend seems to suggest a flipped version of her role in The Executioner's Song.

And let's not forget daddy dearest: Ben Mendelsohn, the Australian answer to Gary Oldman, who is probably best known for his role as the corporate snake trying to undermine Wayne Enterprises in The Dark Knight Rises:

Or Russell, the tweaked-out heroin addict in the recent Brad Pitt film Killing Them Softly (based on Cogan's Trade, about low-level mobsters who fuck up their big heist and then have to skip town.) Or the sleazy boyfriend in the Florence + The Machine single "Lover To Lover."

Florence and the Machine: Lover to Lover on Nowness.com.

What is Girls trying to tell us--if anything--with the recent cameos that seem to reference something outside of the world of the show (i.e., John Cameron Mitchell, Patrick Wilson, Donald Glover, Rita Wilson)?

When Donald Glover first showed up, I thought Girls was engaging in some regular old stunt casting, which does exactly what you are talking about--tries to pull some residue from an actor's other work into the present show (have you noticed that there is this stable of sci-fi actors, mostly from Firefly and BSG, who show up as guest stars whenever any show wants to give itself some geek cred?). But then his character didn't seem to have much to do with Troy, and was a Republican. And Rita Wilson was somehow perfect as Marnie's mom (oh does that mean Chet Haze is somehow Marnie's pseudo-sister, because please, yes), but again, not the nurturing figure we were expecting. It is almost as if Girls is poking fun at our tendency to typecast actors, and using the huge stable of actors who want to be on the "It" show to be able to do so. John Cameron Mitchell was the most obvious example of this for me, playing a fairly stably gendered and non-sexual (except for his comment that pistachios look like little penises) character.

But perhaps the pendulum has swung back the other way, as Patrick Wilson's character seemed more like classic typecasting, and Patricia Arquette's full-on stunt casting: playing the weird hippy-dippy character with a darkness at her center has been her stock in trade for decades now. Whatever the intention behind it, they could hardly have cast the part better. She was pitch perfect, as was Mendelsohn. (And their extremely strong performances in turn brought out better than usual performances from Lena Dunham and Jemima Kirke, making this one of the strongest episodes yet of the show.)

2. Pretend that you are an officer from D.A.R.E. program and are giving a lecture to kids about the dangers of doing drugs. Describe Hannah's relationship with narcotics, starting with the opium tea and progressing to cocaine and whippets. Bonus if you can work in Elijah's diss that snorting coke wasn't going to be like "driving around in your mom's Volvo with a bottle of cough syrup and a box of cold McNuggets."

At some point in the late ’90s, mainstream TV started to shift away from dealing with drugs in that after-school special/Jessie Spano kind of way, when D.A.R.E. officers could use a "very special episode" of any given show to illustrate the twin dangers of drugs and peer pressure. But even though drugs are no longer presented as the ultimate evil, they're still always just a metaphor, usually a stupid one that just makes everybody act more like themselves. At least Girls has the guts to make drugs, like sex (see question 5) as weird and complicated as they are. But they're still dumb metaphors (roughly: opium = painful truth, coke = false friendship, whippets = the stupidity of youth). So, you know, don't do drugs.

3. The name of this week's episode was "Video Games," which meant I was waiting for the other trashy Lana Del Rey shoe to drop for the entire episode. But it's in fact a reference to Petula's belief that life is a video game, a simulation like The Matrix or that one Are You Afraid of the Dark? episode. Create a video game for Petula: is it an old Nintendo game, or a really choppy version of the original Doom, or Grand Theft Auto? Is it the Holodeck from Star Trek? Farmville? What is the objective of the video game that Petula calls life, and what are the glitches/obstacles she has come across? Bonus: Describe the Game Genie cheats for Petula's life.

Petula's whole life is a series of Game Genie cheats for the video game she calls existence. There is no game here, there is only the shirking of responsibility that comes with thinking life is not real. Everyone is the main character of her own story, but if you think of the world not as a book but as a video game, not only are you the main character, you exist in a world that, for all its threats and pitfalls, was designed specifically for you. Hannah isn't just a minor character in Petula's story, she "manifests" her as a "cushion" for her relationship with Jessa.

On this level beyond self-centeredness, there is nothing but destruction: "If you're not with me, you're against me, so get out of my way." Like Amy Jellicoe on that other amazing female-centered HBO show, Enlightened, Petula is a destroyer who believes she is a benevolent healer. She raises bunnies and then kills them for food, and seemingly remains unaware that she is basically starving her son in the process. She can do nothing but destroy. She may think she is in some nurturing Sim Earth-type game, but her language is all first-person shooter. And the enemies, of course, are other women: Jessa, Jessa's dad's former girlfriend, her daughter who may or may not still be named Lemon, etc.

4. For two seasons now, we've been hearing about Jessa's mom (and Shosh's oft-referred-to aunt) as a sort of insane, absentee parent. But meanwhile her father has been living upstate, and there's been a history of her not showing up when she had plans to visit. Then her dad leaves her at a supermarket, right after their cathartic breakthrough. ("You think I can rely on you? "You shouldn't have to! I'm the child! I'm the child!"--the most heart-wrenchingly sad thing to happen on Girls, ever.) Does this excuse her behavior at the end of the episode, or make it even less excusable? Haha, just kidding, Jessa is always the worst. Feel free to make up the phone call between Shosh and her aunt regarding her first live-in boyfriend, if that's preferable.

There is not and never will be an excuse for Jessa acting the way she does. But even though this episode didn't redeem her as a person, I think it went a long way toward redeeming her as a character. That is to say, there has always been something cartoonish about Jessa, something stupider-than-life that made her hard to believe, when everyone else, for all their character flaws, seemed like real people.

But the truth is I know plenty of people in the real world who seemed that way when I met them too. You know when, usually in college, you meet someone's parents for the first time, and you're like, oh, of course! That person makes total sense now. Sort of like that.

Or a commentary on that, because the most telling thing about her dad wasn't the lateness or the unreliability or the immaturity or the paranoia, but him saying to Jessa, "You know we're not like other people." Underscored by that fantastic Aimee Mann song "How Am I Different," it really drove home the essence of a parenting style that could create a character so obnoxiously removed from reality.

5. Urinary tract infections are the WORST. But they're often caused by an imbalance of microorganisms that colonize the vagina, also called the "vaginal flora." With her HPV and now being de-flora'd, there's definitely a trend of sex = bad, painful things. If you think about it, Sex on Girls is never just a casual encounter, or one that is portrayed as having positive consequences. So far we've seen intercourse lead to a) Marriage; b) Being forced to stare at a doll while being starfished; c) Completely speeding up the normal process of a relationship and making it untenable; d) Ruining a perfectly good Ping-Pong table and e) causing gay couples to break up and friendships to be ruined. Is Girls actually sending out a pro-abstinence message? Or does Hannah just need to drink more water and cranberry juice?

It's not just the consequences of sex, but the sex itself that is often bad on Girls, and whatever else people will say about the show in coming years, one thing is clear: no show to date has shown so much bad sex and shown so much of what can be bad about sex, and that is an important thing for TV. Not only does Girls not look away from bad sex, it also doesn't make it into a tragedy, or a dealbreaker. After Marnie gets starfished, she cracks up, and then happily calls Hannah. It's depressing, but it is also realistic and necessary. Sex, and specifically female bodies in relation to sex, are so inflated and elevated on TV that they become impossible to really talk about. If sex isn't simply tiptoed around, it is treated as a metaphor, something people are either having or not having. For better or worse, Girls is willing to look at real sex, like it is willing to look at real women's bodies, and say, this is a significant thing, but it is also a part of life, and like everything else, it is flawed and can be weird and ugly and uncomfortable and stupid. And when it is weird/ugly/uncomfortable/stupid, we still get to say, "I want to keep doing this/I don't want to keep doing this/Here's how we can make this better" and so on. If all you ever see is sex treated as a holy sacrament, it's a lot harder to say these things, or even know that you can.

The one-night-only debut of Space Cruiser, next Thursday's game-cum-concert in question, is described as a "cooperative mission-based game centered around navigating around a fictional universe" that's designed for up to 200 participants, who together will control a spacecraft, which the planetarium has been re-imagined as.

The co-founder of Babycastles—whose existence The Observer has previously documented with enthusiasm—Syed Salahuddin's overview, via email, may better explain it:

A multi-player control deck at the center of the theater will offer a small crew the chance to navigate the spacecraft together, piloting through treacherous asteroid belts. The crew is an unassigned, free-form team that works together to pilot the spaceship, with various parts of the ship spread out over the theater while being guided by a on-board computer system that is voiced by Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields.

The night also includes admission to an open bar, some indie video games, and a live performance by the band One Ring Zero. Tickets from the museum are $75 (but apparently a discount code of "BEYOND" will make hanging out with all of the city's hippest geeks a little cheaper come Thursday).

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Courtesy MoMA/PopRally

“Hey does anybody have an extra ticket?” asked a man in a white button-down and a backpack outside MoMA last night. He walked down the line that stretched from the entrance closer to 5^th Avenue to well past the former home of Folk Art Museum.

"Anyone?" he asked.

Near the front of the line, a man whose t-shirt read “MANA” just below the neck bounced on his heels.

The high-demand event wasn’t a Kanye West sculpture garden performance, or even a flash sale on heirlooms at the Modern. It was Arcade, a PopRally event hosted by Kill Screen, the thinking man’s video game journal that selected a handful of excellent games for the party. Some of the games were just barely of the video variety, but everything fit in nicely with the “Talk to Me” exhibit that opened last week.

Recent avant-garde notables like Canabalt and Limbo were on-hand, along with a handful of new games, some designed just for the event. Under Andy Warhol’s Ten-Foot Flowers in the lobby, twentysomethings dashed to slap each other’s bucket-sized buttons in a game by the Coppenhagen Game Collective. Occasionally they collapsed on each other, like a sanitized version of Twister.

A bystander complimented Kill Screen president Jamin Warren on his curation of the evening, but Mr. Warren was modest.

“It’s just editing, right?” said Mr. Warren, a former Wall Street Journal writer. “And I do that all the time. Anyone who’s edited a ‘top ten’ article is a curator.”

There was a lot to like. There was a rhythm game that used an iPad in combination with an Xbox Kinect to create a "full-body theremin," according to its description. There was Echochrome, the heady Escher-like puzzle game on Playstation that benefited from its placement in a museum, even if it suffered slightly from its positioning next to the beer table (try walking a straight line on an ever-shifting plane). The most impressive piece was “Starry Heavens,” in the sculpture garden.

The first thing that caught your eye with this game were the seven or so white weather balloons that hung above it. On the ground below was a series of black, white and grey circles, laid out on tiles of varying size, linked with grey bridges and angled toward the center, a little like the Sputnik chandelier at Lincoln Center. Players moved to different colored circles, "banishing" each other  after receiving commands from the Ruler, in the center, with the ultimate goal of replacing him. The Ruler was on his own schedule, with a center balloon somehow involved, as it was pulled down at knotted intervals. The other balloons were not essential to the gameplay.

“But the person in the center would feel more exposed without them so we thought they were necessary in their own way,” said accented architect Nathalie Pozzi, one of the game’s designers, who stood off to the side watching the game. She smiled. “Well, though, I’m the architect so of course I think that.”

“For me the game is kind of a moral and political allegory,” said Eric Zimmerman, the game’s other designer, who sidled back to his partner after a few quick instructions to the team documenting the game with video. “The title comes from a quote by Immanuel Kant, which I’m not going to explain because she thinks it’s pretentious.”

“I found the quote!” Ms. Pozzi said. “But I’m not going to explain it.”

“There’s a funny paradox of power,” Mr. Zimmerman said. “You’re all trying to overthrow the leader, but to do so, you have to kill your teammates.”

He sighed contentedly as a young woman exited the game in an exaggerated huff. She'd been banished by another player.

The magazine's president Jamin Warren, a former Wall Street Journal writer, said the issue party came about thanks to a new partnership with party promoter Supercrush Studio. "We're really looking for revenue streams beyond the traditional ones for a magazine," he said. The magazine now works with ad houses to probe the nebulous video gamer demographic, and recently began a partnership with Pitchfork.

"It really is weird that there aren't any video games here," a ponytailed attendee told a female friend while waiting in line for complimentary Brooklyn Lager, not complaining, but pointing it out.

There were clues that Puma had sponsored the event. For one thing, a projection showing various Puma-branded videos shot to look homemade ran throughout the party's entirety. Little Pumas were inlaid on the surface of every Foosball table. Also, there were girls walking around with the Puma logo on their thighs.

"It is like a normal party," said a fellow in wire-rimmed glasses, sitting in a booth with a friend who verbally fantasized about bringing his PS3 from home and hooking it up to the projector. "Lots of bros."

They were some species of bro, but it was generally the Williamsburg variety of bro, the kind that seems to hold profound respect for Super Nintendo, according to an informal survey. Brooklyn band Beach Fossils played a DJ set.

"I can't believe I wasn't following these guys before," said John, a distinctly un-bro employee of New York's homegrown video game studio, Rockstar Games. He wore a shirt with the company's logo and looked out on the room, impressed. He'd heard about the party from Twitter.

Next to him was his fiance, her shirt advertising L.A. Noire, Rockstar's crime-solving, suspect-interrogating new release. John worked on that game.

"Red Dead [Redemption] is my favorite," John said. "I'm too close to L.A. Noire. I know what everybody's going to say in every situation

"I let her play," he said, smiling to his fiance.

Cigarette smoke and the smell of freshly opened Budweisers wafted around seemingly arbitrarily placed  monitors covered in wires and sometimes newspapers. One installation consisted in a massive, black motorcycle helmet, outfitted with a microphone, and rigged to an antiquated Nintendo motorcycle game. The person under the helmet hummed and giggled; the higher the pitch, the faster the eight-bit motorcyclist would go. Another game had a sign appended to it: “PLAYING WITH YOURSELF IS MASTURBATION.” The game requires two players using different sides of the same controller to draw hearts around enemies, trapping them in their symbolic digital love. All for points, of course. Then there was the punishing iPhone game where you played a child sweatshop worker for whom a misplaced seam meant a beating.

Many of the games at Babycastles don’t fit the traditional definitions of the medium; they veer closer to artistic experimentation than they do to mass-market viability. They are the product of a movement merging aestheticism with a format most commonly utilized for the purposes of crass commercialism. For those who have been paying attention to this development as it has unfolded, the art world’s recent fascination with Cory Arcangel—and the scale of the Whitney Museum’s current exhibition of his work—might come as a surprise.

The hype surrounding Mr. Arcangel, art’s technowunderkind du jour, and his ballyhooed show Pro Tools reached fever pitch before the exhibition opened. New York Times art critic Roberta Smith began her tepid assessment by referencing a “triple crown” of profiles from a breathless press (New York, The New Yorker, and the Times’s own Arts & Leisure section) wowed primarily by Mr. Arcangel’s manipulations of video games.

This was despite the fact that he wasn’t the only one experimenting with them. In 2009, the New Museum’s “Younger Than Jesus” exhibition included Flywrench, a game by the then moderately-obscure programmer Mark Essen. Over a pulsing techno soundtrack and with rudimentary, eight-bit visuals, players piloted a “ship”—nothing more than a line, changing colors—through various shapes. It was frustrating, challenging—and thrilling.

Mr. Essen’s other games—Randy Balma: Municipal Abortionist, The Thrill of Combat among them—all exhibit his distinct style: pared-down creations with lo-fi effects, they achieve a level of pulse-pounding emotional engagement that outstrips so much previous digital art, never mind the games’ mass-market retail brethren, which cost upwards of $60 a unit and millions of dollars to produce.

Which is all to say that Mr. Essen’s creations exhibit as much craft as they do purely artistic intent. Long before running its Arcangel profile, New York magazine asked in the headline of an Essen profile pegged to his spot at the New Museum: “Will Video Games Turn Mark Essen Into an Art-World Star?”

At the moment art stardom doesn’t look likely for Mr. Essen or his ilk—especially given the art world’s, or at least the Whitney’s, preference for Mr. Arcangel. For an institution that focuses on traditional art forms, the Whitney show appears progressive. Seen in a certain light, it is anything but. In the long term, museums may regret putting the spotlight on someone marketed as a member of the art world instead of seeking the work of those outside it.

The fact that Mr. Arcangel’s most widely-known pieces are simply manipulations of existing technology—as opposed to outright creations—would seem to underlie this, and yet that point exists as an afterthought in most of the press about him. Pro Tools’ centerpiece is a stripe of technological mischief the 33-year-old Mr. Arcangel is well-known for: Various Self Playing Bowling Games (a.k.a. Beat the Champ), a series of retro games projected on massive screens. Joysticks are jerry-rigged so that the games’ characters roll only gutter balls. In the brochure for the show, Whitney curator Christiane Paul notes that this Sisyphean scenario took a “couple of years to produce.” The intention of subverting the machines’ technology and bringing a kind of aesthetic tension to various generations of video games—we’re supposed to be less comfortable with the characters the more “realistic” they are as approximations of humans, i.e. how fallible they appear—is far from his first like it, or even the only one in the show.

A previous work, Super Mario Clouds v2k3, emptied everything but the clouds from the instantly recognizable Super Mario Bros. Masters is created from a rigged golf game from the late 90’s—there’s a club to pick up, and a ball to hit—that hits the ball in a direction nowhere near where you attempt to putt it, making the act of trying to get the ball in the hole a futile one. During The Observer’s visit to the Whitney, a security guard instructed players: “Yep, you pick it up. Okay, now hit it.” On the screen, The Observer’s ball rolled, as expected, to the side of the hole. “Yep. It’s supposed to do that. It worked. Your turn is over.” In none of these attempts to subvert video games does Mr. Arcangel leave anything to chance. With an outcome so expected, nothing is frustrated, not even the machine, which performs just as the artist has programmed it to.

Mr. Arcangel’s is fixated on what he has described as technology’s dull, awkward moments, but this often seems to manifest itself as a populist resentment against those very moments; this results in work where the process by which it’s created is more compelling than the result.

This doesn’t have to be the case, as Mr. Arcangel himself once proved. His 2002 game I Shot Andy Warhol, a hack of Nintendo’s Hogan’s Alley, replaces the generic robber targets with pop culture icons: Flavor Flav, the Pope. The idea of being rewarded for “shooting”—with Nintendo’s “Light Gun”—targets we’re familiar with is as disturbing as it is comical. And yet it is not visceral work like this, but rather Mr. Arcangel’s more process-oriented creations that are being given his largest platform yet. Why?

There isn’t a definitive answer to that question, but it’s worth keeping in mind that Mr. Arcangel’s video game riggings are objectively more difficult to reproduce than, for example, a line of code in one of Mr. Essen’s games. Flywrench is now available for anyone to download on Mr. Essen’s website in minutes: this disturbs the idea of an “original” “print” of a piece of digital technology. If the art market values anything, it’s limited supply, and that’s a bill Mr. Arcangel can easily fit. This might explain why Mr. Essen’s latest, the award-winning Nidhogg, is traveling the country, and has yet to emerge for download. If Mr. Essen is intent on breaking into the art world, limiting his work’s accessibility might be key, given that his medium is so susceptible to duplication. It is also antithetical to Mr. Essen’s body of work, which enjoys a rabid fanbase thanks to its wide accessibility, and which is mostly free to download. The Whitney, on the other hand, charges $18 for general admission.

The last game The Observer played in Ridge-wood was a golf game that uses the number of Twitter hits for a search term to determine the force with which a player’s ball is hit. “Sudanese Refugees” yielded a delicate putt; “Justin Bieber,” a mighty swing. Across the river, someone else was playing a golf-based video game, one given the higher artistic distinction of being placed in a museum. In that game, however, you’re given only one shot, and you always lose.

fkamer@observer.com

In stark contrast to the ineffectual checkmarks presented to the American electorate on November 2, a feature on The New York Times' website is now offering readers an immediately comprehensible, quick-and-dirty set of options for fixing a deficit that Alan Greenspan says could create another bond-market crisis.

By clicking on items like "Reduce the Federal Workforce by 10 Percent" or "Bank Tax," readers can return the U.S. government to fiscal responsibility in less than five minutes.

Maybe Federal officials don't have Adobe Flash Player 10, and that is why our government has so much debt.

mtaylor [at] observer.com | @mbrookstaylor

The conceit of the article is pretty simple. Kids are spending more time than ever playing video games. A Bill and Melinda Gates commissioned study on why so many Americans don't graduate high school discovered that many of them found classes pretty boring. If you can't beat em', join em'.

"Game design is the platform that we can hook them into because this is where they live," says teacher Al Doyle, a 30 year veteran of NYC public Schools. "Video games are more important to them than film, than broadcast television, than journalism. This is their medium. Games are this generation's rock and roll."

So far test scores at Quest to Learn have turned out to be no better or worse than average. Which isn't encouraging, considering that the school has received substainial additional funding from the MacArthur Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Still, one has to image graduation rates will be higher, and prospects for future employment bright.

"Everything in the future online is going to look like a multiplayer game," said Google CEO Eric Schmidt at the beginning of this year's G-20 summit. "If I were 15 years old, that's what I'd be doing right now."

Ask your friends a question about the latest news tidbit—say, where President Obama and the First Lady went on their dinner date this weekend. Then watch them whip out their iPhones, flip open their laptops, racing to find the right answer. Within seconds, they’ll emerge from the scrolling sea of Google results, triumphant and shouting: “Blue Hill!”

Our constant (okay, seemingly neverending) search for the right piece of news or information is a daily, even minute-by-minute challenge, providing a small, satisfactory triumph on blogs, Twitter and in comment sections, and even in bars and at dining room tables with our BlackBerrys.

New York Times junkies can even get their own Times IQ as high as 200 … on Facebook. Every weekday morning, the users of the New York Times News Quiz application are faced with five multiple choice questions based on the day’s top news stories (as regarded by the editorial staff). Yesterday, for example, users were asked where George Tiller was shot (Wichita) and who was Robin Soderling’s opponent in the big tennis upset at Roland Garros (Rafael Nadal). After they click away the quiz and submit their answers, they receive a Times IQ ranking, based on their answers. They can challenge their Facebook friends and compare their news knowledge to all users across the platform. A cheat sheet of links to The Times’ latest news articles is provided after they take the day’s quiz.

The application is simple and fun—albeit less than popular. (There are only 2,178 active users. Compare that with the Texas Hold ’Em Poker game, one of the most popular games on Facebook, which has more than 12 million active users, out of Facebook’s 200 million or so). But how else can newspapers play with their content to attract readers? 

Web news designers, like those whizzes at NYTimes.com, already create dazzling, interactive infographics to help readers digest vast amounts of information and understand complicated news stories. But what if users could not just click around the infographics, but become part of them—a character with dilemmas and goals—and not just understand the news, but play with it? Would reading the news become one of the best games in town?

On May 29, Clive Thompson, New York Times magazine contributor and a columnist for Wired, was speaking on a muggy afternoon at the 6^th Annual Games for Change Festival in the New School’s Tisch Auditorium on 12th Street at a discussion titled “Games and the News.”

He mentioned The New York Times’ Faces of the Dead feature. A photo of a U.S. soldier appears on the page—his face spliced with hundreds of tiny squares. Each one represents a service member that the Defense Department has identified as a casualty of the war in Iraq. Users can roam their mouse over the grid and click on the squares to find more information on the man or woman. “I remember looking, I mean that’s really beautiful, but it didn’t really make me want to go in and look at any of the individuals,” Mr. Thompson said. “There was nothing to do, basically, than hover over it.”

Ian Bogost, a video game researcher, associate professor of digital media at Georgia Institute of Technology and founding partner of video-games studio Persuasive Games, was speaking alongside Mr. Thompson, stroking a bushy goatee and explaining how this is a common characteristic with online infographics. “There’s this tradition of depicting data, and depicting data can be clarifying and can create sort of a different kind of interest in relevance,” he said. “[But] by creating this sort of directed activity, then all of a sudden something that was just sort of a message or information that you didn’t know what to do with can become more game-like.”

He said, for example, the Budget Hero game, created by American Public Media, allows users to balance the federal budget however they want to. They get several spending options, with pros and cons listed for each decision, and they can cut or finance areas of the federal budget. But what if the game set more parameters? What if they could choose whether to be a middle-class or lower-class American or how many children they have? How would that affect their decision and help them understand all sides to a budget decision?

 “I think if you apply that example to all the celebrated infographics in the news world—all the stuff that The New York Times does, for example—it’s really interesting and high quality but is often overwhelming and if you added a type of directed goal to them, then they actually become more journalistic,” Mr. Bogost explained.

He mentioned an About.com poll in which 54 percent of about 3,500 people said they buy a newspaper “all the time” just to play crossword puzzles and other games usually buried in the back sections. Another site, Archimedes-Lab.org, found that just 13 percent of their readers “never” “buy a newspaper just to do the puzzles.” “The crossword puzzle is this amazing entrypoint into the media itself,” he said. Reading the actual news articles, while flipping to the puzzle page, can be just an added bonus.

“The newspaper business realized, too late maybe, their competition for classifieds and advertising,” Mr. Bogost said. What if, like classifieds, games “actually turned out to be a business that is a part of journalism and they didn’t even realize it.”

Newspapers, Mr. Bogost said, have an opportunity to make gaming part of consuming the news.

Last week, at the Games for Change festival, “Play the News,” an online portal of interactive, casual games created by a Pennsylvania studio, won a kind of Pulitzer of news games—the first Knight News Game Award, at an awards ceremony sponsored by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation on May 28.

Newsgaming’s September 12^th – A Toy World was a controversial, yet interesting, contender in the competition. Released in 2003, the game takes place in a Middle Eastern city, in which little Lego-looking characters race between buildings and terrorists wear white head dressings. The user can drop a missile on the terrorists, but if they miss and hit a civilian, another civilian will weep over the victim and then transform into a terrorist before the player’s eyes.

Play the News, described as “an engaging, community-driven experience—imagine fantasy sports meets the evening news,” takes story lines from headlines (like banning fast food joints close to schools or Hamas attacks) and incorporates them into prediction and decision-making games. But the graphics seem old-fashioned and the story lines are, well, boring.

So far, online news games are behind in the whizzy graphics and lifelike role-playing department—a bit like playing Mario Bros today, among the Wiis and Xbox 360s of the world, which won’t keep users engaged.

But some news organizations have found exciting, yet simple, ways to incorporate game-play into their business—perhaps without even noticing it. Mr. Thompson said Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo “almost stumbled into this alt game-like apparatus for reporting news” by asking his readers to help him tease out a tip and find information for him. Mr. Thompson compared the dynamics to an alternative reality game, like playing Halo or World of Warcraft or even trying to figure out all those crazy clues on Lost by checking out their marketing materials online. “There’s a puzzle that is created that is incredibly hidden and complex so you know, people discover little clues and then you have to collaborate to try and tease out what the hell is going on,” Mr. Thompson explained. Mr. Marshall, and other TPM writers, are the leaders who corroborate the truth and collect it for readers to understand—and because their readers feel like they are playing along with the journalists and are part of the process, they keep coming back.

Mr. Thompson said newspapers can leverage this tactic by creating game-like “leaderboards,” giving the best commentors, bloggers and participants incentives, whether they be shoutouts or high rankings on the site (Digg.com and Techmeme.com have similar features, Gawker highlights their top community contributors as well).

“You could regard The New York Times as its prime value is it’s a fantastic leaderboard, right?” Mr. Thompson said. “It is a great place to create variety and rewards for people.”

When Times columnist Nicholas Kristof announced at his Games for Change keynote speech that he was going to create an online, social networking game to accompany his new book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, he said that many are skeptical of mixing journalism and games.

“I think that the way to change that is the record of success that these have had and in my case, what really changed my thinking was watching Food Force and Darfur is Dying in particular, and journalism is in such desperate shape right now, frankly, that we’re groping for anything that might work, that might reach new audiences, that might connect,” he said. “I truly think that these [games] are going to play a major role in trying to make this connection because in journalism, we’re not often very good at it, and you guys can help us be that bridge.”

Do newspapers have to start tapping into their readers’ competitive sides to fight in this new-media ring? Game on.

In fact, New York City, whose gaming industry employs just 1,200 people, trails “gaming hubs” like Seattle, Los Angeles, Montreal and Boston (Boston?!?!), according to the study, “Getting in the Game.”

But there is some good news:

We’ll take their word for it. The rest of the release, and the actual study, are below.

STUDY REVEALS THAT NYC IS ONE OF JUST A HANDFUL OF CITIES TO DEVELOP A CLUSTER OF GAMING FIRMS; BUT DESPITE A RECENT SPIKE

IN FIRMS AND JOBS, NEW YORK LAGS BEHIND OTHER INDUSTRY HUBS

LIKE SEATTLE, LA, BOSTON AND MONTREAL

The Center for an Urban Future, a Manhattan-based think tank, released a new report today which concludes that the fast-growing video game industry represents a promising opportunity for New York City’s economy. The study shows that New York is one of just a handful of cities in North America to develop a cluster of gaming firms, thanks to a considerable spike in the number of gaming firms here in the past few years. But despite recent gains, the study finds that New York’s gaming sector faces significant challenges and still lags well behind established gaming hubs like Seattle, Los Angeles, Montreal and Boston.

The report, titled “Getting in the Game,” shows that New York City is now home to more than to 30 game development companies and another 55 firms involved in some aspect of gaming. The industry employs at least 1,200 people in the city.

While the sector is still relatively small, it has grown significantly from a few years ago, when the number of game development firms could be counted on one hand. And although New York lacks a large game development company—like Entertainment Arts, PlayStation or Ubisoft—the city has emerged as a leader in three growing sub-sectors of the industry: casual games, mobile games and serious games. In fact, New York is home to several of the nation’s largest and most well-known casual game companies—such as Gamelab and Large Animal Games.

The report, the first comprehensive analysis of New York City’s video game sector, concludes that New York has tremendous potential to cultivate a larger game industry—a prospect that, if achieved, could lead to hundreds, if not thousands, of new jobs and help the city diversify its economy. The study shows that New York has many of the ingredients necessary to be a major center for the industry: it boasts a deep pool of creative workers and it is home to some of the world’s most successful film, media and publishing companies—sectors that have similar characteristics as gaming.

“The video game sector is poised to be one of the fastest-growing parts of the entertainment industry in the years ahead,” says Tara Colton, deputy director of the Center for an Urban Future and author of the report. “While New York’s video game industry overall may be not as large as other regions, it has carved out some impressive niches, and the city has many of the ingredients to become a robust gaming hub. Given the recent economic downturn, New York needs to do more to diversify its economy, and the video game sector should be one part of that strategy.”

However, the Center’s study shows that New York faces a number of challenges in capturing a larger share of the industry’s future growth. Chief among these problems is a limited supply of technical workers, compounded by the fact that the city’s universities aren’t creating the pipeline of technical talent that local video game companies need. Other challenges include the high cost of doing business in New York and the fact that city and state economic development officials have done little to support the industry’s growth.

The report features results from the first-ever survey of local gaming executives, conducted in partnership with the New York City chapter of the International Game Development Association. 35 percent of gaming executives who responded to the survey cited the city’s high costs and overhead as one of their greatest challenges, and another 33 percent pointed to the difficulty in attracting qualified workers. In addition, 76 percent of those responding to the survey said that their companies had never interacted with the city or state government; of those who had, most cited negative experiences.

The report calls on city officials to integrate the gaming sector into their overall economic development strategy, urges New York’s universities to expand their video game programs to include a technical game design degree program and encourages universities and local game companies to forge closer ties.

The Center for an Urban Future is a non-partisan think tank based in Manhattan that has long been focused on highlighting opportunities for growing and diversifying New York City’s economy. In the past, the Center has published studies about the biotechnology, air cargo and fashion industries and written extensively about the impact of the city’s creative economy.

More than 20 NYPL branches in the five boroughs are participating in the "Game On @ The Library!" program this afternoon--it starts at 4:30 at the flagship on 42nd and Fifth.

The NYPL's assistant coordinator of young adult services, Jack Martin, told the Gothamist blog that "gaming at the library can bridge the gaps between children, teens and adults, bringing them together as families and friends under one space, or through dialoge created through the users' individual game playing.”

We almost buy the whole video games improve hand-eye coordination argument, but parking your kids in front of a television screen to polish those inter-personal skills is tough to swallow. Next thing you know the Parks Department will be offering an afternoon of technology at Sheeps Meadow.