A game about a robot becoming a journalist feels a bit on the nose right now, in the midst of stories about writers being replaced by AI. But Ben Gelinas, director of Times & Galaxy, says it was never his intention to make a point about the rise of artificial intelligence. The intention was to focus on journalism itself. “You can’t write for everybody, and I’m trying to show that.”
You play as Reporterbot, the first ever robot reporter for the Times & Galaxy, a space “holopaper” that’s produced aboard a starship. On your first day as an intern, you’re sent to investigate a shuttle crash, and after interviewing witnesses and poking around for clues, you have to decide how to write up the story. Do you go for a sensationalist angle? Focus on the human (read: alien) interest? Or do you produce an informational story, merely giving the facts?
“I wanted to bring in some of the ethical and creative choices that are required of reporting … you’re gathering information, but how you portray what happened, what you choose to focus on, that’s up to the journalist to decide,” says Gelinas. Going down the more sensationalist route will up the paper’s readership, but may tarnish your reputation. Other characters might be less willing to speak to you if they think you’re a tabloid muckraker. But the informational angle could lose readers despite boosting your standing as a purveyor of the truth. “I had a colleague who called those kinds of stories ‘broccoli’,” says Gelinas. “You didn’t want to read them, but you had to because they were good for your health.”
Gelinas is coming at Times & Galaxy from a position of hard-won experience. He always wanted to be a journalist (“Games were my obsessive hobby, but I never saw it as a career”), and spent nearly three years working as a crime reporter at the Edmonton Journal in Canada. But the constant horror of covering homicides and interviewing victims’ families became too much. “Eventually it caught up to me, emotionally and mentally.”
He asked to be moved over to the arts section of the paper for some respite, and while he was there, he got a call from BioWare. They were looking for an editor to wrangle the increasingly knotty Dragon Age lore into shape. Gelinas ended up spending nearly six years at the company, doing more and more writing in addition to editing, and working on games like Mass Effect: Andromeda.
He left to become an indie-game developer in 2017, and thought about making Times & Galaxy then, but reasoned it would be too ambitious for a debut. “I decided I would cut my teeth on a much smaller game,” he says, which ended up as 2018’s wonderfully quirky Speed Dating for Ghosts. “I think you can make a video game about anything,” he says. “And a lot of avenues haven’t really been explored in the same level of detail that you see in other mediums.”
Despite its outlandish setting, Times & Galaxy tries to nail the nuts and bolts of reporting, and especially the less exciting aspects of covering local news as a lowly intern, being sent to write stories about cat shows and county fairs. But that’s where the space setting adds a splash of colour. “We have our cat show, but it’s all alien, weird cats,” says Gelinas. “And their definition of ‘cat’ is very loose.”
There’s a liberal dose of comedy. “Even though I’ve written about a lot of grisly things, I didn’t want to bring a lot of that into this,” says Gelinas, who notes that the game has been particularly influenced by The Jetsons, Futurama and Adventure Time. But there’s also a bit of Star Trek: The Next Generation in there (Gelinas is a big Commander Data fan), in the sense that it’s a show about a group of characters interacting with each other at work, where work happens to be in space. “We wanted to bring the same vibe: so it’s not so much a game about journalism, it’s a game about aliens and robots who do journalism.”
Most of all, Times & Galaxy is about people, whether they are humans, robots or aliens, and how your choices as a writer can affect the relationships between them. It’s about how the pen is preferable to the sword. “Most of the games I’ve worked on, you have to kill people to get to those relationships and stories,” says Gelinas. “I wanted to make a game where you had a really good reason to go out and explore the world, and meet people, and go on adventures, without necessarily killing them.”