A couple of new “news games” are looking at the recent heroic plane landing on the Hudson to put users into the news:
“Hero on the Hudson” challenges players to steady a plane nosediving toward the busy river. In “Double Bird Strike,” the goal is to evade flocks of birds — a suspected cause of the US Airways jet’s near disaster on January 15.
Both are free online games created by units of MTV Networks, a division of Viacom Inc. Free games, which make money by selling advertising, are seen as a promising segment of the $22 billion U.S. video game industry.
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Simulation and visualization are key components to take news games to the next level from the land of Flash based quizzes and calculators. Playability is something that misses in most news games. The idea of creating a first person shooter around a tragic news event would be instantly dismissed, but this effort taps into a piece of good news.