Global warming, journalistic whiplash, and shooting zombies

Whiplash isn't just a nasty personal injury, it's also a handy metaphor for journalists - not least in some greenhouse effect reporting from last year. After a piece in the New York Times in July, the phrase "journalistic whiplash" spent a little while as a buzzword in the US press.

Basically, it's taken to refer to the sensation readers of newspapers get as complex stories are boiled down to simplistic messages saying "yes!" or "no!" on the issue, when the subtle point the scientists are trying to make are better expressed by "maybe", or "to a degree". Because the differences between positions are thus exaggerated, readers are encouraged to snap their opinions back and forth as if the truth were a tennis ball - hence the metaphor of the neck injury.

For us, working for a no win, no fee compensation company, its greatest effect is on our research; we go off looking for information about a whiplash neck injury, and developments in the process of making a compensation claim, and we end up discovering more and more depressing things about how the world is going to end up a smoggy cinder. Or it's all going to be fine and the birds will sing. And how our attention gets hyperflexion disorders from bouncing between.

That, at least, is an understandable distraction from the work we're supposed to be doing; a side-meaning of something we're supposed to be researching. However, I got an email from a friend today with a link to a distraction that the management wouldn't understand; a game called Super Energy Apocalypse Recycled. (In case you're reading this, management, I didn't play, I just read about it.)

I bring it up because it is faintly relevant here; the author of the game began writing it as a non-believer in global warming, and - gradually - came to believe in it as a result of writing the game. No opinion whiplash here; just a slow exposure to the figures that gradually persuaded him into a firmer belief.

The reason that the writer was learning these figures is that the game features realistic pollution and energy use from the weapons you build to deal personal injury - see, it is relevant - to the rampaging zombies trying to swarm your base.

The reason for that 'Recycled' in the game's name is that it's been updated with more realistic figures than it initially had, after some professors discovered its existence and realised that the game was a very good way of getting the information across to the world. If newspapers are leaving their readers with journalistic whiplash, perhaps games are the new media that may educate us more subtly? If so, perhaps we'll be able to look forward to Hyper No Win No Fee Courtroom Crisis gracing the pages of this site?

Can I claim?