I’ve finally been playing News Tower, a management game where you’re put in charge of every facet of a 1930s newspaper. Like, every facet, from which reporters cover which stories to making sure the bathroom is clean. It’s the kind of video game stuff I tend to love, but all of it taking the form of running a news outlet hits a little too close to home.
One of the last freelance pieces I wrote before starting as managing editor of Kotaku in 2016 was a review of The Westport Independent, an indie newspaper management game that was mostly focused on the editorial end of things. I remember finding both the game and writing the review emotional, making me think about what my editing career had been up to that point and what it would look like in my new role. And while being managing editor involved, well, both managing and editing, there were still big chunks of the business that were firmly other people’s problems.
Not so now, and not so in News Tower. In the game, you inherit a struggling paper and, most crucially, the building it’s housed in. The newsgathering is pretty simple: your telegraph operators find news across the city and globe, and then you send a reporter to cover it based on their strength in its subject area, such as sports, crime, politics, or economy. When a reporter is done they hand their story off to be typeset and assembled, and at the end of the week, you arrange your stories onto the pages of a newspaper and print it off to be sold. All of this takes in-game time; you have to juggle how long stories take to report to make sure you have enough to fill your pages, and I’ve spent a lot of the game’s Sunday evenings muttering “come on, come on” as the assembly person’s progress bar slowly filled and the clock ticked down.
But you play as the publisher, not the editor-in-chief. Beyond the work of the paper itself, there are all kinds of other things to oversee. You lay out your newsroom, buying and placing everything from reporters’ desks to lamps to trash cans. The printing press takes up a ton of space, and it’s also hot and noisy, which saw me sequestering it to its own floor and then desperately arranging acoustic panels and tiny fans around it. You need paper, someplace to store the paper, and someone to carry the paper where it needs to go. Your employees get hungry and thirsty, so you need a water cooler and food for them. They need to use the bathroom, so you need air vents to keep the bathroom from stinking and an employee to keep it clean. Things break, so you need a repairperson to fix them.
Employees will get uncomfortable if their physical needs aren’t met, slowing them down. I’m early in my first run with the game, and my person in charge of stocking supplies is unhappy with everything: it’s too dark at his desk, the printer is too loud and hot when he has to put paper in it, the bathroom is too stinky when he has to go in it. I’ve literally carried out his duties for him, using my mouse to drag boxes of paper from outside the news office up to the shelves as he meandered up and down the stairs, all while bemoaning our lack of paper.
I’d like to give him another lamp or more fans or some help, but I currently have barely enough money to keep us in business. I’ve refused to take out a loan, even though I’ve been making extra money by doing deals for the mafia instead. I’ve sold off odds and ends to scrape together handfuls of dollars for something I need more urgently, swiping up reporters’ potted plants and clustering their desks around a single light bulb, swearing I’ll fix things later if we can just sell enough papers this week. This money stress has made me unkind to my virtual employees; I swung from making my reporters a lovely little newsroom to snapping “You wouldn’t complain about the lighting if you were out reporting” within a handful of in-game time.
News Tower is paced such that none of this is too stressful mechanically. Since the reporting largely happens on its own once you set it ticking, you have plenty of time for this day-to-day management, and you can move and re-do your layout easily. The game gives you plenty of clues to what’s wrong, if you have the means to fix it. But emotionally, I’m finding it a lot. It feels like there’s so much to handle, and so much of it relies on money I don’t have, and I still want to make everyone happy and not fire anyone. On top of all that, I still really want to make a good, honest paper that highlights the most important news, even as I promise the mafia I’ll do the opposite. There’s so much to do and so few resources to do all of it perfectly, but I’m still so certain I can, even as this commitment just digs me deeper into an early-game hole.
I’ve never really had the experience of a management game not feeling fun because it’s too similar to my real life. A game like Frostpunk is a harsh setting I’ll never find myself in; Stardew Valley is a lovely escape that sands all the rough edges off actual farming. I usually love little chores in games like this, but all the little chores in News Tower are just pinging all my brain cells attuned to my real life chores. I recently got access to the game’s financial reports, and I’ll be honest I can barely look at them without thinking about my own real-life financial reports and all the responsibilities they entail.
I’m drawn to the game because it’s about journalism, but maybe I’m not in a place to play a journalism management game right now. This might be praise for News Tower: It definitely feels like running a news outlet, or at least running a news outlet if you’re me, someone with an over-developed sense of responsibility and a self-imposed mandate to do everything perfectly that I should probably work out in therapy instead of in a video game. There’s definitely a lesson in here about priorities and time management that I badly need to learn. At least my real life news outlet is doing a lot better than my virtual one, and at least the only bathroom I have to deal with there is my own. (Which is also currently dirty, oh no.)
