Passionate about public radio? Greg Hochmuth, an artist and engineer in New York City, has designed the game for you.
“Don’t Play With Your News” is an online puzzle game inspired by the radio personalities of NPR News. It lets you take lines from the organization’s five-minute news updates and rearrange them into an entirely new story. The game is kind of like magnetic poetry for the web—except this time, the “poets” in question are Lakshmi Singh, Korva Coleman, Jack Speer, Giles Snyder, Barbara Klein, and Craig Windham.
Hochmuth started working on the game in 2009. “I was interested in breaking this consistency, hoping to offer a series of projects that reinterpret the news in very different ways,” Hochmuth explains in a project description on Medium. Over the years, he amassed a collection of more than 58,000 broadcasts and 4900 hours of audio, taken from 8 a.m., noon, and 8 p.m. updates. Hochmuth cut them into 1,148,916 short clips, which online users can search and reconfigure any way they like.
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According to Hochmuth, Don’t Play With Your News is part of a three-part series that "explores our relationship with the news and broadcast.” You can learn more about it online, or jump right to “playing with your news” right here.