Abstract. Target: BACRIM is an immersive and interactive documentary game that exposes the atrocities of Colombia's paramilitary forces in one of its most violent regions. The producers combine both non-fiction and fiction to create a game that places the user at the heart of the story. Through this docufiction, which is anchored in augmented reality, the user or participant experiences danger firsthand. For the user, this violence is a game. For the people who live in this region, it is a reality. Target: BACRIM wants to blur that distinction. We therefore create a world, where fiction and non-fiction are interrelated, where genres merge and where individual disciplines escape the shackles of tradition to converge and create an interactive documentary that places user experience at its core.
Introduction: The creature awakesEnglish Literature teachers can learn a lot from Victor Frankenstein. As a central character in one of the 19 th century's most important Gothic novels, he makes for a fascinating object of study, but he is also an instructive role model. After all, like Frankenstein, anyone teaching classic texts is in the business of necromancy. Such pedagogical alchemists are tasked with breathing new life into dusty tomes written by long dead writers. They must reanimate ideas that modern readers may consider irrelevant by grafting them onto vital contemporary themes. When it came to designing the locative learning tool Shelley's Heart, this process involved stitching facts about Mary Shelley and the Romantic poets to a fictional frame tale featuring modern alter egos of these historic figures. Throughout its many iterations, this practice-led research project was fraught with uncertainty. If its disparate parts were not effectively joined together, the experiment would fail and the whole conception would collapse into a disjointed jumble. However, at 5:00PM on All Hallows' Eve, the 31 st of October 2018, the creature finally sprang to life! Figure 1. Shelley's Heart: Locative debut The night that the Shelley's Heart web app was officially launched in St. Peter's churchyard in Bournemouth, UK, over 150 people were in attendance. For two hours, these participants explored four paths weaving around the location where Mary Shelley is buried along with the heart of her husband, poet Percy Shelley. Since the official unveiling, Shelley's Heart has been freely available to the general public. It requires no downloading and can be accessed via the website
In 2018, a group of ten academics and industry professionals created ‘The Secret Story Network’. This practice-research initiative produced ten 60–90-minute role-playing games conducted on the social media platform WhatsApp. In the process, we worked to identify and refine design strategies that incentivize engagement with the type of narrative collaboration that media scholars commonly call ‘collective storytelling’. Via the participatory action research methodology, this study evolved through cycles of prototyping, testing, feedback, reflection and modification. This article analyses our study in relation to the ‘Threefold Word Model’ for RPGs proposed by Kim. Based on the affordances of the WhatsApp interface, we suggest a modification of this conceptual frame, in line with scholars such as Edwards, Bøckman and Bowman that extends investigations into four theoretical lenses that we use to examine the stories in our study. These modes are (1) drama, (2) game, (3) simulation and (4) immersion. The observations made also suggest new avenues for ‘writing’ and creating interactive digital narratives.
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