As part of of our work for EUROfusion's Horizon Europe public engagement remit, we fictioned a narrative that would take the expo visitors on a journey: a journey at once both fictional and literal. Employing elements of Alternate Reality Gaming (ARGs); an interactive networked narrative that utilises the actual world as a platform, we developed user-propelled narrative structures to both stimulate and guide visitors through each of the Expo's distinct parts and onto the next.
Fictioning
We initially sketched ideas with AAA games writer James Wallis (Spaaace) before teaming up with award winning interactive fiction author M. Darusha Wehm with whom we devised the story outline. Darusha then wrote the complete three-part narrative:
A mysterious group called the Adversaries has been stealing and hiding knowledge about science, and especially fusion, in order to take control of its potential. A group of citizen agents, led by a benevolent Artificial Intelligence, work to reclaim the stolen information which has been fragmented and secreted in digital lockboxes with secret keys left in public places by the Adversaries for their own use.
The agents must find markers which lead to the strongboxes, then work together to combine the fragments of information into digital artefacts. As the team reassembles the artefacts, their communications system is disrupted by an agent of the Adversaries, but they still can succeed in reclaiming all the initial artefacts and learn about further places where fragments may be found.
As they work toward reassembling more artefacts, suspicion is cast on their teammates, and eventually the spy amongst them is unmasked. Once both sets of artefacts have been completely recovered, the agents learn that while the Adversaries' plan has been foiled, they continue to work in the shadows to sacrifice the future in exchange for their own profit and power today. Loyal agents are offered an opportunity to use the knowledge they have recovered to run simulations of future worlds in an attempt to counteract the Adversaries' work.
Narrative Beats
The narrative unfolds in-app via a simulated chat room run by Gaia (an AI character) in which a number of Non-Player Characters (NPCs) are also searching for stolen artefacts.
Player actions in the physical exhibition and in the augmented reality portals in the app trigger narrative sequences in the chat which directly relate to artefact content reclaimed by the player, or provide additional information on the scientific content.
As more artefacts are retrieved, the main narrative arc is advanced.
Narrative Arc
The three acts in the narrative mirror the three parts of the exhibition. With the rabbit holes, players retrieve fundamental scientific proofs from the past, and the NPCs elaborate on these.
In the second, practical applications of these proofs in the present are encountered whilst the player must also work to restore the communication system.
After the system is restored, players are released to 'secure the future' through participating in an immersive future energy decision-making system. On completing this, players graduate to full autonomous status and the third act, independent of the physical exhbition and in turn the mobile app, provides routes for players to engage on specific issues with members of the fusion community through a browser based chat system.
Reiteration of the CTA as private welcome message in the chat room of the Radiant Matter mobile app.
Characters
Amongst the NPCs are three experts; a scientist, a historian and an entrepreneur who provide contrasting perspectives on scientific content retrieved during gameplay. The remaining NPCs comprise a double-agent, who must be unmasked in later gameplay, and two characters whose relationship acts as a foil for the process of nuclear fusion: forces that repel each other creating energy when they are brought together.
What follows is the opening welcome to the player in the public chat that arrives a few minutes after the private welcome message shown above. The welcome is swiftly followed by a spat between two non-player characters:
gone_fission
Welcome to our little treasure hunt, @${username}. These so-called "Adversaries" hide the information they steal in digital lockboxes, but they leave markers in public places for each other.
We've broken their code, so with this app you can scan the markers to gain access to the artefacts. We've found that most of them only have fragments of the knowledge artefacts, but the app will combine them to complete them.
Have fun!
———
Alphomega
This isn’t a game, @gone_fission.
Humanity can’t afford to lose access to its scientific discoveries and it’s up to us to make sure that the knowledge that’s been stolen and locked away in the portals is retrieved and shared.
Information belongs to us all!
———
gone_fission
*eyeroll* @Alphomega doesn’t seem to think that anything can be both useful and fun. What a buzzkill.
Broadening Perspectives
The chat room acts as a Greek Chorus insofar as NPCs comment on the action unfolding within the game, but they do not act as a homogenous entity. The dynamics of the chatroom are designed to reflect/express the plurality of opinions on fusion in the actual world.
The NPCs' dialogue as a whole also provides a means to deviate from offically sanctioned content held within the game. Their views are their own, as it were, and this allowed the scientific communication to remain intact, whilst being opined upon by the NPCs.
The threaded nature of the chat room fitted well with the scientific content we created as part of the wider project. Scientific information isn't to everyone's taste so we created pathways into that content through other disciplines including literary, historical and geographical sources. The differing interests and expertise of our NPCs provided routes for users with non-scientific interests to engage with the content.
Making Fragments Make Sense
We prototyped the narrative using Twine, an example narrative is inlined below, which provided early access for stakeholders. This eased the review process, especially for those who found the segmented nature of interactive fiction hard to visualise. This also allowed us to experiment with some of the learning objectives that formed part of the larger project. Twine runs in the browser so it was a good fit for quick access for our team and the client.
Sophocles Leading the Chorus of Youths, 1890
GMS Integration
After signoff, we integrated the narrative into Coalesce, our multi-lingual backend game content-management system. Coalesce provides functionality to set time delays for push-notifications and we used this to add intervals between messages to simulate real-time chat where characters do not always reply immediately.
We launched with French and English versions of the narrative, with further translations including Spanish, Italian and German to be added in due course.
Coalesce
Coalesce is our game content-managment system. Built on open source technologies including Vue.js, Coalesce is a configurable system built to manage and deliver game content to game-managment servers and end user devices.