This year´s Games for Change Europe Festival,
held June 15-16 at the CNAM Museum in Paris, France, focused on Games &
Politics, featuring an array of projects that connect the power of games and
interactive media with impactful messages.
In the series of talks about Documentary Games, G4C highlighted
groundbreaking projects and their makers from around the world to reveal the
true potential of games as an investigative, mind-bending and political medium
(please find also Offshore International, A New Interactive Documentary At The Frontier Of Serious Gaming).
In his talk, David Dufresne, creator and director of
the critically acclaimed Fort McMoney, provided insights
on the creative challenges of his multi-episode narrative and the potential
impact of interactive documentary storytelling.
A
look at the dashboard for the Fort McMoney Game
The game consists of three episodes (Boom Town,
Black Gold and Winter Road), each played in real-time over a four-week period. In
the game, players explore the city and connect with key players in the oil
industry, environmental activists as well as those living and working in the
city and surrounding oil patch. Players learn the town's environmental,
cultural, political, social and economic concerns.
Each week, you are able to vote in referendums and
surveys that will affect the city's future, engage in debates, and attempt to
win other players over to your "worldview" in order to influence the
city development. Each action you take earns you influence points, giving you
extra leverage. Your goal is to take control of the world's largest energy
project and make your worldview triumph.
As stated on MIT- Docubase Fort McMoney: Concept to Launch:
Perhaps the most striking distinction between Fort McMoney
and conventional forms of journalism or documentary is that it attempts to
create a simulation of possible futures for the city – a future that can be
directly shaped by the players themselves. David doesn’t see any contradiction
between journalistic values and creating simulations that model hypothetical
scenarios – in fact, he believes it’s necessary. “It seems that most
journalists only want to talk about the past and the present, never the future.
But this is what Wall Street, the EU, the US government do all the time. They
make projections. Journalism is not only about conveying facts. It’s a tool for
thinking.”
Fort McMoney
incorporates 60 days of filming in more than 22 locations in the city,
including dozens of interviews. Research took place over 2 years, with 2000
hours of footage shot at a cost of C$870,000. It is a result of the collaboration
between National Film Board of Canada (NFB) and Montreal-based TOXA, in
association with Franco-German TV network Arte. The documentary game is
available in English, German and French.
In February 2015, Fort McMoney
was named the Best Original Interactive Production Produced
for Digital Media at the 3rd Canadian Screen Awards.
About David Dufresne
David Dufresne is an international award-winning independent
writer and filmmaker, who joined the MIT in 2014 as a Fellow at the Open Documentary Lab, Comparative Media
Studies/Writing, for one year of research in web documentaries.
Since 2014, he has been a visiting-professor of
journalism at Académie du Journalisme (Neuchatel, Switzerland) and since 2015
at l’Ecole des Médias in Université du Québec (Montreal, Canada).