Sarah just wants answers...Untangle the web but be warned: your clicks have consequences. An investigative narrative game about online conspiracies and radicalization.
The MIX Archives is an inquiry into the mechanics behind the epidemic of misinformation that ravages through the world as we speak. It is the number one threat to democracy in the United States and dislodges not only the stability of society as a whole, but also communities and families. Why do people fall for conspiracy theories, how do they sink into the conspiracy rabbit hole, and how does this impact their lives and that of those closest to them? Follow Sarah in her online quest for answers and connection, and you'll experience it firsthand.
For this project I was the writer and lead narrative designer.
The focus of my work was on creating the narrative structure, the world and the emotional experience as well as content writing. Since the story is character driven, the majority of the creative process involved creating convincing characters with their own backstories, voice, stakes and motives, as well as making the world feel whole and populated. Imagine a conference room walled with whiteboards and me frantically drawing graphs and lines with markers in all the colors I could find. Additionally I had to build a story that could be conveyed within a limited timeframe and write it in such a way that the player is guided (subtly) through the most emotive arc. Questions that came to the surface were: which conversations are triggered when, how does the player navigate the information, how is that information presented just as much as the contents of that information etc. It was key that all the game content was connected and cross-referential. I had to pay attention to the keywords in each article, the hints that I inserted in each DM, and establishing a sense of continuity and realism by writing comments to posts that built onto one another and keeping track of time progression in the game world. That being said:
Never before have I had to flex my fictional investigative journalism muscles as much as for this game.
First, I had to establish the game world. I had to come up with a new conspiracy that was rooted in truth, so for that we delved into the sociology and psychology of online radicalization. We quickly realized that we wanted the story to be healthcare related but not about covid. We also made a list of things that characterize common conspiracies, such as supremacist ideology and feeling unheard. Sugar (appealing to the US' national nutrition problems) and blood (as a way to add an innate aspect to nutrition inequality & to allow for a fictional combination of factual elements) turned out to get my creative cogs turning. In this phase I also decided on the reasons for our PC to participate.
Then I had to come up with interesting characters and stakeholders, and backstories for their participation as well as the pacing of the game. Each character needed a clear function in the game, and I had to draw graphs that showed their connection to events and other characters.
Lastly, the actual narrative design and writing had to be carried out. In order to work as effectively as possible I first designed a detailed narrative prototype in Twine (at the time our game was still labeled with our working title Blood and Sugar).
Only once the broader narrative structure was satisfactory did I move on to nitty-gritty content writing.
Below you can see the fruit of my mental labor, a copy of the spreadsheet that I spent a lot of time working in. It has the news articles with keywords, dates, game states (content is split up in game states and will appear in the search engine accordingly) etc., and other pages such where I wrote all content for such as the Key MIXER comments, Breaking News articles, DMs, generic comments, intro text and the livefeed at the end of the game.
And of course, once everything was implemented into Unity we did a whole lot of playtesting... This is what our setup looked like!
