Gameified Narratvisim; assembling truth in the digital age

Video Curation, Research and accompanying essay, 2020

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"Narrativism is one of the four lenses of game making, and is the school of thought that prefers experient, role-driven designs. It is about using a game to impart a storied experience in which the player takes an active role and develops sympathy toward its outcomes."

https://www.whatgamesare.com/narrativism.html

 

At 23:34 on the 03/02/2020 I was driving on the A46, somewhere near Leicester, heading towards Lincoln from Birmingham, when I watched a meteor light up the sky. A distinct, bright green ball of light descended from the sky over the space of a couple of seconds, meeting the horizon with a powerful green flash. I heard a gentle, distant but definite thudding sound as the green flash disappeared out of view. I witnessed a meteor, of significant size, enter the Earth's atmosphere, trail above my head and explode just ahead of me, beyond some trees on the tip of the horizon line. Or did I? In my efforts to seek verification of what I had seen I became active in constructing a 'fact based fiction' online; scouring message boards, uncovering YouTube footage, piecing together news articles to synthesise a kind of truth. An attempted document. The results are impossible to prove or disprove.

 

The curated videos, found footage, articles and witness statements form a kind of narrativism (in a gaming sense); the search for evidence is a live-action role-play game that reflects the way 'truth' is sought, assembled, presented and distributed in an online space. An accidental homemade epistemology.