The Secret City: A Tech-infused Real World Choose Your Own Adventure with Cross-disciplinary Ties

Abstract

The Secret City This proposal suggests a creative endeavor that weaves together multiple robust digital technologies, and utilizing them in service of a single branching narrative structure. The experience will infuse real-world places with mediated content to create a compelling fictional frame designed to awaken a sense of wonder in the participant akin to that which comes foreign travel, but which need take participants no further than the seldom seen edges of their own community. By casting participants as heroes in a narrative they themselves help to define, it will use technology to leverage participant’s human curiosity and imbue them with a lasting sense of empowerment, responsibility, and agency to affect change. We will create a multimodal, first-person game experience that uses ubiquitous technologies like mobile phones, tablets, as well as emergent wearable technology which casts the player as protagonist, and uses digital storytelling to facilitate interaction within the built environment. We also believe that it is critical to the success of the project that the use of technology be tempered with modes of mediation in an altogether different vein—interactions in real-time with physical objects, as well as actors leading participants through structured improvisatory moments within the narrative framework.