Major project: CrimeStarters: A Transmedia Heist Anthology
This project aims to encourage user engagement in digital storytelling and narrative by implementing gamification techniques into a transmedia format. This project achieves this by putting the user in the role of the Mastermind, the administrator of a job hosting website for criminals called CrimeStarters. The user must navigate the website and use the information at their disposal to solve issues that arise within heists to ensure their crew are successful, this is how puzzles are used to implement gamification techniques. This release of CrimeStarters has one job for the user to engage with, a heist gone wrong – it is the user’s job to explore the information they have been given and engage with their heist crew to figure out what went wrong and who should be removed from the crew. The user makes this decision by contacting a real email address. This approach aims to blur the line between the real world and the story world this narrative takes place in. The way in which this project has been designed leaves open the possibility of adding more heists/puzzles in the future which in turn, allows for the possibility of additional media formats to be included too.
