Opening Up Category 2021
Please note that voting is now closed. This year's Opening Up vote winner is Manzil by Nivritti Khurana.
A Web Odyssey
“A Web Odyssey” is a web-based interactive narrative which deals with the navigation on the Web. It is based on the figure of Ulysses trying to navigate back to Ithaca. It features the different episodes of “The Odyssey” (the Cyclops, Circe, the Sirens, C
All of Me: The Twine
The work is an intimate, absurd online exploration for one player of wanting to live, wanting to die and what can happen if we sit together with the dark.
Astronaut: The Best
A management adventure game about running a proper space academy using hard work, lies, and witchcraft. Traditionally, the space race is thought of as a gauche way to kill dogs using explosives, but you are expected to conduct your program with class.
At Nightfall, the Goldfish
An interactive digital story, exploring the new possibility of computational technologies to present the nonlinear narrative. This writing applies the first person for each character telling their life experience.
betweenspace
The work invites you, a virtual audience, to an interactive digital experience, traversing the personal and the political through an exploration of the intimate nooks of a north London flat during a time of global crisis and quarantine.
Bitsy Garden of Forking Paths
A whimsical remake of the Borges short story, inviting the user to explore the divergent paths of the endless, labyrinthine garden, while leafing through cut up fragments of the original tale, reconstructing new drafts in the process.
Cheat Codes for Hinterland Walkthroughs
This digital poetry game replicates a journey through the SE Queensland hinterland changed by bush fires and the cheat codes found in a landscape reborn from tragedy.
Colo-Mitolo-Gital
An anthology website containing interactive narratives that reinterpret different family stories while layering in Colombian history and culture as a way to understand my own heritage through the lens of computation, the web, and play.
Curtain Call
A visual novel that explores the roles we play for those around us and the intimacy of truly knowing someone beneath their surface projections.
Directional Pilgrim
This poetic experience uses Twine and operates like a hypertext choose-your-own-adventure. The player must navigate a map to unlock clues about the nature of the landscape – a process called “medicating.”
dont look at the sun
Played by walking around a behavioural health ward and interacting with objects, it is a ruminative look at the feelings experienced by a nameless person temporarily stuck there.
Drone City
This codework depicts life as an automated flying delivery drone in a gated traffic environment, with the city parsed as a tightly constrained, algorithmic space.
Flowers for Senkin
A multimedia novel about one day in the life of the Nazi camp for Soviet war prisoners, Stalag 352.
Four Months Earlier
Linda is visiting Russell in Los Angeles, where he now lives. We join them halfway up a hiking trail. You must walk them to the top. Keep them within earshot and they’ll chat about Linda’s visit and the past, while trying to find the right time to bring u
Frog’s Princess
A movie-length fully-voiced fully-interactive Medieval fantasy story for 9 to 11-year-old children.
Ghost City Avenue S
Avenue S is a meditation on disconcerting times—a reflection on isolation, nature, walking, politics and protests. It is an active viewing experience.
HIGH-EIGHT VIDEO RENTALS
On dark night, on a lonely highway, a green neon sign flashes, inviting you to enter HIGH-EIGHT VIDEO RENTALS. Who knows, you might just find what you’ve been looking for…
In Cold Blood
A a darker/contemporary twist on the classic ‘whodunit’ genre. It uses a wide variety of media to create an interactive narrative that is designed to keep users guessing.
Indelible Stain
Indelible Stain is the first four chapters of a multi-modal narrative that tells the parallel story of two people’s PTSD occurring 15 years apart and explores the notion of gendered responses to trauma and the shame associated with it. Note: use the password PTSD to access the work
Klimper-KIT
By pressing all different keys from A to Z and from 0 to 9 users do create a collage of sounds and signs. The virtual space enables language structures, which can be created or modified directly by the user.
Lonely Not Alone
Co-designed by young people, for young people, to tackle the stigma of loneliness. The universe is a safe place for young people to share their stories anonymously, find their tribes, and discover the One Small Step that could help to make things better.
Neurocracy
A sci-fi hypertext game that allows players to freely explore the Wikipedia of the year 2049. Then a murder happens and the editing war begins! Find clues, draw connections, compare notes with others, and ultimately solve the murder across ten episodes.
Packetsphere: An Internet Travelogue
An in-depth look at how the internet works; a critique of those systems from an environmental standpoint; an ode to 90’s media, including old GIFs, instant messaging, and the travel guides of old public access television; a dining experience unlike any ot
Prayers to our new God
Once upon a time, people looked at gods not only for source of morality, but also of meaning and structure in the world. Now, the source of ontological truth in our lives seems to have become the economy, shaping everyone’s lives through social media.
Ren’s Demo
You will be offered to the Goddess as part of a mysterious ritual. Can you escape unscathed? Do you even want to if it means condemning the world to the Goddess’ wrath?
Secret Numbers of Dead Objects
There is often an unexpected immediacy to gun violence. The movement of a finger can explode metal ending a trajectory of interactions. What remains from victims of gun violence are memories and legacies, tragic pain and remnants of unique experiences.
Shade of the Morning Sun
The 53+ stories and vignettes in the Shade of the Morning Sun collection chronicle the lives of a Scottish-American family over three generations from about 1968-2068. It is told as an ongoing series of short stories with the same recurring characters.
Shadows Become You
A serialized web-based psychological horror graphic novel. This comic uses its web format to immerse the reader into the world of the story through animation, time-released chapters, vertical page movement, and pacing.
Shell Song
Shell Song is an interactive audio-narrative game which explores the concept of deep-fake voice technologies and the datasets that go into their construction.
Somewhere Near Romance
Somewhere Near Romance is an exploration on the meaning of love, as viewed by a logical machine
Technicolor
A unique perspective that shows the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic (which threatened these care facilities more than any other group of people) through a disorienting viewpoint of those who had no idea a pandemic was beginning to rage around them.
The 4Runner’s Gospel (T4G)
A series of fictional video games and interactive content inspired by the New Testament. It takes players on a hands on visual and musical adventure filled with adrenaline, puzzling mysteries, and engaging animations.
The Avon Lady
When Margo arranges a home visit with free makeovers from her friend’s glam mom, who’s an Avon lady, their mother absents herself, leaving the three sisters alone. The evening erupts into an ugly free-for-all.
The Case of the Disappearing Dandelions – A Musical Mystery
A digital literary love story and satire, a novel, inspirationally interactive, transmedia experience that bridges connections between the various worlds we travel: personal, artistic, political, virtual, and so much more…
The Journal of a Lonely Moon
A small interactive play that features the celestial bodies of our galaxy as the characters.
The Method Detective
Recently dumped by his girlfriend, his home life in a shambles, he distracts himself with any case that comes along: solving the murder of a “dead” conspiracy theorist who is not actually dead, but not really alive; bounty hunting a missing gerbil…
The Mouth of the Dragon
A documentary poem called La Boca del Dragón, in which I narrate, through visual and textual documents and poetry, events that occurred to Venezuelan migrants on their transit to Trinidad and Tobago.
The Perfect Democracy
A digital Australian novel that follows the fallout from the passing of Australia’s wealthiest citizen.
The Poetry Machine
An exploration of the boundaries given to poets when they choose to create within the ruins of another’s work. It considers the frustration of creativity being bound to a deadline or form.
The story of one castle
The aim of our work was to reflect the history of one Ukrainian castle (the castle of Count Xido) through the process of storytelling of its owners in order to form in readers the views of the value of history and historical and cultural monuments.
The Weathering
An interactive, web-based narrative film about a woman who, after the death of her husband, obsesses over finding his spirit and connecting with him in the afterlife.
Tugboats of the Moon
Uses the re-written and re-conceptualised engine of my digital poem, Sydney’s Siberia, and rethinks it for our forever reshaped world.
Waters of the Gap
Interviews with people claiming to have seen the goddess of the Roman Baths in modern times. This sits alongside articles on local history and folklore, and an interactive map containing each sighting.
Yolanda’s Ground Zero in 360
An interactive virtual reality tour into a Philippine coastal village that has been reeling from the impacts of climate change.
You Have Arrived
An interactive textual game set in the near-future that captures anxieties about high housing prices and getting on the property ladder within the context of a climate crisis.