Documentary Gaming Collective: Blending Alternate Reality Games and Documentary Theater

Iliya Giyahchi
Performance Studies
UC Davis

This interdisciplinary working group explores the creative, pedagogical, and political potential of documentary gaming—a hybrid media form that combines elements of Alternate Reality Games (ARGs), documentary theater, interactive fiction, and investigative journalism. Through a Practice-as-Research (PaR) approach, the team is developing a transmedia experience that engages participants in uncovering layered stories embedded across physical and digital space and merges procedural storytelling, real-world archives, and live performance. The full ARG will launch in Fall 2025. The project is a collaboration among artists and researchers from across the UC system, including Iliya Giyahchi and Shaoni C. White (UC Davis), Bahar Abdi (UC San Diego), Vicky Michalopoulou (UC Irvine), and Devon Baur (UCLA). Additional collaborators include graduate and undergraduate students, as well as independent artists contributing to the design and execution of the game environment. The work-in-progress uses real documents and digital platforms to challenge distinctions between narrative and archive, play and politics, fiction and fact. By blurring these boundaries, the group seeks to prototype new models for civic engagement and public storytelling that don’t simply simulate crisis, but invite participants to imagine and enact alternatives.