The LUNe (Laboratoire des Usages Numériques, in engligh Laboratory for Digital Practices) opened in 2019 in downtown Nantes, under supervision of the local governement. Their goal is to welcome teenagers and young adults to discover and experiment digital creative tools—code, robots, virtual reality, 3D printing, video editing—throughout pedagogic tools built specifically for this place.

New digital practices come with issues the LUNe team wishes to address in their civid and academic duty. One of these issues is the topic of harassment, a form of violence that has very much increased with the development of digital tools and practices.

“Une mission pour Lunité” is an investigation game designed with a double objective : educate on the mechanisms of harassment, to better prevent them and defuse them, while getting a young audience acquainted to the various technologies available at the LUNe. The goal is to propose an educative, playful experience around a very sensitive topic, while avoiding a moralistic or paternalistic tone.

Young participants come to this experience playing the role of junior agents, selected to join Lunité, an ficticious organization striving for peace in society. After a video brief, they will be instructed by senior agents to form teams, and they will be given a tablet that will serve as their investigation file. During their mission, they will collaborate to resolve puzzles on various digital and analog supports. Among other tools, they will get to use virtual reality devices, drones, smartphones, Arduino circuitboards, touch tables, Makey-Makeys, or a pen plotter.

My own role in this project has been very broad: from prototyping puzzle ideas in an iterative process, fine tuning their difficulty, art direction, visual production, prop sourcing, programming with Construct the digital puzzles and the investigation file.

Camille Huber brillantly created illustrations to give life to the characters and story, in a purposefully restrained style in order to avoid overwhelming the eye with informations that don't actually matter in the puzzles.

The entire experience is framed with a story written from real facts, which allows for immersion while maintaining a distance required by the sensitive nature of the topic. Participants experience the story from a holistic, observator position and lead the invigation by themselves to better understand the interactions between characters.

At the end of the experience, facilitators lead a collective discussion to provide additional information, allow participants to debate on the story, and to share, if they will, how it resonates with their own experience.

“Une mission pour Lunité” was awarded with a Territoria d’Or in 2021.