Smoking Gun

An email pops up on your phone. 

You don’t know me. I can’t tell you who I am. But I’m about to send you something which you –and the rest of the country- need to see. You can call me Smoking Gun. Wink emoji. Now get digging. You won’t regret it. 

Smoking Gun is a piece of interactive fiction played on your phone over the course of a week. You are contacted by a whistleblower, who says they have information about something that needs to be made public. They can’t tell you exactly what, for fear of being identified but they can direct you to publicly available information where, they say, you can find out for yourself. It’s there, hidden in plain sight, but if you dig, you’ll uncover a national scandal.

You solve puzzles, scrutinize videos, follow clues, chat about it with other players. What will you uncover at the heart of government? As your investigations take you deeper, nothing seems as clear-cut as the whistleblower is making out. Maybe it’s time to go back to the data… 

Smoking Gun is a STARTS EU VERTIGO residency with Data Stories, at the University of Southampton. You can see our midterm report here.

Upcoming shows:

Will be announced soon…