Called CigameniC, it is the outcome of the final degree project of two UC3M graduates in Journalism and Audiovisual Communication, Pablo Arana and Daniel Bernáez, under the tutelage of Professor Javier López Izquierdo, Assistant Dean of Audiovisual Communication.

The term CigameniC is a combination of the words cinema, magic and game, which the creators have attempted to transmit to their production. “It is a story with high quality audiovisuals (cinema), which goes beyond the player’s screen making the spectator participate (magic), and it is interactive, with different developments and endings (games)”, they explained.

In their web they define it as the first 3.0 video game for YouTube, which takes advantage of the interactive possibilities that this audiovisual platform offers. This form of narrative immersion allows the user to decide the course of the story and integrate it into real life, thanks to the use of alternative online platforms which enrich the story, such as Facebook, or email, which are indispensable for enjoying the adventure to the fullest.

At a given moment, for example, the user has to find out an email address to send an email, so that after doing so a reply comes with the instructions they must follow.

“In fact”, they point out, “one of our objectives is to demonstrate that at present the boundaries between the different multimedia and online tools are quite blurred and totally complementary.”

In a nutshell, it attempts to use the real world as a support for interactive narrative, known in the English speaking world as ARG (Alternate Reality Game) which has Lost Experience on the North-American channel ABC as its main exponent.

The game story combines the everyday reality of the UC3M Getafe campus, where the project has been filmed in its entirety, with a science fiction story backed by special effects that allows it to recreate the fall of a meteorite right in the University’s main yard.

The adventure blurs the boundaries between cinemagraphic language and that of video games. “In my opinion, the whole story secretly proposes a game between the narrator and the reader or spectator”, Professor Javier López Izquierdo comments, who directs the ALMA-UC3M Master’s in Screenwriting for Television and Film.

“At the beginning of the story, some rules are presented and we are invited to play. During the game we are given instructions, clues, sometimes false, which are just as important as the true ones because it is only in fiction and in death when we wish to see our expectations not fulfilled. What David and Pablo do is strip this procedure down to its bare bones”, he concluded.

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