Blurring fact and fiction to build an interactive documentary game about Colombia's paramilitary networks, and the question of what it means to report a story you can also lose.
In the Bajo Cauca region of Colombia, neo-paramilitary groups known as BACRIM run an economy built on extortion, illicit mining, human trafficking, and murder. Journalists who cover this world do so at serious personal risk. Target: BACRIM begins with a simple, uncomfortable question: what if the audience had to take that risk too?
The project is an interactive documentary game. Players assume the role of a reporter working the story in real territory. The violence is documented. The danger is designed. But the line between those two things is precisely what the project is trying to dissolve. Augmented reality pulls players' actual contact details into the narrative. Their phone number. Their email. The threat lands somewhere real. For the people who actually live in the Bajo Cauca, this is not a mechanic. It is Tuesday.
Two structural innovations drive the design. The first is what the project calls a "thread of parallels" rather than a traditional three-act arc. There is no neat resolution because the situation being documented has none. The second is the distinction between character-driven and character-pulled narrative. The player does not drive the story forward through a fixed protagonist with predetermined traits. They are drawn into the story by events and by other characters, and they bring their own disposition with them: bold, cautious, reckless, methodical. The story responds to who they actually are.
This creates a genuine tension at the heart of the project. Journalism is meant to reach everyone. Games gate content behind performance. A player who makes poor decisions might never access a crucial piece of reporting. The project does not resolve that tension. It names it, and holds it open as a productive problem for the form.
It is no longer our story.
It is the user's.
"For the user, this violence is a game. For the people who live in this region, it is a reality. Target: BACRIM wants to blur that distinction."Target BACRIM, Interactive Storytelling, 2015
The deeper provocation here is about what journalism is actually for. If the goal is to inform, then a well-written article does that more efficiently and more equitably than a game that withholds information from players who do not perform well. But if the goal is to produce genuine understanding of what it feels like to exist inside a dangerous situation, then efficiency is not the right measure. The question is not whether interactive documentary is better than traditional reporting. It is what it can do that traditional reporting cannot.
The character-pulled model points toward something important about how agency functions in immersive media. When the player is the protagonist, the character does not have fixed traits for the player to embody. The player's own traits become the character's traits. This is a fundamentally different relationship to a story than reading, viewing, or even playing a game with a defined hero. It raises questions about identification, about responsibility, and about what it means to make choices inside a world where real people are suffering the consequences of choices they did not make.
Target: BACRIM was a live production at the time of writing, and the tensions it names remain unresolved in the broader field. How much fiction can an interactive documentary absorb before it stops being journalism? How much reality can a game hold before it stops being playable? These are not rhetorical questions. They are design constraints every project at this edge has to confront, usually without a map.