(Tim Sheinman; PC, Mac)
Sift through the evidence and unravel a plot to defraud US democracy in this timely immersive satire
According to Reuters, around half of those who voted for Donald Trump, the losing candidate in the recent US presidential election, believe that he is the victim of a complicated plot to deny him his rightful second term. Engendered by extreme partisanship and propagated by social media, the power of the conspiracy theory is, seemingly, at a historic high. A grim moment for democracy, then, but a serendipitous one for Tim Sheinman, the Brighton-based creator of Conspiracy!, a video game in which you must untangle the threads of sedition that run from the US deep state to the country’s highest seat of power.
The aim of the game, which features the voice of Jon Ronson, a journalist who has spent a career profiling the kinds of people who believe the kinds of outlandish theories put forward here, is disarmingly simple. You are presented with 20 Polaroid photographs, each one describing an event seemingly unrelated to the others: a flock of geese dropping dead from the sky; a fatal car accident involving a US senator; a curiously successful chain of mattress companies.
