Raiders of the Lost Archive
Raiders of the Lost ARCHive was a joint project of Bogdan Spanjevic and UK game designer Rebeca Shelley during the Nuit Blanche manifestation in Brussels, Belgium. During the White Night, Brussels City Archive, one of the oldest public institutions in town, was transformed into a playground and gamified for this purpose.
The idea behind this hybrid game was threefold: to open Archive for a wide audience, to help and support citizens of Brussels learn more about their city, and to enable transfer and interpretation of knowledge.
Through series of playful and fun tasks, players were invited to save their city from collective amnesia that started to erase large portions of city memory by deleting and destroying documents preserved in the City Archive.
Visitors were supposed to recreate the memory of the city by investigating scattered fragments of documents – using a special mobile app to broadcast and share assembled stories.
Raiders were played by more than a thousand players during one night.