This project proposes the creation of an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) entitled DREAMER, aimed at educating the general public about media. Designed as a playful, transmedia, and participatory experience, this game will utilize engaging mechanics (puzzles, false leads, realistic fictional content, urban or digital exploration) in order to develop participants’ critical skills regarding the media. From a narrative perspective, the game will build a fictional universe based on Namur folklore, thereby promoting the latter while linking playful content with real cultural points of interest in this geographic area.

Digital citizenship, defined by the Council of Europe as the capacity to participate responsibly in communities through competent and positive engagement with digital technologies, is becoming an increasingly pressing societal issue as our lives continue to shift online. Two-thirds of citizens expressed a desire for more education and training to enhance their insufficient digital competencies. However, current approaches to digital citizenship education exhibit limitations, particularly regarding the scope of the content conveyed, its operationalization for skills acquisition and its ignorance of the pre-established representations of digital technologies. Given these challenges, one promising avenue resides in the use of audiovisual fiction as a vector for fostering digital citizenship. Indeed, recent studies indicate a clear connection between the consumption of fiction (e.g., science fiction movies) and the digital citizenship aspects beyond coding. Furthermore, the use of fiction in classrooms for other purposes than digital citizenship education has a long tradition of established and operationalized practices, such as design fiction with clear evaluation instruments. Lastly, students arrive in the classroom with already pre-established, and possibly skewed through fictional tropes, representations of digital technologies that need to be accounted for.