When you might go astray is a research project dealing with conspiracy theories, fictional narratives, and how their narrative patterns shape the stories of their believers.
The research starts from the following questions:
How much of the pervasiveness of conspiracy theories is generated by their compliance to certain narrative schemes?
What happens when the legitimate need to generate counter-storytellings gets trapped in other kinds of narrative templates?
When you might go astray deals with these questions by exploring the dangers of conspiracy theories and their entanglement with narrative schemes transforming their believers into heroes on a quest.

I started my research by analysing famous conspiracy theories by tracing a series of archetypes and elements that can be found in many of these stories simultaneously. Guided by this first exploration, I have been centering my research around the idea of the monomyth¹ and similar narrative theories.

When you might go astray is divided into two parts: a game designed for the browser where the player is asked to undertake a journey, and an essay examining conspiratorial narratives through the lenses of the mono-myth. The game employs a fictional lens to ultimately unravel the links and sources to real events and anecdotes related to the conspiracy theories universe. In parallel with the theoretical inquiry, I conducted a research into gaming workframes, ending up crafting a game engine of its own, following the storytelling needs. This results in a combination of a game, interactive fiction, digital book and theoretical essay.

This project has been initiated in the context of the graduation research conducted during the Experimental Publishing Master course at Piet Zwart Institute.
Thanks to Aymeric Mansoux, Michael Murtaugh and Marloes de Valk.