Nothing to Hide
Nothing to Hide is a real world game that explores city surveillance.
It brings to life the ways that people are tracked across the city by CCTV, crowd monitoring sensors, public transport check ins, debit and credit card payments and so on.
The game directly engages with the technology that is actively used in the host city and the real positions of CCTV cameras, sensors and phone masts.
It transforms the player’s experience of a familiar place and offers players a fun, immersive experience, while also raising questions about privacy, surveillance and our ability to move around our cities anonymously.
In our fictional future there is an integrated surveillance system called Live-Check™.
This works as a ‘single ID’ system, tracking a person as they move through the city and through their digital life.
It also keeps track of their Trust Score, which needs to be high in order for them to use the system.
The Live-Check™ system brings many positives, such as the ‘frictionless’ enabling of purchases without a wallet, advert personalisation, and alerting you to friends nearby.
But it’s not long before things take a darker turn, and as the system runs on collective participation, your engagement makes you complicit. When ‘undesirables’ are cast aside, what trade-offs will you be willing to make?
An 'out of the box' street game designed as a repeatable format so that we can tour it to multiple cities globally.
The game is delivered with a wraparound discussion programme designed to enable a rare conversation between policy makers/infrastructure planners and those people vulnerable to surveillance.
Created in partnership with Alison Killing, Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist.
Partners include the Amsterdam Municipality, Waag Futurelab, Bits of Freedom, and Failed Architecture.