Immersion – Multiple Journalism

Gone Gitmo

Devid Ilievski — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 18:11:41 +0000

Gone Gitmo

An immersive docu-game based on the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, originally designed for Second Life and now available in Unity, based on actual reporting and facts.

When

2007

Where

United States

Who

Nonny de la Peña, Peggy Weil

Website

gonegitmo.blogspot.com

What is it?

Guantánamo Bay, Cuba – colloquially known as ‘Gitmo’ – is one of the world’s most famous and controversial prisoner-of-war camps, home to hundreds of detainees from the United States’ ‘War on Terror’.

Following on her 2004 documentary Unconstitutional about Guantánamo Bay, journalist Nonny de la Peña teamed up with artist Peggy Weil to make Gone Gitmo.

A virtual but accessible version of the prison, in contrast to the real but inaccessible prison, Gone Gitmo is a fact-based simulation of Guantanamo Bay. The ‘player’ enters as a prisoner and discovers what’s it like to be imprisoned in the camp and lose his or her civil rights.

Since journalists are not allowed inside the camp, the reconstruction is based on interviews with former prisoners, videos and photos from a variety of official sources and legal materials that detail the plight of Gitmo prisoners.

How does it work?

The original version of Gone Gitmo, no longer running, was a virtual re-creation of the Guantánamo Bay prison in Second Life, a popular virtual world platform. In 2013, De la Peña and Weil recreated Gone Gitmo in Unity3D as a docu-game and first person experience.

In the game, users go through a virtual detention inside the prison camp and are immersed in the experience of being taken prisoner and losing their habeas corpus rights. The player’s avatar is briefly bound, hooded and forced to kneel in the same way that detainees were taken to the prison.

After arriving in the virtual replica of Camp X-Ray, players are free to explore the camp where various screens play clips from De la Peña’s film ‘Unconstitutional’ (2004) and from original U.S. Defense Department footage in order to create a spatial narrative.

Why did they make it?

Nonny de la Peña is one of the founders of immersive journalism, which uses new technologies to bring users a sense of ‘being there’. She defines immersive journalism as “the use of virtual reality and 3-D environments, built in a gaming platform, to convey the sights, sounds and feelings of news.”

Participants can enter the news stories as themselves, as visitors gaining first-hand access to a virtual version of the location of the story – or as a character depicted in the story. In this way, they can have a different level of understanding from reading a print story or watching news on television or online.

De la Peña believes that immersive storytelling is the future of the news and an important way to engage young audiences with global news stories. “We’re looking at a new medium that’s here to stay, and we need to be thinking about how to use it”, she said at a conference at USC Annenberg in 2011.

“How many kids are gaming? All of them. This is not a unique batch of individuals. It’s a growing audience. This has become a critical place where we can still tell news stories”, she said, comparing the state of gaming to the emergence of radio and television.

Why did we select it?

Gone Gitmo is a pioneering journalism project using fact-based virtual reality to tell an important news story about an inaccessible prison camp. It makes the invisible visible.

Furthermore, by offering a first person perspective on a hidden news event, Gone Gitmo opens up a range of new possibilities for users to be immersed in the news and to engage with it actively. Through immersion in virtual environments and first person storytelling, docu-game Gone Gitmo adds an innovative dimension to the news.

Although the building of virtual worlds for news games is still costly and time-consuming, we expect it will become more prevalent and influential in the future.

Besides prototyping immersive news stories, De la Peña also contributes actively to the discovery of best practices and the discussion about ethics for a largely unexplored field.

De la Peña: “For example, there is an issue here when you have virtual bodies – is it too subjective? How do you retain objectivity? How do you edit an immersive journalism story? You have to take pieces out and leave pieces in. There are always editorial decisions. What are the best practices for doing it in a virtual world?”

Some other docu-games

JFK Reloaded puts the player in the role of Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. The player is then scored on how closely one’s version of the assassination matches the report of the Warren Commission: first shot missed, second hit JFK’s neck and third on the head.

According to the company, the primary aim of the game was “to establish the most likely facts of what happened on 1963-11-22 by running the world’s first mass-participation forensic construction”, the theory being that a player could help prove that Lee Harvey Oswald had the “means and the opportunity to commit the crime”, and thus help prove the Warren Commission’s findings.

The Guardian’s The Refugee Challenge invites the reader to make the choices real refugees have to make. After each choice players get a new challenge to solve, so they’ll get closer to the experience of looking for safety in Fortress Europe.

Project Syria is one of Nonny’s immersive journalism piece, first shown at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2014.

Related Cases

Gone Gitmo

An immersive docu-game based on the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, originally designed for Second Life and now available in Unity, based on actual reporting and facts.

Desert Rain

Desert Rain is a groundbreaking multi-media installation that immerses participants in the complex relationship between reality and virtuality, inspired by the 1990-1991 Gulf War.

Desert Rain

Devid Ilievski — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 23:23:05 +0000

Desert Rain

A theatrical multi-media installation based on real life sources that probes the relationship between the real and the virtual in response to the 1990-1991 Gulf War.

When

1999

Where

United Kingdom

Who

Blast Theory artists’ group (led by Matt Adams/Ju Row Farr/Nick Tandavanitj) and Mixed Reality Lab (University of Nottingham).

Website

blasttheory.co.uk

What is it?

Desert Rain is an artwork by the British artists collective Blast Theory combining elements of performance, installation and virtual reality. The centerpiece is the war game Desert Rain which is part of a performance in an extensive physical setting, including a Virtual Reality environment. The topic is the 1990-1991 Gulf War which triggered questions about the intricate relation between the real and the virtual in the context of modern warfare and mass media.

How does it work?

Desert Rain is a mixed-reality performance for six participants in a carefully scripted sequence of physical spaces.

First, in the darkened ante-chamber, the participants get instructions. Then they are led to U-shaped cubicles, where they enter the virtual world of the war game projected onto a “screen” of water spray.

Here, the players have 20 minutes to capture their allocated targets in desert landscapes, bunkers and motels.

Once the game is over, the participants are asked to stepthroughthe rain curtain – to mark the transition from the virtual to the real world – and proceed along a sand corridor to a reconstructed motel room, where they are confronted with the real identities and experiences of their targets.

Among these targets were for instance a BBC journalist and this soldier, who the audience met through prerecorded video interviews on a television.

Technology and software tools

Desert Rain creates a collaborative virtual environment where communication and interaction between participants is made possible by virtual reality software and collaborative virtual environments.

The technical infrastructure includes a range of innovative technological devices.

These include the projection on the technologically driven water curtains-cum-screens; a pressure-sensitive footpad to navigate the 3D world; headphones for live audio links and feedback; and a magnetic card which stores crucial information and activates the various technologies. In the computer space behind the cubicles, technicians monitor the players without them always being aware of it.

The project for an interactive story was launched by The Guardian UK in collaboration with The Guardian Australia, which provided the opportunity to share resources and create a unique and labor-intensive story. The Guardian turned the Holmes family images into a rich magazine-like visual interactive, reconstructing the Holmes’ experience of that dark day.

Firestorm creatively embeds a variety of sources in a compelling linear storyline that uses the dramatic photos shot by the family to bring to life a wealth of contextual information. The project reads like an e-book, divided in chapters and enriched with loads of embedded content that smoothly pops-up to enhance the power of storytelling.

Why did we select it?

Desert Rain is a critical response to the Gulf War as represented by mass media. While live television claimed to provide direct access to real events in the war zone, audiences had the feeling that “the more you watched, the less you knew.”

”Gulf War did not take place”

In Blast Theory’s words: “The media, advertising and the entertainment industries were casually misleading at best and perniciously deceptive at worst.”

Desert Rain also takes a stand against philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s position that the “Gulf War did not take place” which basically reduced the war to a grand simulation scheme while ignoring the real and devastating effects on the ground.

With Desert Rain, Blast Theory reconstructs the war in a collaborative virtualandphysical environment, aiming to make the intersections and gaps between both worlds more concrete and to allow participants to experience them through immersion.

Why did we select it?

Desert Rain can be seen as a forerunner of immersive forms of journalism today, which recreate news events and situate participants inside virtual environments, such as Second Life, CAVE, and online virtual worlds and games.

Triggered by the media coverage of Gulf War I, Blast Theory explores the boundaries between the real and the virtual war by juxtaposing the two realms in one installation, where “the real intrudes upon the virtual and vice versa.”

Reconstructed hotel room

In tune with the reflexive tradition of modern art, Blast Theory’s work critically questions the bombardment of images by CNN, BBC, and other media companies during Gulf War I, which foreclosed experience and objective information.

Blast Theory’s mixed reality installation is an artistic form of journalism that offers a thoughtful alternative to the representation of the war in broadcast media.

Extra

Blast Theory also made “Fixing Point” an audio walk in the woods that traces the legacy of the conflict in Northern Ireland.

The Refugee Challenge by British newspaper The Guardian invites readers to confront the choices real refugees have to make, in order to better understand what it’s like to look for a safe haven in Fortress Europe.