December 16, 2025.
To close out the year, I’ve added a small but important experiment to the site: an interactive documentary “mini‑game” that lets you explore a real federal audit where more than 130 works from Canada’s Federal Indigenous Art Collection simply vanished from accountability. It’s a nonfiction, browser‑based experience that treats the audit itself as the crime scene.
This project also marks Plex’s early debut in voice. Plex appears here as a light, slightly sarcastic guide who walks you through timelines, missing records, and institutional shrugs, while never making fun of the art or the communities affected. The jokes are aimed squarely at bureaucracy, euphemism, and the way official language can smooth over the disappearance of cultural treasures.
Building this was harder than it looks because getting clear, detailed information on the case is genuinely difficult. Public coverage focuses on headline numbers and broad outrage, but the deeper you go, the more you run into redactions, gaps, and vague assurances instead of concrete answers. That struggle became part of the design: the game doesn’t invent tidy resolutions, it immerses you in the same fog a concerned citizen, journalist, or researcher would face.
The goal is not to “solve” a mystery but to feel the lack of accountability. By putting you inside documents, statements, and timelines, the interactive format shows how process language, committees, and “action plans” can coexist with vanishing artworks and no clear responsibility. It’s quiet, cerebral, and a little sarcastic, because that contrast makes the failings more visible instead of less.
This piece is also a preface to the upcoming Crimes of the Art, Episode 0: Vanishing Virtues, a Ren’Py‑based nonfiction game that will expand on this case with a fuller narrative and more space for Plex’s voice to evolve. For now, you can try the prototype on the new “Try Crimes of the Art” page; I’ll be posting an image of Plex there as well, so you can finally put a face to the voice guiding you through the paperwork.
