Drawing on more than two years of reporting, thousands of documents, and dozens of first-hand interviews, this FRONTLINE multiplatform investigation of lives cut short examines a federal effort to grapple with America’s legacy of racist killings through the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act.

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www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/unresolved/

This zen puzzle game transforms the mundane experience of unpacking items out of boxes after a move into an extraordinary storytelling device, allowing the player to get to know the main character at an intensely intimate and personal level without ever seeing her over 21 years of her life and eight different moves.

As schools weighed how to reopen safely during the pandemic, The New York Times worked with engineering experts to visualize the flow of air inside a New York City classroom, designing an augmented reality experience to show how improved ventilation could help reduce exposure to coronavirus.

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www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/02/26/
science/reopen-schools-safety-ventilation.html

This interactive novella designed for mobile uses thousands of tiny videos to tell the thousand-year tale of a kindhearted spirit named September, resulting in an experience that’s part ghost story, part scavenger hunt.

www.motto.io

Through the endearing and earnest narrative of Lucy and the Wolves in the Walls, Fable Studio deftly invites us to shift our perspective–to see the world as experienced by its eight-year-old protagonist, Lucy. This interactive journey transports us through the alchemy of VR into the role of a young girl’s imaginary friend. While we are invisible to all other characters in her life, for Lucy we are witness, confidant, and fellow explorer. Her eye contact with us is that much more meaningful because we go otherwise unseen. With a piece of chalk, she literally draws us into being. She gives us hands to interact with the world. So when she requests our trust, we give it, even when the rest of her family denies the evidence of her experience. Central to Lucy’s story is the delicate balance of truth, evidence, and belief. Lucy and the Wolves in the Walls is, at its heart, a celebration of wonder. It is a reminder of the liminal space of possibility we occupy as children. The audience desire to remain with Lucy in that space was so strong that the creators extended her life across multiple platforms—artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies—allowing us to communicate meaningfully with her in real time. For its sweet insistence that all is not as it seems in the world, that trust and belief transcend age, that neither adults nor children have cornered the market on truth, and for its invitation to be curious at every corner, Lucy and the Wolves in the Walls receives a Peabody.

A meticulous, artistically-rendered Minecraft build, The Uncensored Library is a monument to press freedom and an innovative back door for access to censored content. Leveraging Minecraft’s availability in countries while other media is blocked, over 20 million gamers in 165 countries have been able to access censored articles, available in English and the original language, from acclaimed independent journalists under threat by the authoritative regimes of places such as Saudi Arabia, Russia, Mexico, Egypt, and Vietnam. The site provides instructions for accessing the library through a centralized Minecraft server, which allows participants to meet each other, and also provides a Minecraft map which can be republished to other servers, thus ensuring that the content and experience can never be fully blocked by any country for long. Among the library’s most striking features are digital shrines to murdered journalists, including Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, and Mexican journalists Miroslava Breach and Javier Valdez. But perhaps the most impressive aspect of the library is the gorgeous artistry and architecture of the spaces such as the section on Russia housing a giant octopus to point to the country’s role in spreading misinformation around the world. It’s this attention to detail that speaks most to Minecraft’s younger audience, and the library has become a teaching tool in K-12 schools and universities around the world. For turning one of the largest digital platforms for youth into a global movement to fight censorship, The Uncensored Library wins a Peabody Award.

China’s brutal and systemic detention of Uyghurs and other minorities in Xinjiang is well documented, but there exists little photographic evidence from inside the camps, which has effectively limited Western journalistic coverage of what is likely the largest mass-internment drive of ethnic and religious minorities since the Second World War. A two-part project that comprises a VR documentary and an interactive feature, Reeducated uses testimony, hand-drawn illustration, and immersive video technology to record the atrocities and conditions inside the walls of the camp. The 20-minute film gives a haunting reconstruction of the Xinjiang camps, using 360-degree virtual reality technology to place the viewer directly inside the prison cells, classrooms, and torture rooms. In one scene, viewers are situated on a makeshift operating table, within the patient’s point of view, undergoing an urgent appendectomy without anesthesia. Three former detainees, Seituly, Koksebek, and Otarbai, narrate the relentless brutality they endured as they swirl into existence, drawn piece-by-piece with painterly ink illustrations, reminiscent of calligraphy and court drawings. Here, art links to memory, humanity, and justice. Under the highest journalistic standards, the Reeducated team immerses viewers into the extreme anxiety, fear, and suffering that over a million people—and counting—continue to endure. For co-creating powerful immersive evidence of life inside mass internment camps and bearing witness to the profound resolve of survivors in defense of their personal and collective humanity, Reeducated wins a Peabody.

Life is Strange: True Colors centers on the story of a 21-year-old bisexual Asian American woman who has spent the last eight years in foster care, a radical departure from whose stories are typically told in AAA video games. The protagonist, Alex Chen, has the supernatural ability to sense and manipulate others’ emotions. Shortly after witnessing the tragic death of her brother, Alex, she and her friends uncover conspiracies that lead them to question the town’s history and what Alex knows about her own family. Notably, though, intense moments of darkness are balanced by unexpected happiness—such as leading an imaginative young boy through the town as part of a Live Action Roleplay (LARP) game. The game’s central mechanic, the ability to sense and influence emotions, plays a crucial role in both the narrative and the gameplay. The whole development team created a diverse and inclusive game, seeking out consultants, including mental health professionals, to ensure that the characters and themes were authentic and respectful, while using a combination of traditional motion capture and performance capture to produce more realistic and nuanced character animations.And the game features a dynamic soundtrack that changes in response to the player’s choices and emotional state, creating a more personalized and immersive experience. For showcasing both empathy as a superpower and the power of games as a medium for emotionally resonant storytelling, Life is Strange: True Colors wins a Peabody.

Through her YouTube channel, ContraPoints, Natalie Wynn defies simplicity, having developed a following of over one million subscribers by producing long video essays that dissect trending topics and social phenomena, from “Canceling” to “Cringe,” “Incels” to “JK Rowling.”Many of her most popular videos are over an hour long, all filmed, written,edited, and designed by Wynn. In each video, she artistically explores all sides of an argument, treating different perspectives with equal parts seriousness and shade. She is just as critical of herself as she is of Twitter mobs or people in power. Using history, theory, pop culture references, and comedic acting, she helps us understand the nuances of what’s trending. Each video boasts hundreds of thoughtful, paragraph-long responses to topics that normally engender name-calling and shaming with expletives. As a transgender woman, Wynnis vulnerable to attack online and in real life, making her efforts all the more brave and significant. For producing complex, thoughtful, humorous, andartfully filmed videos that engage deliberative debate while showing us that social media does not always have to be toxic, ContraPoints wins a Peabody.