What will be the sports world’s response to climate change? How will disciplines and practices evolve in the coming decades?
On this 26th of February, L’Équipe explore, the platform for original content from the sports media, offers you an innovative digital format: « Sports in 2050, the game where you are the hero » an interactive website that immerses you in a futuristic world heavily impacted by climate change.
With this immersive format, L’Équipe invites you to explore, in a playful and educational manner, the repercussions of climate change on sports practice. Drawing on reports from the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), the game is enriched with explanatory texts accompanying nearly 400 cards, each featuring a futuristic illustration. Feel free to embark on this adventure and replay it as many times as you like.
We are delighted to present this monumental project concocted with our friends from L’Équipe explore. Come on, we’ll reveal the behind-the-scenes of this extraordinary production. Welcome to this digital adventure like no other!
We’re going back in time
Summer 2023, Jean-Baptiste Renet and Imanol Corcostegui, heads of the explore department, invite us to brainstorm a format with Alexis Danjon, an investigative journalist specializing in ecological issues. An idea takes shape: a choose-your-own-adventure book, web-style.
Another intuition immediately emerges: that of experimenting with visual creation using Midjourney, an artificial intelligence program that generates images based on textual descriptions. We then envision a few scenarios and have fun with the tool. Here are our initial explorations.
This exercise leads us to create images to depict:
- An exhibition in 2050, ‘The Glacier Workshop,’ allowing visitors to explore the mountains as we know them today but gaining access to sports practices that have transformed over time.
- The architectural competition for the new PSG stadium, where major firms propose their visions. For instance, we playfully imagine a club shop now also selling plants.
- Events on golf courses, nighttime stages in the Tour de France to avoid extreme heat, etc. Alexis shares envisioned futures based on his extensive knowledge of researchers’ work, IPCC reports, and, of course, sports.
Such an interactive journey is also built with sketches and images that we may not end up using.
We write with new tools
If you thought we were going to write this script on Word, you’re way off. To create this type of program (and we have a bit of experience), it’s crucial to develop good tools tailored to the mission. For this one, we chose to build our game board in Figma. A big thank you to the author Alexis Danjon for his flexibility and understanding. It’s not easy to switch from a text editor to a graphic design tool.
On the editorial side, we decide to always pair fiction (the narrative text) with its scientific explanation. Remember, everything proposed in the script is based on publications, projections, and inspired by recent events.
The narrative principle refines itself. Systematically, two choices are presented, leading us into narrative arcs that take the form of trees. You, the players, will choose, based on your preferences, to open a door to a choice that will take you on a journey either within a football club, with the Tour de France, or in the world of elite skiing.
We won’t tell you more here to avoid spoilers, but rest assured that during your journey, you’ll encounter a diverse cast. Let’s drop a few names to whet your appetite: Pauline Ferrand-Prévot, Mathieu Flamini, Thibaut Pinot, Anne Marie Pröll, Lindsey Vonn, Raphaël Poirée, Julia Simon, Marie Dorin-Habert, Quentin Fillon Maillet, Lazarus Lake, Aurélien Sanchez, Flora Dolci, Ada Hegerberg, José Mourinho…
The editorial design phase is long, very long. We write a lot, and most importantly, we realize the need to test the branching, check if it’s coherent or not. To do this, we set up a prototype, simple, without a graphical interface, and focused on one goal: testing the logic of choices while gathering initial feedback on the reading experience.
This method allows us to test and adjust based on feedback. Below are some screenshots of our tool created on Figma.
We design with new tools
Clearly announced on the program’s homepage: all the images in this narrative were generated with Midjourney, an artificial intelligence program that creates images from textual descriptions, and supervised by our graphic designers.
For each of the 370 pages (about 250,000 characters for connoisseurs), we explore multiple visual ideas. Each time, we submit our proposals to the project team using an (almost) democratic process. Based on everyone’s feedback, we suggest variations. Each time, the challenge is to illustrate while maintaining a coherent universe that aligns with the text and the series of sequences in the script.
— Visual proposals for a card related to refereeing.
You will discover 370 images in the program. Here, we present a few selected trials from the approximately 12,000 images that Thomas generated. Feel free to contact us to discuss the topic of image creation with tools like Midjourney; it’s a subject that captivates us.
To conclude
As you may have gathered, we have taken immense pleasure in working on this program. It’s also an opportunity to emphasize that interactive storytelling remains a fantastic playground for authors today. Eighteen years after our first web documentary, the excitement at the dawn of launching this adventure is still just as vibrant.
We take this moment to reiterate some fundamental aspects of our approach in terms of interface. The more ambitious the project, the simpler and more accessible the interface should be. ‘Sports in 2050’ is an interactive program that doesn’t require a user manual. The interface is there to serve the narrative, the flow of pages, and allow you to focus on the story.
And now, credits, ladies and gentlemen:
L’Équipe explore
A project written by Alexis Danjon
Editor-in-Chief: Imanol Corcostegui & Jean-Baptiste Renet
Editorial Director: Lionel Dangoumau
Technical Director: Raphaël Dardeau & Jean-Christophe Delanneau
Upian
Artistic Direction: Thomas Deyriès, Martin Jouvet & Jérôme Gonçalvès
Technical Direction: Maxime Quintard
Web Development: Tony Trancard
Project Management: Baptiste Duchêne
Acknowledgments: Alexandre Brachet, Estevan Brout, Maxime Malécot,
Baptiste Binet & Simon Boileau
