Crime Scene (website)

The Crime Scene universe is very much interwoven with the real world and since its inception, the lines between the fictional story world and the real world were intentionally blurry. When the website went up in 1995, the site's creator identified himself as Detective Ted Armstrong from the Oxford Police Department. He explained that he was looking for help solving the murder of a young woman.[1] However, the intention wasn't to create a hoax. Whereas a hoax aims to deceive people as its end goal, Crime Scene uses deception as a way to make the story more immersive and to give people a sense of being part of a real life mystery. This kind of storytelling, still somewhat undefined even today, was very uncommon in 1995 before the internet became ubiquitous. Arriola explains,

“I'm trying to come up with a name for this kind of entertainment, which pretends to be real – maybe this is 'faction'. It represents itself as fact, it's as factual as it can be, but it's fiction. I want to make people think this is real, at first. Then they have to do a little work to find out that it's not."[4]

Over the years, other kinds of entertainment have emerged giving more definition to what Arriola refers to as "faction", notably alternate reality games (ARGs). In most ARGs, the game itself never refers to itself as a game or admits that it is a work of fiction. In the ARG community, this is known as the "This Is Not A Game (TINAG)" principle. This principle is a call for the willful suspension of disbelief beyond the traditional boundaries of a story for the sake of a more immersive experience.[8] Although the Crime Scene website no longer maintains the TINAG principle absolutely, (explaining in the FAQ section that the cases are works of fiction), it still tells stories as if they were real criminal cases. In fact, many visitors to the site still question its authenticity and express uncertainty as to whether or not it's real.[9]

Crime Scene also spreads the stories out, not only into the real world but also across the internet and into other formats. In that stories are spread across different mediums, Crime Scene also finds a kinship with transmedia storytelling. For example, observant viewers might notice a website mentioned in a case document, such as a suspect's business website[10] or the website for the fictional newspaper, The Oxford Weekly Planet.[11] If they tried to go to the website they would find that it actually exists and appears to be authentic (i.e. produced by someone within the story world). However, in reality, these sites were created by Crime Scene staff. Another example is an e-book that was published in 2014 titled "Purity Knight: A Diary" which contains the diary of one of Crime Scene's fictional victims.[12]

In Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, Janet Murray discusses the Crime Scene website as an example of storytelling innovations in the early days of the internet, citing how it allows viewers to weave between fact and fiction and at times "leap out of the story altogether and find [themselves] in the 'real' world".[13] All of the stories presented on Crime Scene take place in the real world town of Oxford, Mississippi, and locations are closely mapped to real life places. In the early days of Crime Scene, almost every place or entity mentioned in the case documents were real. In fact, the first case published on the website used the real names, driver's licenses (with registration numbers scratched out), and other personal details of the actors portraying the characters.[2]

The one major difference between Crime Scene's Oxford and the real Oxford in Lafayette County, Mississippi is that Crime Scene's Oxford is located in Yoknapatawpha County, the fictionalized municipality made famous by the writer William Faulkner. Faulkner situated his stories in Oxford and based locations and characters off of those he knew of in his real life. But he created Yoknapatawpha County to serve as the mythical story world in which his characters lived.[14] Similarly, Crime Scene uses Yoknapatawpha County as the story world but keeps Oxford as the base between the story world and the real world.

The way in which Crime Scene blurs the line between fiction and reality is somewhat akin to, or perhaps the inverse of, what is referred to as breaking the fourth wall. However, as Stephen Conway explains in an article on Gamasutra; in games, what is commonly cited as a break in the fourth wall is better described as an expansion of the magic circle, the space in which the fictional game world exists and is separate from the real world. When the magic circle is expanded, elements outside of the game, such as websites, maps, or real world locations, are suddenly made into game pieces.[15] Crime Scene expands the magic circle in just such a way, by making the game spill over into the real world so that viewers are unsure where the game ends and reality begins.

The controversy that led to the website's initial notoriety was very much influenced by the historical context of the mid-1990s. As Arriola explained in a television interview in 1999, "The internet in 1995... [didn’t have] any entertainment websites and so anything that you went to at that time was probably put together by a scientist or a college student and it was, for all intents and purposes, a bunch of facts."[2]

The pragmatic nature of the early internet coupled with the website's own verisimilitude made it easy for the site's visitors to believe in its legitimacy. Additionally, there was no disclaimer anywhere on the website at the time that indicated that the crime was fictitious.[19] So when Crime Scene was featured by the internet service Prodigy in its daily lineup, with a description noting that it featured "a real murder investigation", controversy ensued.[1]

The increased publicity led to more visitors, and some of them began to question whether or not the investigation was real. One of the site's viewers called Prodigy's customer service line on two separate occasions and was reassured both times that the investigation was authentic.[19] Then they called the real-life Oxford Police Department and the local newspaper, The Oxford Eagle, which was also named in the case documents, only to find out that nobody had any knowledge of the investigation.[19]

When word got out that it was all a work of fiction, many viewers were upset and they contacted local authorities and media to seek a resolution. Some viewers complained of being "ripped-off" because they were paying Prodigy's service charge of $16 an hour for internet access and they spent hours poring through the case documents.[19] When law enforcement in Oxford caught wind of what was going on they considered whether or not they could bring charges against Arriola. But as explained by Kathleen Flinn in an article detailing the controversy, "What would they charge him with, anyway? Impersonating an officer? Fraud? Filing a "false" report? In the end, they decided he had not really broken any laws".[1]

Responding to the criticism in an interview with the aforementioned Oxford Eagle, Arriola said, "'I used to feel bad that I tricked these people and made them upset...This reminds me of when realism hit the theaters; no one knew how to react. But rules for these sort of things are not made yet. We're still teaching people the conventions of how to behave in the theater of the Web.'"[19]

In 1999, the metal band Slipknot released their debut album with a song that was inspired by and named after the victim in one of Crime Scene's earliest cases, Purity Knight.[20] Like many visitors to the website, the band's lead singer, Corey Taylor, believed that the story was true, saying "I still think the story's real. It fucked our whole world up when we read it. Can you imagine a girl being buried in a box and have all this lecherous bullshit drip down on her from this guy? It just hurts your head."[20]

The story was about a University of Mississippi student that was buried in a box underground and kept alive for days. The band also sampled audio clips from the Crime Scene website of Purity telling a story to a little boy who had discovered her in the box in the woods and recorded her. The audio was sampled in the prelude to "Purity", which was titled "Frail Limb Nursery".[21] When Crime Scene made allegations of copyright infringement, the band removed and replaced the two offending tracks and re-released the album in order to avoid a lawsuit. While the prelude "Frail Limb Nursery" was never re-released, "Purity" was included in the band's second DVD, Disasterpieces as well as the live album 9.0: Live, Antennas to Hell, and the 10th-anniversary edition of the self-titled album.