This is the ninth article in the Playing Inside: Board Games, Video Games, and the Indoors series, which explores the ways that board games, video games, and other types of indoor play impact and guide our understanding of the environment.
A collared grizzly presses her face toward the gaps in a metal capture cage, ear tags visible. A looping GIF from Bear 71 alternates between this shot and the grid-like interface that plots her movements through Banff National Park. That loop anchors this post and sets a question: what happens when people play inside the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) interfaces that treat surveillance as both subject and method? I focus on two projects: Bear 71, which turns wildlife monitoring in Banff into an interactive grid, and Do Not Track, which uses a web series format to show how browsers and platforms already track the person at the screen. Together, these projects sketch what it feels like to live as data inside contemporary media systems.
The NFB released Bear 71 in 2012 as an interactive web documentary by Leanne Allison and Jeremy Mendes through its Vancouver digital studio. The team originally built the project in Flash and later reimagined it as Bear 71 VR, a WebVR/WebGL version that preserves the work and accessible on new browsers and headsets. Readers can launch the current browser version for free through the NFB interactive site. The interactive documentary usually takes about twenty minutes.1
The project follows a female grizzly in Banff National Park while park rangers tag and collar wildlife and monitor them through camera traps and tracking systems. After the initial capture footage, the piece shifts to a map of the Bow Valley. Roads and rail lines slice across a dark grid on which icons mark cameras and animals. The icons for each tracked creature moves across the grid. Participants move a cursor through this space, zoom toward clusters of activity, and open still images and clips from the surveillance network.
A first-person narration, from Bear 71 runs over this interface. The bear recounts tranquilization, the weight of the collar, close calls near grain spills along the tracks, and collisions that kill other animals. She refers to mortality statistics compiled by park biologists from similar records. Environmental humanist Katey Castellano describes the project as a reassembly of wildlife management data through an anthropomorphized voice that keeps the grid accountable to the animals it represents.2 The map and the narration together build a sense of existence under observation.
The bear understands herself as a body in a home range and as a set of records in files and databases. From the participant’s side, the experience resembles working on a control screen. The grid responds to every cursor movement. A click opens a camera feed or a text snippet. The person at the keyboard follows corridors through the park and lingers near collision points. Media writer Mary Angotti notes how this design implicates the viewer in the apparatus that harms wildlife even as it teaches them how to move through the interface.³ The interaction feels like exploratory play—wandering, testing, revisiting—while the memory of the cage keeps the bear’s vulnerability close.
Labels and pop-up panels use the language of park management. They describe safety protocols, research goals, and procedures for handling wildlife. On the same grid, participants see fences and transport routes that fragment habitat and create danger. Care and control share one surface. As the map fills with traces of movement, the corridor emerges as a place of protection and risk.
In my own research on the NFB, I describe this tension between environmental concern and the infrastructures that strain it as part of the Canadian aporetic condition: a field of unresolved contradictions in a resource-rich, settler colonial state.3 Bear 71 gives that condition a voice and a territory, with images tied to a single animal’s fate. The project also directs attention toward human environments. The grid recalls diagrams that surround everyday life in cities: cell-tower maps and security dashboards. Participants navigate Bear 71’s world and then return to their own routes and devices. The piece suggests that many humans now live inside corridors that resemble the bear’s range. The simulation of tracked existence in Banff opens a way to think about the systems that observe and sort human routines.
Do Not Track carries that insight into the browser itself. Brett Gaylor directed the seven-part personalized web documentary in 2015 as a co-production of Upian, Arte, the NFB, and Bayerischer Rundfunk. The series remains available at donottrack-doc.com; seven episodes, each about 7 minutes, add up to roughly an hour of attentive viewing.4 Each instalment addresses internet privacy through short segments that weave together interviews with journalists and researchers and interactive elements that draw on the participant’s own data, alongside clear explanations of cookies and analytics.
Early on, the interface identifies the participant’s city and device from the incoming connection and displays those details on screen. Later episodes invite logins through social platforms, quick surveys, or voluntary links to browsing habits. The series folds these inputs into later scenes. Routes and viewing patterns appear as charts and animated paths, and targeted ads and data brokers move into view. The participant watches a portrait that seems to grow from years of monitoring. At that point, the experience shifts. The series shifts from distant systems to a detailed account of the person sitting at the screen. In these scenes, the interface introduces a data double. It shows how fragments from searches and clicks, along with location signals, connect with older records in a network of companies that trade in behavioural prediction. The series names this configuration with Shoshana Zuboff’s term “surveillance capitalism,” an economic logic that treats human experience as raw material for data operations.5
Do Not Track presents this concept through personalized sequences that unfold across the browser window. The participant sees messages and images that the web can infer from modest disclosures over time. By the end of the series, participants understand that their everyday routines already unfold inside such systems. The interface focuses on a small gap between a person and their profile, between habits and the models that describe those habits for remote actors. That gap supports reflection and modest acts of redirection: changes in settings and attention to permissions. Awareness of surveillance becomes a resource for cautious play with the very tools that helped to create that awareness in the first place.
Together, Bear 71 and Do Not Track present a portrait of networked life under observation. In the first project, a collared bear narrates existence inside a corridor of sensors and transport lines in Banff. In the second, a person confronts a version of themselves that grows from their own digital traces. Both works rely on intimacy: closeness with an animal whose world appears as an interactive map and closeness with a datafied self that appears as an interactive report.
Each project invites participants to notice how the systems around their everyday routines track their lives. This shared effect also defines the importance of playing inside these interfaces. The cage image at the start of Bear 71 and the personalized portrait at the heart of Do Not Track stay with participants after the sessions end. The bear’s anxious gaze through metal bars and the browser’s quiet disclosures about past clicks encourage a fresh look at familiar spaces such as parks and screens at home.
These works show that art can inhabit the same channels that support tracking and use them for public reflection. As National Film Board of Canada productions, Bear 71 and Do Not Track point toward art as a public service. They help people sense how surveillance shapes shared environments and treat heightened awareness as a starting point for future collective choices.
[1] Bear 71, directed by Leanne Allison and Jeremy Mendes, interactive web documentary, National Film Board of Canada, 2012. Originally launched as a Flash-based web documentary and later adapted as Bear 71 VR using WebVR/WebGL technology; see Julie Matlin, “Bear 71 VR: Google and the NFB Partner to Expand the World of Virtual Reality Storytelling,” NFB Blog, February 9, 2017, https://blog.nfb.ca/blog/2017/02/09/bear-71-vr-google-nfb-partner-expand-world-virtual-reality-storytelling/. For the current browser-based version, see “Bear 71 VR,” NFB Interactive Collection, https://bear71vr.nfb.ca/, and “Bear 71,” National Film Board of Canada Collection, https://collection.nfb.ca/interactive/bear_71
[2] Katey Castellano, “Anthropomorphism in the Anthropocene: Reassembling Wildlife Management Data in Bear 71,” Environmental Humanities 10, no. 1 (2018): 171–186, https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-4385516.
[3] John W. Bessai, Art as a Public Service: The National Film Board of Canada’s Role in Shaping Democratic Dialogues and Societal Transformation (PhD diss., Trent University, 2024).
[4] Do Not Track, directed by Brett Gaylor, personalised interactive documentary series, Upian, National Film Board of Canada, Arte, and Bayerischer Rundfunk, 2015, https://donottrack-doc.com/. See also “Take Back Control of Your Digital Identity with Do Not Track,” news release, National Film Board of Canada, April 9, 2015, Government of Canada, https://www.canada.ca/en/news/archive/2015/04/take-back-control-your-digital-identity-do-not-track.html.
[5] Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019).
GIF credit: Animated scenes from Bear 71 (dir. Leanne Allison and Jeremy Mendes), © 2012 National Film Board of Canada.
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