While filming a documentary about divisive oil refinery ventures in the subzero cold of Fort McMurray, Alberta, the director David Dufresne said he wasn’t considering only pollution in that Canadian boomtown or the vast tar sands beneath its frozen ground. He was also thinking deeply about technology, about making a new kind of hybrid media, a docugame.

Interactive documentaries have been widely available since the CD-ROM boom of the 1990s. Yet while they have become a genre unto themselves, few have included a game component. With “Fort McMoney,” a free program released online this week, Mr. Dufresne has tried to change that.

His team created an interactive tour of the region’s landscape, people and issues to illuminate what he calls “a very complicated world, a very secret world, a city of complexities.” The game portion, he said, is a way to discover what goes on in a gold rush community experiencing serious growing pains. The project includes more than eight hours of video and is to be rolled out in four parts over four weeks; an iPad app is to be released next week.

Through wide, lonely shots of tundra, the camera shows an isolated Fort McMurray. Monstrous, thick smoke rises from its refineries. What viewers encounter can evoke both envy and sympathy. Early on, players meet and interview residents, including a saleswoman, a homeless man and the mayor, whose prerecorded answers come in responses to a menu of questions. They discuss the economic success, along with drug and prostitution problems. Players can essentially step into a leader’s shoes to decide whether to build more. Then they can vote on referendums covering refinery expansion and support for social services.