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Friday wrapup: a month’s worth of headlines. They could all be part of the World Without Oil game (and many are dead ringers for ones that were) but no, they’re from our local paper, the San Jose Mercury News. Read ‘em and weep, as they say… (thanks Deb for the clipping services)
In this Gamasutra article, game designer Ian Bogost talks about performative play – play which has an affect outside the game world, upon the real world – and uses the World Without Oil game as an instructive example. This is just one of several instances lately where I have been talking or thinking more about how WWO brought reality and an alternate reality together for people, such that they could find it easier to change their lives in preparation for an oil shock.
“Games that center on realistic problems can help develop many important skills, ranging from teamwork to problem-solving to understanding relevant content,” says Eric Klopfer, the director of the Teacher Education Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author of the book Augmented Learning. “In many ways, these games are more scalable and classroom-friendly than other video games, in that they don’t require special technologies or even extensive training. World Without Oil is a great example of how this could be possible.” Nice article about Alternate Reality Games in Education by Katie Ash. Reminder: you can find WWO lesson plans for high school teachers at http://worldwithoutoil.org/teach
If you want to get a solid picture of what World Without Oil signified to the world, listen to WWO’s participation architect, Jane McGonigal, at the New Yorker conference earlier this month, “Stories from the Near Future.”
What Jane’s saying is that games have turned a corner from Escapism to Engagement (not just WWO, but it’s perhaps the most potent example) and… well, she tells it way better than I do, so check out the vid.
This just in from Jane McGonigal (otherwise known as mPathyTest) who’s in New York for the Stories From The Near Future conference: an article in the New York Times titled “Gas Prices Send Surge of Riders To Mass Transit.” Apparently, gas prices are motivating people to take transit in record numbers, catching transit planners by surprise. “Nobody believed that people would actually give up their cars to ride public transportation,” says the executive director of the South Florida Regional Transportation Authority. “The whole NYT article reads like a KalWithoutOil report,” Jane says.
The biggest surges are occurring in metro areas in the South and West – the very strongholds of American driving culture. The article says Denver ridership is up 8%, for example, and several routes now run at capacity at rush hour.
Now this is no surprise to WWO players. Player Ararejul explicated this very situation in her video posted from Denver, titled “Is Public Transportation Ready?” Posted over a year ago, I might add. “This was the first thing our players predicted and documented when gas hit $4 a gallon,” Jane notes. “Dude, WWO seriously worked as a forecasting device.” One that looked not to the past for answers, nor to experts, but to the future and the collective imagination.
Nina Simon works on cool museum stuff (like the Spy Museum [cue theme music]) and posted a thoughtful post-mortem on World Without Oil some months ago in her richly ideated blog, Museum 2.0, pointing up the game’s educational side. She’s presenting museum-quality newtech ideas at a museum conference this week and sent me the slide above with this note: “Your pic on the left. On the right, cellphone pic we took yesterday in SF. Using it in upcoming presentation. Sometimes I wish games didn’t have to be so real.”
01SJ is the Zero One art-on-the-edge digital festival here in San Jose, and it’s chosen World Without Oil as a finalist for its Environmental Art award. That is so cool as to render me speechless. We are shoulder-to-shoulder with such WWO simpaticos as The Miss Rockaway Armada and The Yes Men. See the entire list of finalists here. And if you’re in the area, come on down to the 01SJ Opening Ceremony in San Jose on Wednesday, June 4 – that would be a great way to celebrate the first anniversary of the close of the World Without Oil game.
Yowza, folks. WWO is up for an Academy Award (not that Academy, its interactive sister: the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, aka The Webbys). World Without Oil is a finalist in the Games category, which if nothing else gives us trifecta honors: won for Activism at SXSW, nominated for Environment at the Stockholm Challenge, and now for Games at the Webbys.
If David Bowie et al groove on WWO, that’s cool. The thing I’d really like to win, though, is the People’s Voice Award for our category. Because WWO was all about the people’s voice, in a way that no game has ever been before. And this is the year for serious games. And although you might read that WWO was “Ken’s game” or “Jane’s game” or whatever, we all know that’s basically not true. It’s PeakProphet’s game and Blueski’s game and MsGeek’s game and Burnunit’s game and RockLobster’s game, and on through two thousand more player names and 1,500 player stories.
If you need convincing, check out our Lesson Plans: players’ stories are now at the center of immersive high school teaching. If you find us worthy, please go vote People’s Voice for World Without Oil: http://pv.webbyawards.com/
(register -> websites -> entertainment -> games -> World Without Oil)
Games make us happy. A simple enough premise when the game is football or soccer or chess or Monopoly. Can the idea be extended? Can it get serious? Can it get real? Can it go global on the Internets? Why not?
Jane McGonigal talks ARGs, WWO and happiness with Steve Paikin of The Agenda (Canada’s biggest news magazine). Roll tape!
Cool beans. The Stockholm Challenge has selected World Without Oil as a finalist in its 2008 program, in the “Environment” category (subcategory: Energy and alternative technologies). The Stockholm Challenge is all about using Information Communications Technology (ICT) to help counteract social and economic disadvantage. If you look at the finalist list (and you should) you’ll see two main areas: groups that are extending known technologies into underdeveloped regions (often in innovative ways) and groups that are coming up with new technologies or approaches for serving the public good (WWO is in this second area). Here’s the WWO brief at the Stockholm Challenge.
I find three other game approaches among the finalists, both in the Health category: Freedom HIV/AIDS,which uses mobile games to raise awareness in India, and Reach Out Central (Australia) and SmartUs - Games in Motion (Finland), both aimed at health awareness. This is a good showing for serious games, folks, showing their rise globally. I look forward to meeting all the finalists in Stockholm during Challenge Week, May 19-22. The Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) does select winners in each of its six categories, but it seems the real prize is to meet and share ideas and aquavit with some really innovative and dedicated people from all over the world.
Or almost complete, anyway - finishing touches this week. Teachers, have at it! Your comments welcome.
What can videogames learn from alternate reality games? And vice versa? Brandie Minchew summarizes the two discussions at SXSW here in her article at ARGNet. One of her conclusions: “Serious games have found a niche in the game world as game designers turn society’s search for ‘fun’ into a dialog about social and political issues.” This echoes a point I like to make: World Without Oil was a really fun game, just a different flavor of “fun” than what we’re used to finding in a game. Exactly the kind of fun you get from a really good dialog?
Update: Lessons 4, 5 and 6 are now online, and the last plans are in editing and will be posted soon. See the Overview page for teachers!
In case you haven’t seen it…
Jane McGonigal has exciting news – she’s announcing “The X2 Club” this week, a massively multiplayer science game. She says X2 is “an alternate reality game, light on fiction and heavy on real-world data, that scientists will play” and that the game “combines collaborative forecasting (World Without Oil-style) and prediction markets with RSS feeds of scientific journals and popular science publications.” Should be the sort of thing that many WWO players can get their teeth into: a fiction with fact close underneath.
VIEW is a conference for digital artists and animators, and as such they take an interest in games and other interactive storytelling. In between the sessions on developing realistic behaviors for 3D food in Ratatouille and capturing acting nuances in Beowulf, there was time for me to explain what alternate reality games are and how serious ARGs such as WWO will save the world. You can find a short summary here. How’s your Italian?
Geoff Daily at AppRising has his way to prepare for an oil shock: broadband everywhere.
World Without Oil is part of Issue 115 of The Escapist, “Crowdsourcing to Victory.” My favorite part of Nova Barlow’s article: “The last week was an agony of sorts - no one wanted the game to end, but I had to end it. It was really hard.”
Evelyn Rodriguez tells why here. Evelyn:
Weave us into a possible future, let us picture ourselves in the middle of a plotline, rather than just spout out more statistics in a news item.
Nice way to sum up what’s so appealing about the Serious ARG.
Who's saying what