A World Without Oil: post-game ..

A World Without Oil: Jane McGonigal's (probably) most ambitious ARG yet, one whose result was not foretold by the game designers. Unusual, that, and very, very brave.

Produced by the design team at Writerguy, WORLD WITHOUT OIL leveraged the power of people connected by the Internet to imagine the actual events of an oil shortage, document them and innovate solutions. As the event concluded, the grassroots website at www.worldwithoutoil.org had captured a vivid and visceral picture of what our next oil shock might look like, in the form of 1,500 blog pages, videos, images and audio clips documenting the crisis. “We provided the narrative skeleton,” WWO Creative Director Ken Eklund said. “The players fleshed out the story of this alternate reality game.”

It had a start-and-end date too, I LOVE that. AWWO was funded by public service broadcasting, but played out entirely on the web.

...the creative expressions can be found on YouTube, Flickr, LiveVideo, Blogger, iTunes, and other sites all over the Internet (tag: worldwithoutoil). Approximately 60,000 visitors followed the game’s events, and over 1,800 people signed on to participate, representing every major U.S. metro area and region as well as Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Iraq, the Netherlands, Holland, Brazil, Poland, Norway and Venezuela.

Small numbers for (entertainment) teevee, but good numbers for a public service on the web. Not to mention the value of the experimentation in the first place.

“I can’t tell you how many educators and nonprofit organizers I’ve talked to see this as the next generation’s curriculum,” says Jane McGonigal, participation architect for the game.

Mm :)

See the full article over at ARGnet here.