Wonderland

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.

Baby (orc) hands soap

Disembodied baby (orc) hands soap!

 
Does it get much better than that?

(Thanks Raluca!)

UK/Euro-based games show

Question for you folks: what's the best UK (or European) show for finding small to medium sized, independent games/play developers of all shapes and sizes?

I'm guessing it's Develop; possibly Leipzig, but I've never been and I'm assuming it's a bit more about the glam and marketing and the big guys rather than the up-and-comings. Might be wrong? I suppose not EIEF because they don't really have a trade floor as such, although they do usually have a few locals and studes (and Nintendo) showing something fun. Casuality?

Suggestions?

The E-Sports World Cup

Electronic Sports. Funny name, that. I've grabbed a few pics from DJ ph's flickrstream. Here're some chaps, pulling that boyband routine again:

.. and here are the lasses, although the first pic's a bit dark, so I grabbed two.

The Brits didn't feature in the final four in any of the categories. Hopeless.
The Poles won both the Quake 4 and Counter-Strike categories (it used to always be the Swedes or the French. Interesting.). Korea won Starcraft - no surprise there, and the Septics won the Counter-Strike Women's bracket.

Barbie Alice in Wonderland set

This is supremely weird. There's a new Barbie Alice in Wonderland set out, and Ken has become.. the Mad Hatter. A really old, ugly one:

It's not like Barbie to get literary, is it? Barbie Alice is almost even weirder - sort of half Harajuku (almost-anime eyes, tons of ruffles) and half plasticky Prom Queen. It's disturbing.

... and she's brunette! That bit I approve of, of course. The Cheshire Cat is perfect. Red Queen is coming soon, too.

SWG's Galactic Senate

Star Wars Galaxies announced a short while back that it would be creating a Galactic Senate from its playerbase. While this sounds like an amazing move towards a more democratic MMO, unfortunately it's not really: the players - Galactic Senators - were nominated by the playerbase, but chosen by SOE staff.

As with all standard dictatorships, the method by which the Senators were chosen remains secret.

Appointment

Candidates for the Galactic Senate may be nominated by any player in good standing, and self-nominations are also considered. Clarity and influence are among the top desired traits for a Senator to possess. An election commission comprising of the Star Wars Galaxies Community Team will appoint the title of Senator to players from the pool of nominations. Once appointed, a Senator will serve a 6 month term at which point the position will be open to new candidates.

What a Senator Can Do

• Propose Senate topics for a vote.
• Request a redress of issues by the development team.
• Attend the Convocation in-game event.
• Vote on Senate legislation

What a Senator Cannot Do

• Propose any backwards regression of updates.
• Ban players
• Squelch or otherwise mute players.

Maybe they're chosen based on their forums reputation and performance?

The list of the chosen is here, not that it really means much to anyone who doesn't play (or probably anyone who does, seeing as the chances of your sharing a server with, and knowing the Senator in question, are minimal).

Chore Wars

Jurie points over to Chore Wars:

Finally, you can claim experience points for housework.
Recruit a party of adventurers from your household or office, and whenever one of you completes a chore, you can log it and claim XP.

Sort of a take on PMOG.. but not quite.

Cheating will be RIFE :)

Messenger teams up with GoPets

Wow - this is big. MSN Messenger has teamed up with GoPets, and via a bunch of plugins, chatters can run GoPets directly from their message window. At least, that's what I think's going on, it's kind of hard to tell from this picture, and I use AIM. Oops.

Kim calls it an 'activity window' - talk about a playground! - and points out:

GoPets, is a 3D persistent virtual world (some would say 'casual mmo meets tamagochi') with an in-game item sales biz model. Windows Live Messenger is a communications app with an installed base of over a quarter billion people. I'd say that's got some potential, no? :-)

I'd agree with you there, old chum. Yup.

Crochet Pac 'n' friends

Whuuh, cute!

Particularly liking how much character Pinky has got there, with his slightly skew-whiff eyes.

Hand-carved Bioshock plaque

Travis is so looking forward to Bioshock that he hand-carved the logo into two chunks of wood, finished them off and showed them to the Bioshock devs, who promptly scribbled all over one and hung the other in their HQ.

Travis says:

I ended up making two of these, although I have almost NO experience with sanding and finishing an' whatnot.

Holy crap. Mate, you've got a talent there!

(Talent runs in their family: his missus was the painter of my prized Link picture, of which Travis did a stained glass piece... )