Last week at SXSW, activist site worldwithoutoil.org won top honors, along with a dozen or so others.The premise of the site is a little complicated, which is why there's an entire FAQ page dedicated to explaining it. Luckily, that page is easy to navigate. And here's what I learned: World Without Oil is a game of "What if?" More specifically, "What if an oil crisis began on April 30, 2007?"
You and I know there was no "real" oil crisis in 2007, which is what makes World Without Oil an alternate reality game, or ARG. ARG's are created not so much for entertainment purposes as for educational ones. According to Wikipedia, an ARG:
...is an interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants' ideas or actions. ARGs are typified by intense player involvement with a story that takes place in real time and evolves according to participants' responses, and with characters that are actively controlled by the game's designers. ARGs generally rely on the Internet as the central binding medium.See, I told you it was complicated!
In the case of World Without Oil, which launched on April 30, 2007, players contributed over 1,500 stories in the form of blog posts, videos, photos and voicemails. Each story documented an (imagined) element or impact of 2007's oil crisis.
You can see how it all worked by navigating week 1, and move forward from there.
FYI, the game concluded on June 1, 2007. It ran for 33 days.
No comments:
Post a Comment