The Making of World Without Oil

Instead of Tombstone Poker with ghosts, or aliens connected payphones, this spring brought ace of the inaugural serious-minded alternative reality games (ARGs) into the spotlight. Low-backed by the Corporation for Public Broadcast medium, Ken Eklund and his staff brought the typically strange ARG genre belt down to Earth aside asking, "What would happen if the world ran out of oil?"

The answers became the core of World Without Oil (WWO). Through the calendar month of English hawthorn 2007, participants from just about the world were invited to help model a world-wide oil shortage away contributing stories and materials as if it were really happening. Each genuine day during the simulation depicted a week in game time, with updated gas prices and reports away a hurtle of characters planned to help guide and serve as a liaison center for contributions. WWO was not a game in a traditional sense, in that players had linear goals – it was most learning and adapting to various situations.

The Escapist recently had the opportunity to chat with Ken "Writerguy" Eklund to get a load at what he learned from WWO, hailed as the "first flip reality mettlesome to enlist the internet's large mass intelligence and imagination to confront and attempt to solve a real-world-wide problem." A mercenary game designer and author, helium's spearheaded educational projects so much as The Memory loss Syndrome, cell phone games the likes of Driv3r: Las Vegas and a number of Gilt Boxwood games.

Although WWO existed for a short time, its roots elongate back to 2005. At the clock time, the Independent Television Service (ITVS) was looking to produce an online game that furthered their mission to "take creative risks, research complex issues, and express points of position seldom seen on commercial OR public television" and hold out a call in for proposals. Eklund pitched Humans Without Oil, and after a year of calculation, the ITVS got back to him.

He began recruiting a team in late 2006 to get WWO to the "pre-game" stage, in which players were introduced to the back history but weren't yet able to participate. The original characters were a group of eight strangers stranded together in the aerodrome during the 2006 Denver blizzard. Armed with a clue that an oil shortage was going to take place the undermentioned spring, the group established a website to compile data about the personal effects it was having, and to forgather others to share their stories.

Veritable of the emerging Web 2.0 culture, participants in WWO found their means of creative expression through YouTube, Blogger, iTunes, LiveJournal, Flickr and other sites. By placing a value on community-created content, collaborative stories and realistic situations, WWO surpassed its germinal goals, drawing or s 60,000 visitors to the official site and recruitment over 1,850 citizen heroes. Although the active participation set forth of WWO has ended, anyone interested buttocks check out the robust file away starting at either the beginning to view everything in chronological order, or skipping to the end with the orotund archive.

In order to handle the intense volume of the multimedia the team received, programmer Bell ringer Bracewell formed a bespoke solution for WWO. "The tool enabled all team up members to see the current backlog of submissions by players," Eklund says, "and to process each submission and post it immediately to the WWO website within a hardly a hours of its submittal. We connected to blogs, television, images etc. that players posted elsewhere, and we created blog entries for emails and phone calls and then linked to them."

The squad revealed the game's cooperative nature bestowed some unique challenges for the puppet Edgar Lee Masters (ARGs' version of halt masters), who traditionally attempt to be as invisible American Samoa possible. "We had the idea that via our characters, we could position challenges to WWO players: call for them to pose a picture that included a WWO sign away, e.g.," He says. However, the squad disclosed because the game was so better at engaging new players, not everyone was accustomed to throwing himself into the experience American Samoa seasoned ARG players were – at least not without a little gentle nudge from behind the scenes first. "Players were joyous to make stuff if our characters did it early. Away the meter we realised this obtuse truth, nevertheless, it was too later for whatsoever challenges. One of my characters was a 15-yr-old girl, for example, so to show her with a WWO sign I needed to lease an actor, and I hardly couldn't coiffur for an actor to play her in time."

Players and puppet masters similar felt emotional as the game drew to a conclusion. "The last week was an agony of sorts – zero one wished-for the game to end, but I had to end it. It was really hard," Eklund says. But everyone involved in WWO learned something. "Finished the crippled, I learned that withdrawal from cheap oil is going to equal much worse than I thinking. Without adequate preparation, there's none way that the burden of energy loss is going to fall every bit operating room evenhandedly, and that sort of inequality will result in terrible agony that could teardrop this country unconnected." WWO's motto, "turn it before you charged it," barely managed to stay few steps onwards of reality, American Samoa gas prices are beginning to mirror those in-gage. By looking at the problem of an increasing demand for petroleum now, WWO aimed to help masses think about the future and leave keister a vast depository of ideas to help citizens, policy makers and educators anticipate the problems that could seminal fluid up and prevent unenviable outcomes.

Eklund learned several things from a gamy intention viewpoint, and in the process helped create a untried writing style. "I would discover WWO as a serious alternate reality game, a 'SARG,' if you will," he says. "'Life-threatening,' because at heart, it's every about confronting a real-world problem, and 'alternate world' because the problem is in the future. … Information technology's dissimilar from numerous other serious games, because it does non put forth a worldview surgery prescribe a course of action, and information technology's different from many other ARGs because IT has no preset narrative, merely instead asks the players to collaborate along creating and relation the story.

"I remember in the pre-gage seeing a number of ARG lurkers come forward. What drew them out seemed to be the serious affected or the freedom from puzzles or impartial the acceptive democratic tone. I was really happy to embody presenting a game for them."

WWO has helped boom the ARG literary genre into a many overserious and educational realm, merely is the field ready to prompt Thomas More in that guidance, operating room will it persist a niche writing style, kept enlivened by marketing stunts? Holocene epoch commercial efforts in the field much as Iris (Halo 3) and the The Ultimate Search for Bourne have failed to take off like ilovebees did, but the ARG field hasn't lost any steam in its progressive efforts.

As more and more designers are showing occupy in the genre, posting along ARG-taxonomic group forums and blogs, Eklund believes ARGs leave share a flight suchlike to the serious games genre. "WWO has opened upfield a whole new attribute to ARGs, which will bring a whole new playing field of potential sponsors to the table and exciting dependent matter, too," he says. "The traditional discipline leave continue as before, and that will glucinium where the bulk of the money is. But straight off on that point's the potential for exciting hybrids, where a commercial sponsor golf links with a non-net constitution to put on a SARG. The transaction frequen brings money, and the non-profit brings gravitas to the gamy. Such games could constitute both powerful learning [tools] and wonderful amusement."

Nova Barlow is the Research Manager for The Escapist and Tap Interactive. She is as wel a weak contributor to WarCry.

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/the-making-of-world-without-oil/

Source: https://www.escapistmagazine.com/the-making-of-world-without-oil/

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