The Institute for the Future once again opens a window into tomorrow’s world, this time letting us peer into 2010 where in the town of Deepwell a woman’s mysterious will has the townsfolk in an uproar. On December 7, 2009, the citizens of Deepwell learned that a woman named Ruby Wood left a “substantial” sum of money to their town, but with one condition – that the townspeople learn to take better care of each other. Who is Ruby Wood? No one in the town seems to know. The town will learn more when the last will and testament of Ruby Wood is opened on March 9, 2010.

In order to get a little outside help and advice on caring, the citizens of Deepwell have launched a website called Ruby’s Bequest, along with a town blog, Deep Into Deepwell, where citizens can discuss the bequest and other town interests. Accusations of being “the town that doesn’t care right” and the tragic death of an elderly citizen have upset many of the townspeople and sparked a debate about caring.

“Ruby’s Bequest” is sponsored by United Cerebral Palsy and produced by IFTF, with experience design by Writer Guy Ken Eklund who also designed the award-winning World Without Oil experience.

“Ruby’s Bequest” will run from March 9 through April 10, 2009 and like “World Without Oil” will have an accelerated timeline. By April 10, 2009, seven years will have passed in Deepwell. According to the website, the story of Deepwell is not pre-ordained and will depend on participants to shape the outcome for the town.

What can Ruby Wood teach Deepwell – and us – about caring? Do you have information about caring that you would like to share with Deepwell? To become a friend of Deepwell and explore “the future of the ecosystems of caring,” send an email to maddie.madd@deepwellusa.org and tell her the most valuable way you care for your community.

This article is the second in a series, providing summaries of the panel presentations at ARGFest-o-Con 2008 in Boston.

The second panel discussion featured Ken Eklund of World Without Oil as moderator, Brian Clark (GMD Studios), Alice Leung (BBN Technologies), and Dave Szulborski. The panel discussed a little of everything, from projects born from passion to penny-pinching PMs and politics.

Dave Szulborski noted that independent games are the mainstay of the genre, and kept it alive when marketing executives were questioning its effectiveness. He noted that successful games of any type tend to inspire new developers to try their hand in development. Independent ARGs also encourage developers to innovate in new and surprising ways. As Brian Clark noted, “the riskiest things we do are those we do for ourselves,” and grassroots games are the ideal testing grounds for aspiring developers, as long as the project doesn’t serve as a resume of technical development skills that avoids the critical “fun” factor necessary for independent and serious games alike.

One of the main challenges facing alternate reality games is the perception of a hoax. Brian Clark notes that some hoaxes such as the Man-Eating Chicken circus sideshow can be healthy in moderation. However, a serious question needs to be raised: if we embrace the ability of games to effect positive change, isn’t it necessary to embrace the corollary – that games are capable of manipulating players? Clark noted that in many ways, MoveOn.org (and many other political organizations) are alternate reality games. They have their own narrative that they control, manipulate, and drive. They even have the occasional mailing and live event.

ARGs have the potential to educate players in critical skills such as relationship building and trend spotting that have to be experienced over extended periods of time. The goals of these types of games can be myriad. For instance, Szulborski mentioned he entered discussions with a university regarding the development of a 3-year long alternate reality game for its undergraduate students, with the goal of fostering a sense of unity and community that extends beyond team spirit at sports events. As Alice Leung explained, however, the inverse pyramid model of player interaction provides a challenge to serious game designers. While learning how to leverage shared awareness may be integral, the game must still attempt to reach the less-engaged players so that everyone internalizes the intended lessons.

Alternate reality games may not be the best mechanism for teaching facts, even though information retention can be enhanced when transplanted into the gaming context. However, alternate reality games are eminently successful at giving facts both meaning and context. World Without Oil addressed a real-world issue, and crowd-sourced the game’s creation to process information regarding the ongoing oil crisis into a digestible form. Further, the team released lesson plans to high school teachers in order to facilitate the game’s distillation to students. BBN Technologies, on the other hand, develops highly regimented simulations for the military on long-term projects.

The challenge of alternate reality games, especially independent and serious ARGs, is to create an experience without telling the players they have to do something. And while the desired results may differ from game to game, that impetus remains the same: a sense of “fun”.

Check back over the next few weeks for the video of this panel when it is released.

Although word is just now coming in, and there’s no official note on the SXSW web site, we’re happy to be able to congratulate the team, including our very own Marie Lamb and Michelle Senderhauf!

A few more familiar faces are bound to show up, as World Without Oil, the alternate reality game with a heart of gold, is a finalist for the SXSW Web Awards in the Activism category. The ‘serious game’ attracted a lot of attention for drawing upon the powers of collective intelligence to address peak oil concerns. Numerous ARGNet staffers past and present worked on this project (Dee Cook, Michelle Senderhauf, Marie Lamb, and Krystyn Wells), so our collective fingers are crossed for the team.

Mind Candy, who were at one time a major player in the ARG genre with Perplex City, is also nominated in the Games category for Moshi Monsters.

(San Francisco—July 12, 2007)—At the end of the 32nd week of the global oil shock, things were looking up. Gasoline prices stabilized in the U.S. – at around $5.60 a gallon, down from a high over $7. Companies were starting to hire again – but more than 2 million people had lost their jobs. Cities were beginning to address more than $1 billion in damage from riots and civil disorder. And in some of the FEMA camps set up outside metro areas, handfuls of people were leaving agricultural work to return home. But among the citizen-journalists chronicling the crisis at www.worldwithoutoil.org, the watchword was caution. “It should be clear of all of us,” warned Blueski, a blogger in America’s heartland, “that this is just a taste of what is to come.”

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.”

In true Web 2.0 style, 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. One index of its reach: a Google search for the phrase “world without oil” returns over 100,000 pertinent results. Besides creating a rich documentary of an oil shock, WORLD WITHOUT OIL became a forum for citizens to share life-changing ideas that transport seamlessly into real life.

“Our game structure gives people ‘permission’ to think seriously about a future they might otherwise avoid thinking about at all,” says Eklund. As a result of the game, people are thinking about their neighbors and communities in new ways, and planting gardens, going to farmer’s markets, using bicycles and transit and otherwise questioning their dependence on cheap, plentiful oil.

“Usually gaming takes time away from accomplishing useful things in real life,” a player nicknamed Ironmonkey wrote, “but WWO taught me a lot, lowered my electric bill, and got me focused on doing things that matter to me.” Player FallingIntoSin wrote, “I had high hopes for this event, but I never dreamed it would become the amazing tool for change that it is.” MTalon summed up the outcome for many players: “I’m a different person thanks to WWO.”

WORLD WITHOUT OIL breaks new ground in serious gaming (gaming with a serious purpose). By weaving fact and fiction closely together, and entrusting players with power over the story, the game creates the sort of immersive collaborative engagement that makes for effective learning.

“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. McGonigal will be delivering a keynote address on WORLD WITHOUT OIL at the Energy Innovation Conference in August.

Entertainment decision makers are taking note as well: “I thought WORLD WITHOUT OIL was amazing and groundbreaking. The way it gets a grassroots movement designed to think about important problems and builds it around narrative – inspiring,” said Jesse Alexander, executive producer for the TV show Heroes, at the recent Hollywood and Games conference.

Writerguy is building a durable archive of the game at www.worldwithoutoil.org. New visitors can follow links there to experience the event week by week, and special threads will guide them through the amassed material. In September, study guides to help middle and high school teachers incorporate the game into class activities will be available at www.worldwithoutoil.org/teach.

WORLD WITHOUT OIL is produced by Writerguy, and is a joint project of PBS’ Independent Lens and its Electric Shadows Web-original programming. http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/interactive.html

The self-proclaimed grassroots experience bills itself as “an insight into what happens when a great economy built entirely on cheap oil begins to run short,” as it looks at the “impact on people’s lives — work, social, family and personal — and explores what happens when our thirst for oil begins to exceed supply.” It’s not immediately clear as to how the game will take shape, but it seems that player-generated content will be at the heart of the experience, as the game will revolve around “citizen stories in blogs, videos, photos, audio and phone messages posted all over the Internet.”

You can get involved by reading the player wiki, official game blog, and the MySpace blog. You can also register at the trailhead site, and check in with developments at the Unfiction forums.

Source: PR Newswire

I suppose that I shouldn’t complain. I’m here for the Game Developers Conference (GDC). It’s a huge and amazing conference that’s the highlight of the year for many game folk. But it is no ARGfest and after such an amazing weekend, I wasn’t expecting much. Boy, was I surprised.

It’s something to sit in a conference room filled with ARG folk – everyone there knows about the magic of Alternate Reality Gaming. We can get excited and discuss or debate the nuances in a way that only those familiar can. It’s filled with our own experiences and, even, biases. It’s something completely different to sit in a conference room filled with folks with a passing awareness, with experiences completely different. And, when the panelist in the front of the room is discussing the power of Alternate Reality Games to alter our own reality for better, it’s absolutely inspiring as you look over the crowd and see their eyes get bigger, their curiosity aroused.

Jane McGonigal captured the audience at the Serious Games Summit panel on Erasing the Delta or, for the rest of us, removing the gap between task and play. In her talk, she challenged serious games to move beyond being simple resources that train or educate people to actual solutions to problems. And, of course, put Alternate Reality Gaming in the frame of games that are actually doing that.

She argued that Alternate Reality Gaming is in it’s third wave. Real Life was the first wave and marked by a fascination by the way in which ARGs were embedded in our every day lives – email, phone, websites, etc. The second wave, Real World, came as we began to explore the world around us – meeting people to answer pay phones or play poker in a cemetery. We’re now at a point of Real Impact. We can start to solve real world problems and alter our reality.

There are several reasons why we’re at this point. First of all, our culture is more and more like an alternate reality game – the internet has invaded our everyday culture and we’re collaborating on an amazing new level. Wikipedia, creative commons, open source – these are very much a part of our society. But not only that, our culture wants to be more ARGlike – a superhero ethic where we can save the world.

She offered up several examples. From our past, we have Last Call Poker’s Graveyard Games. Historic urban cemeteries are in a crisis. The land is too valuable and they’re being moved to make way for condos and big box stores. They need more bodies – live ones – to justify their value as a public space.

Currently, there’s World Without Oil, which is a collaborative alternate reality where players will be able to imagine the kind of changes they will be able to make. It has the potential to truly change our reality by showing players what will happen and allowing them to make changes. This will build a database of ideas on how people have dealt with and reduced the impact of the oil crisis.

In the future, she envisions Massively Multiplayer Science where real world data collection is embedded in the game play. For example, getting players to collect and process data and a massively collaborative fashion.

Throughout the talk, you could see light bulbs going off over people as the ideas flowed. Sitting next to a friend that I haven’t seen since last year at GDC, he leaned over and excitedly whispered, “wow.” I had that feeling all weekend, surrounded by ARGfesters realizing that we were on a tipping point, but it was during Jane’s panel that so much of this weekend really came together for me. It was the perfect cure for that ARG hangover.