Mar
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The Release of World Without Oil Alternate Reality Game
March 29, 2007 |
Alternate reality games turns into high-performance brainstorming.
Alternate reality games may be a young genre, but it’s got much more potential, because it could bring about variations on the alternatives the games propose.
This week’s ETech conference in San Diego, for example, marked the release of World Without Oil Alternate reality game, funded by the Corporation for PBS in the U.S. and designed by the Institute for the Future. The World Without Oil game asks players to consider a likely possibility: that once reserves run dry or the States can’t get access to imports, those who manage energy strategies south of the border come up with a Plan B. There are similar titles, but few that pack this kind of political punch.
I don’t know fun World Without Oil is — it strikes me as somehow less addictive than World of Warcraft, for example — but it shows how you can harness entertainment technologies to pursue what I’d call high-performance brainstorming. The game asks players to write their own stories of how the situation should play itself out, record videos or create other kind of response to the scenarios it proposes. There’s something very Web 2.0 about this, and I mean that in a good way. I think of it as less of a game and more of a grandiose wiki, something that can receive a variety of user generated content and share it with others.
Now imagine alternate reality games (just like World Without Oil is) that grapple with other situations. Some of them could be as mundane as how you would manage your business if your boss didn’t exist, or they could be address global issues on combating hunger or achieving peace in the Middle East. These tools are presented as games because it’s a way of encouraging contributions, but the elements that make them fun are their ease of use and their ability to tap into the opinions and ideas that players have kept bottled up for a long time.
The next level of functionality in alternate reality games would be supporting them with real data. Much like the best business intelligence software suites try to anticipate or forecast future events, the games could mine into data warehouses to introduce the most realistic alternate universe possible. That would make decision-making less idealistic and more pragmatic, no matter what the scenario under discussion is.
If we called such tools high-performance brainstorming (or something shorter, perhaps), they could become much more than entertainment products. They would prove that even when there are endless possibilities to solve a problem, collaboration is the quickest way to start the process of elimination.