Apr
1
A short report on how World Without Oil Izheskian Clan meeting went.
One can wonder how come a clan - any clan - might even exist prior to start of the game - cause there is no beta run of any kinds yet (or are there?).
Well, here is a little story behind it. I just happened to stumble upon news what a new Alternate Reality game, World Without Oil, will launch on April 30th. “Alternative History” (often also referred to as “Postholocaust” - and World Without Oil fits here nicely) is my main area of interest in SF books, so out of curiousity I went to check what Alternate Reality games are, and shared my thoughts on it with a couple of buddies. It turned out that we are not total strangers to the world of Alternate Reality games cause we do love “Night Watch” game we happen to play down here in Izhevsk, Russia. Wikipedia says about ARGs:
“teams solve plot-based challenges and puzzles, and often work together with a community to analyze the story and coordinate real-life and online activities. ARGs generally use multiple media (such as telephones, email, and mail) but rely on the Internet as the central binding medium.”
All of these apply to “Night Watch” we play down here - it also involves exchange of emails among teams and the game hosts, encripted hints to decipher (which takes a lot of Internet queries to run and lot s of speculation over names of the city streets, history and locations),
collaboration between braincenter team residing on premises and mobile groups racing their cars around the city on their quest to find the prize and overcome the rest of, like, 10 teams.
We managed to get 1st prize 3 times in a row.
Besides, every participating team once in a while becomes a Puppetmaster of a next game. Just like described in Wiki, (Night Watch’s) “Puppetmasters are simultaneously allies and adversaries to the player base, creating obstacles and providing resources for overcoming them in the course of telling the game’s story.” Each round of the game is themed differently - ours was loosely based upon “Matrix”. Mind you, it wasnt just a cheesy rip-off - we introduced plenty of localization.
So gathering of World Without Oil Izheskian Clan was evenly spread between speculations on what exactly World Without Oil Game would look like, exchanging fresh memories of the last round of “Night Watch” and discussion on some Alternative History/Postholocaust books I mentioned - like, my ever favorite “Day fo Triffids”, then Brin’s “Postman” (nah, the book is _far_ superioir to the cheesy movie with oh-so-sweet happy ending), Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Golden Shore” series, and several books by Russian authors (like Andrey Ulanov’s “Panzerdivizion”).That’s basically all.