May
18
World Without Oil Alternate Reality Game Picks Up Steam
May 18, 2007 |
Also see: LOTRO videos | World of Warcraft videos
Here’s an update on the folks who are trying to solve a faux oil shortage crisis in the nonprofit alternate reality game World Without Oil:
WORLD WITHOUT OIL: The Alternate Reality Event Is Creating A Rich, Sobering, Tangible Answer To A Timely Question: What Happens When Our Thirst for Oil Exceeds Supply
People around the world challenged to contribute viewpoints, demonstrate new
behaviors
The serious game for the public good
began April 30, ends June 1
Play it  before you live it
www.worldwithoutoil.org
(San Francisco‹May 16, 2007)‹In Murfreesboro, Tennessee, community cooperatives are being formed. In Philadelphia, workers share downtown apartments. In San Francisco and Chicago, abandoned cars block the streets. In Bristol, England, rationing has begun. In WORLD WITHOUT OIL, the first alternate reality game to enlist the Internet¹s collective intelligence and imagination to confront a real-world problem, the world is entering its 17th
week of an oil shock, with petroleum supply running five percent under demand, and the volunteers at the grassroots website www.worldwithoutoil.org struggle to keep track of what¹s going on.
Produced by the design team at Writerguy, WORLD WITHOUT OIL was created to
leverage the power of people connected by the Internet to imagine the actual events of an oil shortage, and then to find innovative solutions. Midway through its run, WORLD WITHOUT OIL has created a vivid and visceral picture of an oil shock by inviting anyone to contribute their views and adding them to the 1000-plus blog pages, images, phone calls and videos already linked to by www.worldwithoutoil.org.
Almost 30,000 regular visitors follow the emerging story, with more voices being added every day. A full-on ³Web 2.0² effort, WORLD WITHOUT OIL exists as a growing network of thousands of interconnected sites and content caches across the Internet, as bloggers on LiveJournal or WordPress link to channels on YouTube or podcasts on iTunes. The game has participants representing every major metro area and every region of the U.S., plus players in Canada, France, Germany, Iraq, the Netherlands, Holland, Brazil, Poland, Norway and Venezuela. One index of its reach: a Google search for the phrase ³world without oil² will return over a quarter of a million pertinent results.
Besides creating a rich, diverse and collaborative documentary of an oil shock, WORLD WITHOUT OIL is a forum for citizens to share life-changing ideas applicable to real life.
³Our game structure gives people Œpermission¹ to think seriously about an eventuality they might otherwise avoid thinking about at all,² says Creative Director Ken Eklund. As a result of the game, people are thinking about their neighbors and communities in new ways, and planting gardens, going to farmer¹s markets, using bicycles and transit, and otherwise questioning their dependence on cheap, plentiful oil.
WORLD WITHOUT OIL is being followed closely by many leaders in digital and gaming culture, who see the game as a groundbreaking foray into engaging “collective intelligence†to address a real world problem. The game’s serious outcome will be a realistic story, collaboratively written by thousands of authors, that tightly weaves real experience with imagined experience. This approach can create the sort of immersive engagement that
makes learning more effective. People of any age or Web ability can participate. In addition to visiting www.worldwithoutoil.org, participants can call 1-866-996-8762 to
leave a message “in game,†or send an in-game email to wwo@worldwithoutoil.org. To help middle and high school teachers incorporate the game into class activities, the designers have created a web page: http://www.worldwithoutoil.org/teach.
WORLD WITHOUT OIL is produced by the Writerguy team, and is a joint project of PBS’ Independent Lens and its Electric Shadows Web-original programming.