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News from the Future of Public Media
Alternative Reality Games as Public Media
email discuss Posted by Jessica Clark on Jul 12, 2007 at 9:06 AM
If a serious energy crisis really hit, would all hell break loose? That was the question posed by World Without Oil, an alternative reality game (ARG) profiled in a June 10 Salon article by Eliza Strickland. Created by an idealistic and strikingly ambitious designer, Jane McGonigal, the game was sponsored by ITVS, the independent programming arm of PBS. In late April, World Without Oil engaged hundreds of gamers from more than 40 countries to imagine their way through 8 months of the crisis and document scenarios of their lives via blogs, Flickr, YouTube and podcasts.
Aside from a few riots, the game had a happy ending:
[G]ood news began to emerge. When gas hit $7 per gallon, America didn’t disintegrate into chaos with warring clans jealously guarding their oil tanks. No further Middle Eastern countries were invaded, although there was a surreptitious scuffle in the oil fields of Alberta, Canada. The U.S. government hastily invested in public transit and alternative energy, and the grumbling populace began making lifestyle changes. People carpooled and bought bikes. They moved out of the exurbs. They planted gardens in their backyards, and religiously visited their local farmers markets.
Heartwarming, right? Better yet, the online game had offline results: teachers followed World Without Oil with their classes, participants planted apple trees and converted their cars to run on cooking oil. This is public media at its most innovative, engaging a global public concerned with the world’s dependence on oil and both educating them and moving them to action.
Not all ARGs are so benign, however. For one, they can tie up weeks of gamers’ time in elaborate marketing ploys for corporate products, like Pirates of the Caribbean. For another, Strickland notes, critics worry that the games could be used to engage everyday people in government surveillance activities, or to foment mass actions.
What’s more, the piece makes some fascinating connections between the ARG techniques and other less fictional pursuits, from the collective investigative journalism being pioneered over at Talking Points Memo, to Chinese “buying mobs” (consumer flash mobs which use their collective power to demand bargains), to the voyeuristic hunt for revealing photos on Google Maps Street View. As the recent spike in popularity of sites like Facebook shows, more and more people are making Web 2.0 tools part of their daily lives. Good or evil, these games are for real.
Discussion
Hi, Jessica. Correction: Jane McGonigal did not create “World Without Oil” - I hired her as a consultant on the project, advising on player participation. I am the creator, actually.