World Without Oil, the latest alternate reality game from Jane McGonigal, my colleague at Institute for the Future, is now in high gear. The idea behind the game is simple: "Play it before you live it." Jane will talk with us about this game and her insatiable appetite for play in an upcoming Boing Boing Boing podcast. Jane says:
World Without Oil is a month-long collaborative alternate reality project funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and ITVS. It’s the first alternate reality game to tackle a real-world problem: oil dependency.World Without Oil imagines we are already living on the other side of the “peak oil” moment. The alternate reality game presents a “reality dashboard” that updates daily with gas prices, fuel shortages, and measures of chaos, suffering and economic impact for different parts of the country. Players are invited to document their own lives in this new reality, through blog posts, videos, photos, web comics, geocaches, audio messages, and any other means necessary!
The goal of the project is to harness the collective intelligence of bloggers and gamers to create a bottom-up map of what it would mean to live through a massive oil shortage in the U.S. The project’s mantra: Play it, before you live it.
The game launched on Monday, and already there are hundreds of player created documents to browse–-not to mention the official “backstory” created by the game’s puppet masters..
The latest game updates include video footage of an underground car vandalism effort, instructions for how to throw fuel-free parties, and an eyebrow-raising transcript of the new secretary of state’s address to the nation.
Sign up to play now; the game runs though the first week of June.
Previously on BB:
• SF Weekly on Jane McGonigal Link
• Jane McGonigal's new game Cruel 2 B Kind Link
• Spelling out Camus's "Myth of Sisyphus" in cookies Link
