Player Produced Texts and World Without Oil
YouTube Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-hzUGFD-Gc
World Without Oil (WWO, tagline: “Play it—before you live it.”) was one of the first explicitly educational ARGs and the first to use the form as an activist medium. Developed by the Institute for the Future and the Independent Television Service, the developers formed a team of players and turned them into Puppetmasters by designing a game which challenged many of the still nascent conventions of alternate reality gaming. Released in 2006, the setting for WWO was the not too distant reality of a world that has reached peak oil (which was, ironically in terms of today’s market, marked by prices of US$100/barrel for oil and US$4 per gallon for gasoline). This world, our world, compressed 32 weeks of crisis into one month and asked players to consider how their lives would change if fossil fuel became unavailable. WWO’s subject matter and overtly civic component were not the only elements that differentiated it from other ARGs, however. Unlike most, WWO’s designers did not generate the core content; instead, they proposed the alternate reality by providing a timeline that included a number of situations and prompts. In essence, after the initial launch, players became the central “characters” in the unfolding narrative. As for content, players themselves created nearly everything—submitting images, blog entries, video clips, voicemail messages—anything that could relate how a world without oil impacted their everyday lives. (For examples of player contributions, search YouTube.com or Flickr.com for the tag: “worldwithoutoil”.) The best submissions were awarded Carbon Credits and their creators were dubbed “Carboneers.”
WWO encouraged players to go out and learn the facts about alternative energy and then harness their new knowledge. To increase penetration of their message and encourage discussion among students, WWO’s designers included an educational component and actively reached out to teachers. Around the world teachers used WWO not only to frame assignments revealing the disastrous consequences of continued waste, but also asked students to apply what they had learned to stave off this looming alternate reality. The game’s designers suggested possible lesson plans, but the teachers (many of whom were becoming active players at this point) created their own, contributing them back to a central repository so that others could experiment with them. Towards the end we saw projects emerge from the player community that included researching and publishing fact sheets, whitepapers, and letters to politicians at all levels—projects that mirror some of the more traditional forms students compose in. We saw also treatises on risk communication, urban planning, survival, and engineering. The interesting part of this was not only that the game provided a rhetorical situation that these texts responded to, but also that a range of forms—from podcasts and short videos to blog posts and even A4 paper (scanned, of course)— were used to make rich, interesting, and meaningful arguments.
From a rhetoric and composition instructor’s perspective, the game proved to be an unqualified success. WWO provided a rich and interesting scenario from which instructors could pull numerous assignments and discussion prompts in nearly any field that interested the students. Students became excited about creating content and contributing to the game and some who had performed haphazard or cursory research for previous projects became much more careful with their facts. Because their compositions were available online, and thus to the whole of the player community, students told me that they edited more carefully, double checked sources more thoroughly, and got caught up in what was becoming a competition to contribute more interesting pieces that communicated from their unique perspectives. Some were even named “Carboneers” themselves.
While technical and time limitations forced my students and I to focus on the more “low-tech” print-based approaches to multimodal composing such as newsletters and other print-based offline materials, those forms were the ones students were most familiar with and which posed a lower barrier to entry. This accommodated students who may not have otherwise had access to the tools for video and audio production and allowed us to enter into a discussion of the contributions multimodal composing makes to essay writing (the explicit focus of this particular section of Seminar in Composition, the first-year writing course at the University of Pittsburgh). Despite being low-tech, the compositions students authored while participating in the game were almost always multimodal, incorporating images, diagrams, text, and (in the case of online blog and forum posts) links to other video, print, and audio materials.
The other way in which WWO broke from the conventions of alternate reality gaming was by not adhering to the genre's "This Is Not A Game" (TINAG) aesthetic. WWO's puppetmasters were already celebrities in the ARG community and McGonigal in particular was a rising academic star in both game and media studies. Also, the game was meant to broaden the reach of ARGs and expand the community of players, an intention that would have been undermined by denying the game exists. These factors made it difficult for them to hide behind the curtain, denying their role in the game. While previous games derived their "seriousness" and fidelity to reality, at least in part, by denying the existence of the game, WWO did so through its choice of subject matter. These factors, coupled with the player-produced nature of the core texts, make WWO the only ARG that is fully scalable between large and small player communities. Furthermore, the "hands-off" approach of puppetmasters during game play and the availability of a detailed "script" online make the game replayable and allow it to be scaled time-wise to fit in nearly any course.
The question of archiving and reproducibility is an important one. In the case of WWO, the game has formally ended, but the project continues to live online at the game’s actively updated "post-game blog," in discussion forums, and on a multitude of social networking and media sharing websites (some of which I link to above). Because WWO required very little intervention on the part of the game’s Puppetmasters, as well as the player-created nature of the content, the game could, conceivably, be replayed at will using the timeline set forth by the game. Realizing this, WWO’s creators still make the weekly game updates available so that it can be replayed over the course of an entire semester as the instructor “puppetmasters,” or manages, the game. The structure of other games makes them less conducive to replay; because they occur in real-time, it is often impossible to “replay” a game. The forums and materials for most games, however, exist long after the games themselves have ended. In the sections “Collaboration” and “Community Play” I discuss some strategies for using these online records as source material for projects and class discussions.