World Without Oil (WWO) is an alternate reality game (ARG) created to call attention to, spark dialogue about, plan for and engineer solutions to a possible near-future global oil shortage, post peak oil. It was the creation of San Jose game writer and designer Ken Eklund, and ARG veterans Jane McGonigal, Dee Cook, Marie Lamb, Michelle Senderhauf, and Krystyn Wells were on the puppetmaster team. [1] World Without Oil was presented by Independent Television Service (ITVS) with funding by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
The game's tagline is "Play it – before you live it." [2]
The game concluded on June 1, 2007.
World Without Oil combined elements of an alternate reality game with those of a serious game. The game sketched out the overarching conditions of a realistic oil shock, then called upon players to imagine and document their lives under those conditions. Compelling player stories and ideas were incorporated into the official narrative, posted daily. Players could choose to post their stories as videos, images or blog entries, or to phone or email them to the WWO gamemasters. The game's central site linked to all the player material, and the game's characters documented their own lives, and commented on player stories, on a community blog and individual blogs, plus via IM, chat, Twitter and other media. [3]
The game was announced on March 2, 2007, and its teaser site went live at that time. A countdown site appeared approximately 2 weeks before the gamestart on April 30, 2007. The game concluded 32 days later, on June 1, 2007.
The World Without Oil game asked players to imagine a world reeling from a sudden oil shortage, describe how the crisis is unfolding where they live, and work together on simple and practical ways to adapt. By playing it out in a serious way, the game aimed to apply collective intelligence and imagination to the problem in advance, and create a record that has value for educators, policymakers, and the common people to help anticipate the future and prevent its worst outcomes. In sum, World Without Oil invited people to, per its slogan, “Play it - before you live it.” [4]
World Without Oil was an Awards Nominee in the Games category for a 2008 Webby Awards, earned an Honorable Mention for the Prix Green award for Environmental Art at the 01SJ 2008 festival, and was honored with a Special Mention in the Environment category for its contribution to humanity in the 2008 Stockholm Challenge. [5] The game won the award for Activism at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in March 2008. [6]
In 2022, World Without Oil was awarded a Peabody Award in a new category for Digital and Interactive Storytelling. [7]
An in depth analysis of player contributions in the game challenges the above claims by revealing the dominance of a handful of players including the puppet masters and commonplace sustainability themes such as alternate commute options or local foods. [8]
A role-playing game is a game in which players assume the roles of characters in a fictional setting. Players take responsibility for acting out these roles within a narrative, either through literal acting or through a process of structured decision-making regarding character development. Actions taken within many games succeed or fail according to a formal system of rules and guidelines.
An alternate reality game (ARG) is an interactive networked narrative that uses the real world as a platform and employs transmedia storytelling to deliver a story that may be altered by players' ideas or actions.
Interactive storytelling is a form of digital entertainment in which the storyline is not predetermined. The author creates the setting, characters, and situation which the narrative must address, but the user experiences a unique story based on their interactions with the story world. The architecture of an interactive storytelling program includes a drama manager, user model, and agent model to control, respectively, aspects of narrative production, player uniqueness, and character knowledge and behavior. Together, these systems generate characters that act "human," alter the world in real-time reactions to the player, and ensure that new narrative events unfold comprehensibly.
I Love Bees was an alternate reality game (ARG) that served as both a real-world experience and viral marketing campaign for the release of developer Bungie's 2004 video game Halo 2. The game was created and developed by 42 Entertainment. Many of the same personnel had previously created an ARG for the film A.I. titled The Beast. I Love Bees was commissioned by Microsoft, Halo 2's publisher and Bungie's ultimate parent company at the time.
The Beast is an alternate reality game developed by Microsoft to promote the 2001 film A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Entry points to the game embedded into the film's promotion centered on the fictional Jeanine Salla and the death of her friend Evan Chan. In 2142, Jeanine learns that Evan was murdered and her investigation uncovers a network of murders of humans and artificial intelligences. The game launched on March 8, 2001 and continued running past its initially scheduled end date on June 29, the film's release date.
Jordan Weisman is an American game designer, author, and serial entrepreneur who has founded five game design companies, each in a different game genre and segment of the industry.
The Secret World is a massively multiplayer online role-playing video game with a dark urban fantasy theme, in which players play characters defending the world from occult threats.
Pete Fenlon is an American role-playing game cartographer, game designer, game developer, graphics designer and publisher. His works include stories, art and games in the genres of science fiction, mystery, fantasy and historical fiction.
Alternate reality games are a modern genre of gaming often consisting of an interactive, networked narrative that uses the real world as a platform and employs transmedia storytelling to deliver a story that may be altered by players' ideas or actions. Most of these games are either independently run or used as a viral marketing campaign by a company or brand.
Transmedia storytelling is the technique of telling a single story or story experience across multiple platforms and formats using current digital technologies.
Steve Peters is an American independent game designer and experience designer specializing in alternate reality games and transmedia storytelling. Steve was Chief Creative Officer at No Mimes Media, an Alternate Reality Game company which he co-founded with Maureen McHugh and Behnam Karbassi in March 2009. From 2011 to 2012, he was VP of Experience Design at Fourth Wall Studios, where he was Lead Experience Designer for their Emmy® Award-Winning series Dirty Work, among others. From 2012 through 2017, he hosted the StoryForward Podcast, a show that explored the future of storytelling and entertainment.
Elan Lee is an American game designer, developer, and creator. He has designed games for the Xbox; helped create the world’s first Alternate Reality Games; and with Matthew Inman created the card game Exploding Kittens, whose Kickstarter campaign was the most-backed of its day. He and Inman founded the Exploding Kittens company in 2015.
The Truth About Marika, is a transmedia production by Sveriges Television (SVT) and The company P in cooperation with SICS and Interactive Institute. It is an alternate reality game and a TV-series, created by Anders Weidemann, Martin Ericsson and Daniel Lägersten. The drama series, written by Anders Weidemann, first aired in Sweden during the autumn of 2007. The Truth About Marika was marketed as a "participation drama" and had a high amount of viewer participation.
Evan Jones is an experienced Alternate Reality Game puppetmaster and the owner of Stitch Media with offices in London, Ontario and Toronto.
Deleted – The Game is an interactive web drama developed by indie producers GEN247 about a group of characters who unwittingly become entangled in an identity theft scheme to rig the 2008 US elections. The show's creators combined a 12-webisode drama series with a sprawling interactive social game that allowed the audience to help the show's characters solve problems and puzzles along the way communicating through popular social media like MySpace and Facebook and blogs. In the course of these interactions with the characters, the audience would affect the way events in the story unfolded.
MediaStorm is a Los Gatos, CA based film production and interactive design studio. The company produces online news stories using high-quality photography, audio, interactivity, and video, and consults on interactive web projects. Seattle Post-Intelligencer said that "telling powerful stories through powerful images, MediaStorm has earned a reputation for engaging multimedia news."
Dave Szulborski was the first professional independent alternate reality game developer, and an authority on ARGs. His books on the subject are used today in curricula on alternate reality games and transmedia storytelling. His independent games included ChangeAgents, Chasing the Wish, and Urban Hunt. He holds the Guinness World Record for Most Prolific ARG developer.
Andrea Phillips is an American transmedia game designer and writer. She has been active in the genres of transmedia storytelling and alternate reality games (ARGs), in a variety of roles, since 2001. She has written for, designed, or substantially participated in the creation of Perplex City, the BAFTA-nominated Routes, and The 2012 Experience, a marketing campaign for the film 2012.
Ken Eklund is an American game and experience designer known as Writerguy. He is perhaps most famous for World Without Oil, an early "serious game" in the alternate reality game genre he created and ran in 2007. His recent projects "explore the positive social effects of collaborative experiences and open-ended, creative play. "