A visual narrative game (Avert the Crisis) sets the scene for actionable interventions in the Alternate Reality Game. Can we generate an emotional connection to Capetonians and their current struggle, that would foster meaning-making for a global community of citizens and innovators to respond to?
The visual narrative game will be playable on iOS and Android devices in the last 2 weeks of March.
The ‘WWW_Day Zero’ Alternate Reality Game challenges players to imagine themselves on the brink of a severe water shortage that will affect their entire city, and to propose measures that could curb this impending doom. The city has just 1 month of water left if inhabitants remain within the daily average of 50 litres of water per resident per day. Players are tasked with documenting their journey, ideas and discoveries along the way, and to share this on any public social media platform. This stream of crowd-sourced solutions will be linked to a web platform, and curated daily by the game’s designers, with the best suggestions earning themselves a spot in the official ARG narrative as it unfolds.
The Alternate Reality Game begins on 1st April 2018 and runs until 1st May 2018.
Following the game, all ideas will be stored in an online database of potential solutions made freely available to any city-hackers out there.
Did you guys manage to map anything yet? As you can see, the hacks are starting to accelerate and growing in number and maturity. I think we should invite more participants in water stressed cities onto this page. They will have a lot of interest to participate because the solutions can apply directly to their situation. @Ianpat, @RicardoRug, what do you think?
Some of my friends in Cape Town have already taken up this challenge of keeping below 25 litres per day…so it seems like the game has already begun!
I’d be keen to hear your thoughts on how this game is advertised and played - does it involve producing inspiring solutions (/ideas) that kickstart the creative process in reducing water consumption? This could be a useful intersection we could collaborate on that would benefit both ‘games’ (or one combined game?).
We spent the hackathon weekend coming up with key concepts and narrative branches that we’d like to incorporate into the visual narrative game, and learning the software required to pull this off. We’ll work on this over the next couple weeks and see what we can come up with, hopefully giving players roughly 2 weeks of play-time to get inspired (and challenged) before the ARG kicks off on April 1st (no jokes). This will give us a couple weeks to set up the platform infrastructure required to facilitate the ARG experience and give necessary feedback to players.
The 25 Litre challenge…We were thinking of short video humorous ad campaign as well. but 25 L challenge…we were thinking of allowing people to try different permutations of lifestyle choices and seeing the impact on their lifestyle and on water consumption. The permutations are actually endless. If people get winning permutations for their unique circumstance, then we have a indexed lookup table:
living circumstances - Litres of consumption
So people can check of their living scenario like you would check off features when you are selecting an AirBnB home to rent. Once that is checked off, the winning solutions are returned. This allows you to match your scenario with all the library of scenarios in the library.
One person may have a family of 6 and middle class living in a large home, while another may be a couple with a baby in an apartment. If you find a match in the databse, it returns all the tips and tricks they used.
