ARG! Collective Intelligence, Collective Gaming

The players of Perplex City wrote a book - a proper one, one that was published (on lulu), to get access to a Library. The players of World Without Oil are being challenged to change their assumptions about the world - and change their behaviour - for one of the most serious causes the human race is facing. Last Call Poker changed players' attitudes to public spaces such as cemetaries.

Alternate reality games, cross-media entertainment, big urban games - call them what you will, but these games - designed to tell stories, to immerse, to engage and to act across multiple media - have all demonstrated the power to persaude large groups of people to do things - and to consider htings -t hat they would never dream of doing on their own. Give them the right nudge: sometimes a serious contemporary issue such as global warming, othertimes a narrative push such as caring for a character developed over a period of months - and you can get them to do amazing things. More often than not, they'll do amazing things anyway, just because of the power of context.

We explore what it is that players of these games done, and what's being done to cajole players into doing the next amazing thing.