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If you want to change the future, play with it first.
STEFANIE OLSEN - CNET NEWS
Imagine there's no oil. It's easy if you try.
SUSAN ARENDT - WIRED: BLOG NETWORK
It's a way for the Internet to get a dose of oil-free reality.
SEBASTIAN BLANCO - AUTOBLOGGREEN
World Without Oil is trying to rouse our 'democratic imagination.'
BEN VERSHBOW - INSTITUTE FOR THE FUTURE OF THE BOOK
World Without Oil is an online project that is a little hard to describe… part serious game, part collaborative storytelling, part social network, part multimedia experience….
SUE - VERYSPATIAL
Fun for the whole family, in a Mad Max sort of way!!
CLIMATE PROGRESS
The idea is half-fiction, half investigative process...
MATTHEW SPARKES - DESIGN & ARCHITECTURE
The idea behind the game is simple: "Play it before you live it."
DAVID PESCOVITZ - B0INGB0ING
This game isn't purely make-believe. It's meant to draw attention to the real possibility of an oil shock and what our country and the world have to do to prepare for it.
DEAN TAKAHASHI - SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS
The ideas that people come up with for surviving in a post-oil world could actually pay off in real life if they lead to less consumption and more alternative sources of energy.
EVWORLD NEWSWIRE
I thought World Without Oil was amazing and groundbreaking. The way it gets a grassroots movement designed to think about important problems and builds it around narrative - inspiring.
JESSE ALEXANDER (executive producer of Heroes, LOST, Alias)
I found World Without Oil a great inspiration... my example of how the web can be used to narrate, perform and collaborate on social issues that are too big for any one individual to solve.
JEROEN COUMANS
Log in to "World Without Oil," a free alternate reality game that taps our collective ingenuity to stop a plausible crisis before it happens - or at least prepare a post-Katrina nation to deal better with a disaster.
ELIANE ALHADEFF - FUTURE-MAKING SERIOUS GAMES
Sounds like a lot of fun… crowd-sourcing a real-world problem through role-playing and creative writing.
DEREK YU - THE INDEPENDENT GAME SOURCE
It's like a RPG for treehuggin', global warmin' fightin' do-gooders. That is like so many levels of awesome, I just cannot say.
BONFIRE
This is a prime example of using all the high-tech bells and whistles of the Web to educate humanity.
BOB JACOBSON - CORANTE
This has been one of the most amazing experiences in my life.
FALLINGINTOSIN (PLAYER)
The producers of this Alternate Reality Game have taken the web to create a new form of mass media that may produce more lasting effects and engage people in a more effective way. As I've explained before: "for a new generation of viewers, viewing is not enough. Participation is a must."
JUAN - GLOBAL CULTURE
This is quite the way to bring attention to an issue that would otherwise perhaps make people's hearts heavy with a mixture of apathy, fear and guilt.
ALICE TAYLOR - WONDERLAND
Came across this very interesting bit of collaborative multimedia fiction today and killed a good hour perusing it. It's interesting to read (and view and listen to) a story that begins roughly now and extends into the future, a story told from many locations and points of view. Eerily plausible...
CHARLIE HIPHOP
The beauty of WWO's oil shock is the extent to which oil scarcity is already considered an issue that spans the personal, political, financial, and scientific, and WWO, recognizing this, allowed players to engage on the levels most compelling to them.
NINA SIMON - MUSEUM 2.0
As the game progressed over 32 days, 1,800 participants responded to the imaginary oil shock by making changes in the real world - growing apple trees, converting their cars so they could be fueled by cooking oil and collectively writing a manual about ways to respond to the crisis.
ROBIN MORONEY - THE INFORMED READER, WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE
They are using content scattered throughout the web to create this new reality. Youtube videos, blogs and a LiveJournal Community are attributed to fictional characters... The puppetmasters use these characters to pull real people into the game and get them to start contributing.
BRADY FORREST - O'REILLY RADAR
Can you imagine what would happen in a world without oil? Several thousand people can, and did over a period of 32 weeks. They blogged about it as if it really happened - coming up with solutions and ways to live without or with very little oil. Check it out... It's kind of scary to think about... do you think it could happen?
MYTECHGUY - FOX 26 NEWS, HOUSTON
World Without Oil has launched and has already collected a massive amount of input from people's video, pictures and blogs, not to mention some well conceived missions. It's a fantastic concept, and is probably the best example currently out there of how ARGs might be used for a social purpose.
JIM WOLFF - TECHNOLUDOLOGY
World Without Oil got my attention precisely by the uniqueness of the concept: to ask young people to publish imaginary reports over the weeks after an oil shortage begins, an event with the multiple economic, social and environmental consequences. The result is of an astonishing quality. The participants determined the essence of a complex subject.
FRANÇOIS GUITÉ - RELIEF
I found World Without Oil a great inspiration... my example of how the web can be used to narrate, perform and collaborate on social issues that are too big for any one individual to solve.
JEROEN COUMANS
Instead of a typical 'clue-hunting' format, following a prescribed script, this ARG is much more immersive, collaborative and unscripted... The idea of bringing futures conversations into the here and now is compelling.
STEAL THIS BRAND
This experience has been just incredible for me. I've learned so much and started to think about even small things in my daily life in new way. Your stories and suggestions give me hope that necessary skills and knowledge are being saved for times when we will need them desperately. You show me that many really great people are out there… and that we will lead the way.
EPAXSON (PLAYER)
There's something about the way that World Without Oil is taking place that leads one to forget that the events it describes are not actually real. The events of World Without Oil are not supernatural or fantastic, but they still are mythology, in that they are literally untrue events that reflect the patterns of our perceptions about the deeper, figurative truths about our lives.
CU SITH - CU SITH MYTH
Gone are the days when computer games involved little more than mowing away descending hordes of pixellated aliens. Now people are beginning to see the potential of games as ways of teaching and learning, not just individually but in groups and, theoretically, as a planet.
ARMCHAIR ANARCHIST - FUTURISMIC
My friends, family and coworkers have all noticed the difference. In all seriousness, this entire thing has made me a different person.
FALLINGINTOSIN (PLAYER)
I'm finding it very difficult to express how cool world without oil is. In the absence of adequate words I'm going to have to fresh mint my own. It is radtacular!
BEN BASTIAN
Dude. World Without Oil. Starting at the end of April of this year and extending for 32 weeks (now finished), this was a HUGE group effort to react to an oil crisis. Blogs, video, MP3s, and photos. Almost 2,000 participants. Completely. Fricking. Brilliant.
THE SERPENT'S JOURNAL (MORNATASARE)
It's not simply that WWO will encourage us to transfer our survival skills from its made-up world back into our real world. Instead, our reality itself becomes a game, and eco-friendly behavior is not simply a moral or political obligation impressed upon us by the persuasiveness of the evidence, now, it's also play.
ZACH WHALEN - GAMEOLOGY
What I found particularly notable is that there's an Unfiction thread which isn't directly solving the problems of the ARG - but rather, talking about the issues, with commentary like this: "Until we build more nuclear, hydroelectric, geothermal, solar, wind, wave, etc. power generation facilities, fuel-cells are not the answer to our problems." So people are thinking about the problem - which is the entire point .
SIMONC - GAMESETWATCH
As a concerned citizen I am glad to see the "game for good" aspect of WWO get a lot of airtime. As a student of game design, I see something far more fascinating going on: WWO appears to be one of the most efficient content propagating narratives ever executed in an ARG context.
MARK HEGGEN
So what did this game accomplish? I'll tell you what I got out of it - we're dealing with a hard set of problems! If nothing else, this game gave a good kick to optimists and got everyone thinking beyond dream scenarios.
NICK ERNST (PLAYER)
It is a far cry from the "calculate your carbon footprint" or other casual games about resource usage. It required much higher engagement than reading news articles on the topic; it was a huge growing, twisting network of news, strategy, activism, and personal expression.
NINA SIMON - MUSEUM 2.0
If the warnings of the entire scientific community can't stop us from continuing a carbon pollution that very well may destroy the planet we live on, how can we get everybody to stop? But if we all spontaneously started playing a game and tried to make it a new human adventure... Can gamers save the world?
JAMES BERNARD FROST
Forget Live Earth, nothing's made me sit up and take notice more than World Without Oil, a hypothetical web journal documenting a week by week account of life in America as oil supplies dwindle. It confirms for me that digital, and ARGs in particular, could really steer society to saving mother earth.
SIMEON - HYPERHAPPEN
This is public media at its most innovative, engaging a global public concerned with the world's dependence on oil and both educating them and moving them to action.
JESSICA CLARK - CENTER FOR SOCIAL MEDIA, AMERICAN UNIVERSITY
It is one of the finest examples that I have seen of games being used to explore a social issue. This is a first baby step from where games are today - primarily about visceral action, towards where they might one day be - one of the most important artistic and pedagogical tools that we will possess.
BEN BASTIAN
As for me, in this here and now, I'm a different person thanks to WWO. I'm much more aware of the fragile thread that supports the lifestyle I and others keep. I'm making changes, but there's a long way to go. But I AM changing, and that means that for me, WWO was a success.
MTALON (PLAYER)
You're in for an entertaining and educational, but excruciatingly real experience - and one that unfortunately, in the future, will not be a game to play but the reality in which we live.
BOB JACOBSEN - TOTAL EXPERIENCE
These games - designed to tell stories, to immerse, to engage and to act across multiple media - have all demonstrated the power to persuade large groups of people to do things that they would never dream of doing on their own.
DAN HON - REBOOT 9.0
Why It Matters: Because as the bedrock assumptions of our lives shift more and more rapidly, being an expert doesn't necessarily make you a better predictor of the future. Sometimes, lots of "average" people swarming a problem makes for a better and more attuned discussion.
WORLDCHANGING TEAM
In the end, the entire enterprise feels less like a traditional game, and more like a war game or scenario simulation. Except World Without Oil isn't about our leaders visualizing their strategies and determining how they would respond to potential crises… It's about us developing those same skills. For that reason alone tools like World Without Oil are exciting, since they begin to re-empower us all to understand and take control of the events happening around us.
ECOPUNK
It's great to see this tangible example of productive play in motion.
TONY WALSH - CLICKABLE CULTURE
At some point this becomes a fundamentally different form of storytelling.
MARK HEGGEN - RE:TEXT
Act as if. Live it. Weave us into a possible future, let us picture ourselves in the middle of a plotline, rather than just spout out more statistics in a news item.
EVELYN RODRIGUEZ - CROSSROADS DISPATCHES
"What if?" is a question everyone can answer.
NINA SIMON - MUSEUM 2.0
How do we get this experience into the school systems?
MEGIDDO_TELL (PLAYER)
In a true oil shock as we may be facing, it will not be the anarchist fantasy world that many people seem to want. It'll be terror. It'll be people watching other people suffer. It'll be people not caring if others suffer because they can't afford to. Let's hope it never comes to pass in that way.
DMOISAN (PLAYER)
If you can grow food in your yard, you better start now.
MEREDITH MEDLAND - LIVING GREEN, PERSONAL LIFE MEDIA
The World Without Oil Site Archive
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