Alternate Reality Games have gained in popularity largely as a result of the infrastructural possibilities provided by the Internet. In games like World Without Oil, Superstruct, and Aftershock, players were geographically distributed across not only the United States, but the world. In the case of World Without Oil and Superstruct, the scenarios constructed for the game took on a global scale. In one regard, the popularity of these games can be ascribed to their broad audience: a tiny fraction of the population is a lot when your possible audience includes everyone with an Internet connection. So what happens when you take the Alternate Reality Game model and translate it locally?
We have used the term Community Games to mean something broader than the Alternate Reality Game genre that has developed. Community games need not have fantastic plotlines and an unfolding story to ensnare their participants. Instead, they need to provide a way for people to engage with local subjects. The local community game is a relatively untouched area. It needs a low barrier to entry so as to appeal to a large party of a relatively small audience, make local material relevant, and provide incentive to play. We have two examples of this type of game, the first of which is Knight News Challenge winner Beanstock'd Game.
If we could compel people to make these small, almost negligible lifestyle changes on a mass scale in the US, we surmised, it could make a very decisive difference in the environmental movement...
...Our comprehensive solution: The Beanstockd Project, a social media project comprised of an online news source (Beanstockd News) and The Beanstockd Game, an environmental competition powered by real-life pro-environmental actions. Beanstockd is led by an incredibly passionate 20+ person team, with a readership hundreds of thousands strong, creating a model of environmental action that is not only novel -- built on socially and psychologically-sound principles -- but highly scalable and self-sustaining. We look forward to your comments, challenges, and ideas as we fill you in on the issues we've overcome and the ones that we face in our rescue mission to save the world, one tongue-in-cheek step at a time.
Beanstock'd addresses issues they've indentified as "gaps in the environmental movement." The environmental or "green" movement has taken on a negative stigma, there has been lack of personal accountability, and the only incentive system is the satisfaction of doing a good deed. The negative stigma is addressed through Beanstock's blog, which uses celebrity news and gossip to deploy an environmental payload. Being an environmentalist is cool because celebrities (who are cool) engage in green behavior. Sometimes the connection is obvious: a celebrity does specific work related to an environmental cause and Beanstock'd promotes the news. Other times, they report on general entertainment gossip and news while dropping in a related link to some cause the celebrity in question has supported.
While Beanstock's current face is a celebrity news website with a Green tint, the Beanstock'd Game (currently in closed beta) addresses all three issues together. The Beanstock'd Game takes place in "closed geographic setting". As it has been deployed in test markets, these are university dormitories in which players from a single building compete as a team against other buildings. Players earn points for logging their environmentally friendly actions on a website, purchasing green products, and minimizing their utilities (raw data collected on electricity, gas, water, and sewage use). Also on the website, players can track their team's progress, view the statistics of competing buildings, strategize on a discussion board, and read tips on how to be Green.
The incentive? Prizes. Retailers and other sponsor groups can donate prizes monthly which are given to the winners. Of course, Beanstock'd still relies on the satisfaction of a good deed, but they use it in a different way. In one of the surveys conducted about a beta test, one player wrote, "I wasn't compelled to cheat... because I wanted to see a more accurate outcome of all of my actions." In this sense, the game relies on the gravity of the subject matter to discourage foul play; it's one thing to cheat in a game like checkers, but it's wrong when there are actual consequences at stake.
The success and sustainability of Beanstock'd has yet to be judged, but it's an example of a platform for community games that can be extended to any geographically close community.
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