How an alternate reality game helped build community during the pandemic
How an alternate reality game helped build community during the pandemic
How an alternate reality game helped build community during the pandemic
By Ellen Wiese
July 09 2020
Summary
This spring, a team of scholars affiliated with the Weston Game Lab and the College developed and presented A Labyrinth, an alternate reality game that utilized the UChicago campus as the playspace for a series of interactive quests.
This innovative approach to alternate reality games combines online engagement with personal relationships and offers crucial opportunities to connect in a moment of social distance.
Alternate reality games tell a story through multiple artistic and media forms, including-but not limited to-websites, video recording, live theater performance, email, social media, cryptic posters and phone calls.
Players progress through the game as themselves, and by doing so, assert the fictional world as in some sense real.
"Alternate reality games are absorptive in the sense that they combine any other art form that you can imagine."
Their work builds on the mission of the Weston Game Lab to foster a space on campus for the research and design of groundbreaking games.
UChicago currently offers a minor in Media Arts and Design, but the bulk of the innovative new media work takes place through MADD Center and the WGL. Thinking about the future of orientation games after the success of Terrarium in 2019, the team faced the unexpected challenge of a campus community that was entirely, well, off-campus.
"How can we do that again for these UChicago students who essentially have been pushed off of campus? How do we make people feel connected to their community, to their campus, through the use of the game?".
In addition to UChicago students and alumni, game participants included a top-performing team of sixth-graders at the University's Lab School and parents in the Chicago suburbs.
"We're interested in social impact and thinking about games that feel fundamentally different from the standard educational game affair," Sparrow said.
Reference
Wiese, E. (2020, July 09). How an alternate reality game helped build community during the pandemic. Retrieved July 10, 2020, from https://news.uchicago.edu/story/how-alternate-reality-game-helped-build-community-during-pandemic