How Alternate Reality Games Are Changing The Real World
How Alternate Reality Games Are Changing The Real World
How Alternate Reality Games Are Changing The Real World
By Matt Hodapp
Summary
By using these games to educate users about climate change, marginalization and public health, these scholars and players are investigating how the process of crafting alternate realities can help reshape the real world in which we live.
Paul Rand: Jagoda and Schilt are a team that breaks down what games are, how they're changing our world and why they may be the future of education.
Paul Rand: The pair are part of a group called Fourcast Lab at the University of Chicago, which builds alternate reality games that aren't just played for fun, but are meant to reshape the way players understand important issues like climate change, marginalization and public health-and to take those ideas back into the real world.
I'm going to make a big claim here, which is that I think that alternate reality games are the most exemplary art form of the early 21st century.
Paul Rand: Alternate reality games are designed to present the illusion of reality.
Paul Rand: This is where we can really start to see how these alternate reality games could have the power to reshape the real world that we all live in.
The great thing about these games as they scale really well, in part because it's not just about designers creating games for students to play, in the way that you would with a video game, it's about creating a world that's being populated by the players themselves.
Patrick Jagoda: I mean, these alternate reality games already have this frame of "This is not a game." But of course, we don't think of them as games.
So we really want to grow these kinds of games, focus them on some of the biggest problems in the world, whether that's climate change, whether that's structural inequality, whether that's the emergence of artificial intelligence and how that's changing the future, and build huge communities of interest around that using the games.
Kristen Schilt: Whereas, I think, alternate reality games give you a hand in imagining an alternate reality, but also having a hand in creating that or shaping that.
Reference
Hodapp, M. (n.d.). Big Brains podcast: How Alternate Reality Games Are Changing The Real World. Retrieved December 15, 2020, from https://news.uchicago.edu/big-brains-podcast-how-alternate-reality-games-are-changing-real-world