Dee Cook reports – Ken Eklund is an author and award-winning game designer whose 2007 serious game, “World Without Oil,” took the internet by storm. The game presented the world with a premise: there has been a glitch, and oil supplies are running short all around the globe. How does it affect you personally? Participants were invited to submit their experiences in any variety of electronic media they could think of, and their written, audio, video, and art pieces were displayed on the World Without Oil home page. For more information, there’s a great interview with Lance Weiler and Ken Eklund on the This Conference is Being Recorded archive.

Ken is busy globetrotting while planning his newest serious game, Ruby’s Bequest, which is centered around the fictional town of Deepwell where a woman named Ruby left a large estate in order that the townspeople learn to start caring for one another. I did manage to catch up with him and ask him a few questions about World Without Oil, Ruby’s Bequest, and serious games.

Q. How did you take the step from writing for games to designing a game itself? Exemplary organizational skills?

A. It wasn’t all that big a step, fortunately. Since Day One my creative work has involved game design; I’m often brought in very early in the game process, when you can shape the game structure with story ideas.

World Without Oil was my first time out as a director/producer, so yeah, organizational skills came into play. You can use the word “exemplary” in this context, however, when you desire to see milk come out my colleagues’ noses.

Q. What was your inspiration making an ARG in general…

A. All my game career I’ve been looking for ways to make game stories more immersive, and a key way to do this is to reduce the number or the height of the leaps of abstraction between the player and the story. By leaps of abstraction I mean “things you have to do different because it’s a game.” Using a controller is an abstractive leap, using button combos is another, and so on. Each leap makes the game less immersive and leaves potential players behind as a result.

So when I came to Alternate Reality Games in late 2004, it was like coming home. There’s no controller, no avatar, nothing between you and the game. So I just knew I had to start working in that area.

Q. …and making World Without Oil in particular?

A. One day in 2005 I saw a Request For Proposal from ITVS, a public media non-profit in San Francisco. Their mission is getting people of all kinds to tell their stories, and they wanted an Internet game. And I had three insights right in a row – bam bam bam. I realized an ARG about a serious real-world scenario could be a perfect way to get people of all kinds to start telling stories. I realized that sparking a massively collaborative story – crowdsourcing it – could pull off a national-scale ARG on a non-profit budget. And last, I saw the perfect narrative hook – something that would affect everyone in intensely individual ways and give them plenty to talk about. Everyone knows that we’ll run out of cheap, plentiful oil someday – what if that day was now? The three pieces all fused together in this classic Eureka moment: the World Without Oil game sprang fully formed from my head.

Q. What was the biggest surprise that came from running WWO?

A. The biggest surprise, actually, is still going on – it’s that, two years later, the fascination about World Without Oil is still so strong. The game happened right where serious games and alternate reality games and collective imagination and crowdsourced forecasting and participatory journalism and immersive experiences intersect, and right when many of those concepts really started to get traction. I am still getting pinged weekly by the people who are shaking things in these areas; the wave that WWO made is still rippling outward.

Plus of course, World Without Oil proved to be so prescient about oil. You have to remember, back in 2007, the idea that oil prices could suddenly zoom upward was science fiction, and only fringey people talked about “energy security.” Now it’s a mainstream national issue, and the place where that happened first was in the collective imagination of the World Without Oil game.

Q. What about any favorite moment that jumps out in particular?

A. That’s a dangerous question – I have so many. My most heartfelt favorites? When some player’s story just completely immersed me in my own game. I would be reading an email or listening to a voicemail and it would be so well imagined, or evocative, or authentic, that I’d just kind of forget it was a game. I remember a moment in a blog by player Warnwood when he and his LA neighbors invited the local gang lord to their Thanksgiving Day street party, in order to secure the gang lord’s tacit protection. I had this tingle in my spine: “Yes, that’s true, that really would be happening.”

A player named lead_tag sent us dispatches from Iraq that were hard to read sometimes – he was stuck half a world away while the country he was fighting for was falling apart from within. There’s heavy irony in taking survival lessons from Baghdad and applying them to Detroit and LA.

Player anda_sf did a remarkable job chronicling her life and that of her roommates using the webcomic format. It’s full of tiny simple moments that express so much – walking around the abandoned cars on a San Francisco street. So many of our player stories were like that, perfect gems of imagination.

Here’s maybe my best WWO story: it’s a month before game launch and I’m at the dentist getting my teeth cleaned. My dentist by way of chitchat asks me what I’m working on, so I give him the 50-word summary: “I’m doing this game where we pretend that the next oil shock is here; people come to this website at WorldWithoutOil.Org to find out what’s going on and to report realistically on what an oil shortage is doing to their lives. And we use the wisdom of crowds to ’play it before we live it.’” It took about 10 seconds but then he got it. Totally got it. And it just completely fired up his imagination. He couldn’t stop talking about it, about all the subtle and cruel ways that an oil shock today would play out. He ended up following me out to the parking lot. And I went home and revised all my expectations for playership sharply upward.

Q. How did your life change personally by producing WWO?

A. Well, the obvious change is that life-changing, world-saving games are what I want to do now, what I am doing. WWO was the pilot project, the proof of concept.

On a more everyday level, I consider oil efficiency just as a matter of course. I happily find I’m spending a lot more time on my bicycle, in carpools and on trains. I’m perfectly attuned to the irony of being asked to fly somewhere to speak about World Without Oil.

Q. How do you picture WWO being played 20 years ago? Would this type of collaboration have been possible?

A. Twenty years ago, World Without Oil would have been a turn-based game. The gamemasters would send out the game state to the players, they would submit their turns, the gamemasters would use the turns to generate a new game state and so on. It would have taken a loooong time to play and would not have been very immersive or collaborative. WWO worked much better as a real-time game!

Q. What was it like relinquishing so much control over the story to the players? It seems almost like watching Plinko on The Price is Right – nobody knows whether the chip will end up on $10,000 or $0.

A. The thing is, trusting people is a totally different proposition than trusting a roulette wheel. I think that the “pronoia” that ARGs can generate is one of the most valuable assets of that game platform, and one that’s often too neglected. To me the natural state is that your players will help you make the game succeed. If your players aren’t, then you’ve broken trust with them in some way. Somehow or other it’s no longer “their” game.

Q. If you could change anything about how WWO worked or happened, what would it be?

A. I would have made it easy for players to join midgame. As it was, the backlog of player stories was just overwhelming. If we had given people a summary that said, “Starting now? Here’s all you need to know,” a lot more people could have fully participated.

Q. Tell me a little bit about WWO in the classroom – are you still hearing from students telling their oil shock stories?

A. Their stories don’t actually come to me – I have to search them out on the Internet. It’s quite a rush to find a class blog and read the blog posts or watch the videos or whatever, and listen as they discover the values of self-sufficiency, resiliency and community – it’s a mini-WWO all over again.

I don’t really have a metric in place to capture how many classrooms have used the lesson plans – if teachers find the version hosted in the PBS resources section, I never see that web traffic. But just in an anecdotal way, by using Google, I see they’re out there – more of them every day.

Q. Are you an ARG-only dude now, or do you see yourself branching out into other areas?

A. I consider myself an “immersive experience” dude now, with ARGs the most prominent tool in my kit. But I’m still the chameleon freelancer dude I’ve been since 1984 – bringing what I know about games to people’s projects. One really promising area I’m plumbing now is collaborations with cultural institutions – museums, theaters and so on. I played a part in the formation of Ghosts Of A Chance at the Smithsonian, for example, although I didn’t work on that game itself.

Q. Can you tell us anything about your project under development?

A. Yes indeed. It’s called Ruby’s Bequest. On the face of it, it’s a simple story: a woman named Ruby Wood left some money in her will to Deepwell, an average American small town. But not without conditions: Ruby’s will challenges this town to take better care of its own people. So at RubysBequest.Org the townspeople are asking: what are the best ways to take care of our poor, our homeless, our vets, our disabled, our aging, our autistic, our Alzheimer’s and so on? What caring experiences have people had that Deepwell can learn from?

What’s really happening of course is that Deepwell is a proxy for our country as a whole. As a nation we want to take better care of our poor, our homeless, our vets and so on. But thinking about it at a national level is just too overwhelming: Deepwell puts the problem at a human scale, makes it solvable.

The best part is that time moves quickly in Deepwell. From gamestart on March 9 to April 12, 2009, we’ll take the town through the year 2015. So the people participating in Ruby’s Bequest will see the challenges looming to our ecosystems of caring, and see how their proposed solutions work out.

Q. What lessons did you learn from WWO that you’re applying to Ruby’s Bequest?

A. All of them, I hope! The main one I’ll mention: I think Institute For The Future is going to do a much better job of documenting and synthesizing the learning processes of Ruby’s Bequest. We saw genuine and effective learning take place in WWO – people reported not only did the game raise their awareness about oil dependence but that they learned how to think about dependencies in general. And many said that they had changed their lives in order to reduce their risk to these dependencies – the game had showed them that it was not scary or hard to do, that it could even be fun to do. But it’s hard after the fact to really understand how the game achieved this level of learning. I think with Ruby’s Bequest we may have the right people tracking these processes as they’re happening.

Q. What’s so important about caring to inspire a whole game centered around it? Do people really not care?

Oh, people care. That’s why the game is so important. The key concept here is what I call the “ecosystems of caring.” You may love someone a great deal yet be unable to care for them, because the support you need to care well just doesn’t exist. My mom lives in Arizona, I live in California – if she needs care, I’m really dependent on a far-reaching ecosystem.

These ecosystems of care are under stress right now. Already in California we’re seeing severe cuts to spending on social services, and the dark clouds have only begun to gather. In a few short years we’re at risk of being unable to afford to care for people as well as we do now – and that’s a tragic thing to confront. What good are jet planes and cellphones and all the other trappings of progress, after all, if we aren’t caring for each other better? Seems to me that affording to care better is a core reason to have a civilization.

Q. Why do you think that Serious Games are so appealing to people? Is it the same thing that compels us to ride roller coasters and fear for our lives?

A. Ye-esss. In a way. Roller coasters help us confront fears, I suppose, and so do serious games. The difference is that roller coasters operate at an adrenal level, whereas serious games shoot a little higher. In serious games, people get to play with complex systems that have a direct relationship to real-life systems. And these systems are complex and forbidding and yes, even scary, in the case of a global oil shortage. And so being able to experience them in an alternate reality helps us learn about them, and learning unravels fear. In WWO parlance, people got to “play it before they lived it.” And it’s fun to unravel fear!

Q. Any final thoughts?

I met with a game colleague today who said this: “I look at universities and how they teach and I wonder how people today are going to learn the myriad analytical skills they need in today’s world. And then I look at games like World Without Oil and wonder, ‘Is that the way to do it?’”

Thanks to Ken Eklund for taking time out of his insanely busy schedule to grant us such a thought-provoking interview, and good luck to him on Ruby’s Bequest!

Dee Cook was elated to discover the world of interactive storytelling because, at that moment, she finally discovered what she wanted to do when she grew up. A fish out of water with lofty ideals and meta-theorizing, Dee finds herself most at home with her sleeves rolled up and the grease of a good story under her fingernails. In the last several years she has written, designed, and consulted on over a dozen alternate reality games, extended realities, and marketing campaigns, most recently World Without Oil, True Blood, Dead Space, and My Home 2.0.

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