Sam's L33t Journal

Urgent Evoke is producing some pretty interesting bits of writing. Here are my modest contributions for the Week 1 missions:
LEARN: Discuss a Social Innovation Tip
ACT: Follow and Discuss a Social Innovator
IMAGINE: Where Will You Be in 2020?
GAME: Discuss an Evoke Power (user-created)

Check out some of the other user-generated content. The big question for me is how / whether the structure of the game will facilitate / inspire real-world action. If the past work of the game's creator is any evidence, it should be interesting.

A while back, I mentioned Superstruct, a not-so-alternate reality game based on predicting the future and stimulating creative thinking about likely future crises. There's also World Without Oil, a game based on a near-future oil crash scenario. Now there's another game in that vein, starting in March, called Evoke, billing itself as both a game and "a crash course in changing the world".

The creator of the ESP Game made a compelling case that solitaire-hours could be put to work on computational tasks, but maybe there are even more powerful ways that games could be turned to social good. It will be interesting to watch people's attempts to explore that problem space.