2017’s O-Week activities will include an alternate reality game (ARG) that will run throughout the week. Students in the course “Alternate Reality Games: Theory and Production” will help plan the game.
An ARG is a game that uses the real world as a platform but has its own interactive narrative and uses outside methods of communication. Humans vs. Zombies is one familiar on-campus example.
Third- and fourth-year students in Patrick Jagoda and Heidi Coleman’s ARG course, which is running in autumn 2016, will help create the O-Week ARG. This is part of a project run by Jagoda, Coleman, and Kristen Schilt, which is funded by an award from the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society.
Jagoda, who has run ARG projects before through the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab, started discussing an O- Week ARG with Schilt over the past summer, and he, Schilt, and Coleman applied for a Neubauer award this past fall.
“I became excited by the possibility of creating a game for 1,500 students that would help prepare them for university life and give them they kind of literacy they need to succeed at the University of Chicago,” Jagoda said. “I also became excited by the possibility of working with social scientists…to create this game in an interdisciplinary way.”
Jagoda is the co-founder of the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab and an assistant professor of English and New Media studies. Coleman is the Director of University Theater and Director of Undergraduate Studies for Theater and Performance Studies, and Schilt is an associate professor of sociology. Graduate students from multiple departments are also already involved in the planning.
They will be working on elements of game over the summer, including writing the narrative and identifying different parts of O-Week that they’d like to target, but much of the planning will ultimately be left up to students in the course.
“I can’t imagine making this game without students. Students are the group who know Orientation best,” Jagoda said. “With any game you’re constantly playtesting and iterating and making changes throughout the process. Working with a unique group of students in the fall will change a great deal of what we have planned.”
Though the storyline and form of the game have yet to be determined, the course’s description states that one goal of the game is to discover “how interactive and participatory learning methods might help University students discuss and better understand complicated issues of inclusivity, diversity, and safety.” Jagoda is also considering the use of apps and alternate media in the game, and the idea of small group challenges.
Jagoda stated that the University of Chicago is the best fit for this kind of “learning as play and play as learning” experiment, despite the University’s sometimes austere reputation. “‘Where fun goes to die’ has continued to circulate widely as the University’s informal slogan, but I think…the actual culture of the University celebrates play, quirkiness, and experimentation as key aspects of intellectual life,” he said.
Coleman agreed: “I think that if we can do [Scav], we can create a new approach to orientations,” she said.
In Jagoda and Coleman’s opinions, college orientations have been much too focused on presentations in which one person broadcasts a message to many people. They hope to make experiences like these more interactive, and therefore more effective. “Coming from a place of performance, broadcasting is not the way that we work,” Coleman said. “So I’m really fascinated by the problem of how to create something that allows those skills, those possibilities to develop. That’s not about 1500 people sitting listening for a week.”
Coleman said that they hope to eventually create a framework for use in future orientations, both at UChicago and at other universities.
In choosing students for the class, Jagoda said they’d like to have students from a range of backgrounds and disciplines, while keeping the class on the smaller side.
When asked what kind of students Coleman was looking for, she simply said, “Fearless ones.”
