Terrarium: an alternate reality game
[Talk]
Time: Saturday, February 29, 3:30pm – 4:30pm
Location: Weston Game Lab Classroom
Presenter:
Patrick Jagoda
Talk Description:
Terrarium was an alternate reality game (ARG) scaled for approximately 1,700 people during the University of Chicago orientation for first-year students in 2019. This experience used transmedia storytelling and gameplay to increase understanding about and engagements with climate change. Terrarium was an experiment in mixed reality storytelling that combined the streaming platform Twitch, Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) software for live streaming, live-action performance, video game mechanics, and puzzles that stretched to various websites. Through several phases, this ARG invited players to participate in co-imagining a preferable climate future.
Presenter's Bio
Patrick Jagoda is a Professor of English and Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. He specializes in media theory, game studies and design, and twentieth and twenty-first-century American literature and culture. Alongside this position, He is the co-founder of the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab and the Transmedia Story Lab. He also serves as Executive Editor of the interdisciplinary journal Critical Inquiry. He is also the faculty director of the Weston Game Lab and the Media Arts and Design minor at the University of Chicago.
Martha Poggioli‘s practice explores the consequences of overlooked systems and objects in relationship to the body; both functionally and formally.
Straddling sculpture and design mediums, her work evolves through interrogating media and object archives to re-present an otherwise hidden world of things.