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The Alternate Reality

gretchenv — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 03:42:29 +0000

Players are in contact with the people who are putting together the website where we will help chronicle the crisis. These people call themselves the “8TSOC” and although they are fictional characters in the game they seem pretty real. Here’s a chat that a player named Stax had with Gracesmom (Sharon) about Nico, the mysterious guy who leaked the news that an oil shock is coming. And here’s where the 8TSOC people blog to each other.

We’re getting the message that the characters aren’t going to be solving this crisis – it’s up to us players. If anyone can, that is.

Meet the 8TSOC

WriTerGuy — Thu, 01 May 2008 20:46:07 +0000

The World Without Oil game centered on a website (www.worldwithoutoil.org, now archived here) which gathered all the in-game ideas and expressions of the players. In the fiction of the game, the website had been put together by eight (eventually, 14) ordinary citizens who had reason to believe the oil crisis was coming. They called themselves the 8TSOC (8 To Save Our Country).

Like the game itself, the 8TSOC characters were fiction but just barely. WWO's gamemasters ("puppetmasters") played them, but for the most part they were alternate realities of who we are (or might have been). Like the game itself, they come across as pretty real.

So it's fascinating, a year later, to read these characters' Manifestos - the characters' thoughts as the reality of the oil crisis loomed larger and larger. Take a moment and check them out.

(To learn who in real life played each character, go here and scroll down to Puppetmasters.)

Week 32: It Takes A Village

gretchenv — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 09:16:33 +0000

As WWO comes to a close, these are the stories that stood out in my mind: RedHatty in Louisiana listens to her elders; blueski subverts the dominant paradigm; Warnwood walks not away from something, but toward something; and last, Gracesmom and Grace choose to be positive in a world without oil.