While slowly attracting participants with hints of whats to come and with virtual coins to begin seeding content, today Ruby's Bequest fully launched with a challenge to players to find 1000 voices to answer the question -- "what are your hopes, your fears about the future of caring." The new ARG from the Institute for the Future hopes to stimulate some collective wisdom to solve the mystery of who Ruby Woods is, and in doing so, perhaps also about the future of a public good.
ARGs have been used as successful marketing tools (The Beast for the movie A.I., Art of the Heist for Audi A3, I Love Bees for Halo 2). In engaging players, these MMP multi-platform, blended reality games have demonstrated the potential collective intelligence and collaborative action that can emerge through game play (interesting essay on the deployment of I Love Bees). A few recent examples have experimented with the notion that ARGs may also be effective for harnessing collective innovation on societal issues. Last October, Traces of Hope (sponsored by the British Red Cross) explored the world of a Ugandan refugee and Superstruct (another IFTF ARG) sought to brainstorm solutions to five super-threat scenarios in 2019.
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