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Youth Are Awesome, commonly referred to as YAA, is a blog written by youth for youth. YAA provides the youth of Calgary a place to amplify their voices and perspectives on what is happening around them. Youth Are Awesome is a program of Youth Central.

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HomeUncategorizedEvoke: A Crash Course In Saving The World

Evoke: A Crash Course In Saving The World

While doing research for a project on virtual identities this year, I spent a lot of time over at the Daedalus Project. Nick Yee, a research scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), dedicated about five years of his life to study Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs). He’s the expert in the field, and is referenced in virtually every article on the subject.  I doubted that other scientists were doing similar research, so I was surprised when Jane McGonigal started talking about World of Warcraft in her speech on TED this week with regards to how “Gaming can make a better world“.

Jane is a game designer, and her goal for the next decade is to harness the gameplay hours of “Super-Empowered Hopeful Individuals” and use them to make positive change in the real world.  At the end of her presentation she introduced a number of games she has designed to achieve this, the most recent of which is Evoke.  Launched on March 12th, Evoke is a collaboration between Jane and the World Bank Institute that has users “evoke” real-word issues such as food security, poverty, human rights, education, and so forth.  It will run until May 3rd, at which time players who have successfully completed 10 challenges will be dubbed certified “EVOKE Social Innovators” of the class of 2010.  Furthermore, the best of the best will be set up with online mentorships with various social innovators world-wide, and the chance to attend the EVOKE summit in Washington.

If you have a problem, and you can’t solve it alone, evoke it.

Evoke combines all the characteristics of an online game with social networking.  You level up and gain experience in knowledge, courage, collaboration, etc., and create a character like in any other game.  But the character is simply you.  Part of your mission is to piece together your hero story, but it’s really just an exercise in examining what skills and personality traits you possess that will help you as a social innovator. Every Wednesday a new mission is unlocked on the website, and users must “Learn,” “Act,” and “Imagine” to complete them, and they all have social networking components attached.  Most “Learn” components ask you to blog or vlog a response with your thoughts on a source, and how you can use them to change the world.  For the first mission, the “Act” component requires that you shadow a social innovator online, and perhaps even fire them an e-mail or two.  This video is the “trailer” for the game, and introduces many of the key components of the experience.

[vimeo 9094186]

The great thing about this game is that it’s current.  It’s happening now, and it’s happening with youth.  It’s like going to a local conference and meeting other young activists, combined with gaming and self-exploration.  Whether you’re new to activism or simply looking for more fresh ideas and ways to make a difference, Evoke has benefits for everyone. You can learn more about how to play here and sign up here, but whatever you do, just don’t associate your Ning ID with the name “Sarah”. (The site has some rotten programming that causes accounts with that name to overlap and not work properly.  I was surprised to log in and find that I was apparently a very intelligent 15 year-old girl living in Toronto who had already completed most of the three available missions.)

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