A crash course in changing the world.
Experience with Evoke
Evoke was the first serious online game that I have played, and as such I made many new experiences while doing so. The first challenge was to learn what the game is actually about and how to use the website to accept and complete missions and quests. Thanks to the introductory videos and the intuitive navigation it did not take a lot of time to get things up and running.
The comics used to introduce each weeks topic where very well done and fun to read. These stories made it much easier to become interested into the problems rather than getting a bunch of links and being told to read up on it. I also like that there was a background story about the Evoke network and Citizen X being developed throughout the comics.
The topics for the weekly missions where varied and easy to get into. For me they were all topics that I had read about before or followed in one way or another, but I had not studied them as in depth as I did with Evoke. This is also where most of my motivation for playing Evoke came from. I was driven by my interest for these social problems, and while it was nice to get powers and achievements for doing the missions, they were not really of any importance to me. I never did a mission for the power points, and I often forgot to vote for the powers after completing a mission. I also never really looked at the leaderboards, so the wh*** competitive part of the game was pretty much lost on me. Nevertheless, I think the powers should be kept in the game as together with the comic they make it feel like an actual game, rather than an e-learning exercise.
While I had a lot of fun investigating and completing the missions, and think that I have gained quite a bit of useful knowledge from that, I did not find the weekly quests as rewarding. Instead of the missions, which were about tackling real world problems, the quests had you gradually make up your superhero identity as an Evoke agent. This felt kind of forced at times and I didn’t really get much out of it.
Suggestions for the future of Evoke
For me, Evoke was a success and generally did what it set out to do: make me more aware of social problems in this world and get me thinking about solutions to them. There topics themselves where motivation enough to get involved and the comics where a lot of fun to read. The story of the Evoke agents should definitely be developed further in the next episode of Evoke.
I cannot really comment on the usefulness of the leadercloud as I rarely looked at it, but I know that other people tend to be more competitive in these social games so it is probably a good way to keep them hooked. As stated before, I personally do not care much for points or powers but it does not hurt to have them in the game.
One thing I would like to see improved, is easier access to the mission solutions from other players. It would be optimal if upon viewing a mission, there would be direct links to the most recent or highest voted solutions. This would make it easier learn about the ideas of other players on the topic.
The developers and administrators of the Evoke site should also spend more time checking if the links to external websites provided for the missions are still working. There were quite a few missions where important links where no longer working and it made it harder and more frustrating to complete the mission.
Topic wise, I think Evoke covered many of the important problems today, so it could be a challenge to choose new ones for Season 2 without repeating some of them. One of the problems I felt were missing that could be chosen for Season 2 is environmental pollution and the destruction of the rain forest. This is also closely related with the situation of the people living in the affected areas.
Summary and conclusion
Taking part in the Evoke game was a great experience for me personally, and I take from it a lot of new knowledge and ideas and a renewed interest in today’s social problems. I think a serious social game is a great platform to introduce people to these problems that would be otherwise reluctant to spend their time on learning about them.
I hope that Evoke gets further developed and becomes accessible to a larger audience in the future. It is a great example of how the internet can be used to get people together and combine their ideas to solve problems.
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