Mission 10 What happens next? Learn 10 - In under the wire :)

Hello and thank you for sharing your time with this idea. I just found out about Evoke and find now that I only have today with it before season 1 commences. I have read the introduction, this week’s mission
and the comic for episode 9 so please forgive me if I’m not completely in tune with the atmosphere of the game side of the project yet, I think I see the idea and from the mission titles which social issues have already been addressed. Time being short, I’m diving in before entirely familiarizing myself with all the power aspects and intricacies that flavor the game side of the project. From the episode 9 comic, the development of the antagonist Alpha seemed intriguing and I’ve decided to explore that direction. I don’t know how well an antagonist will really play out as Alpha seems to be a force or organization running counter to the players, and while They Live having alien conservatives behind the worlds ills was tongue-in-cheek fun, it didn’t purport to have answers so much as entertainment. I trust that Alpha is more a clever twist on things in the game than some evil mastermind as he appears. I noticed on one of the other missions for this week a desire for new characters that dovetails nicely with the idea I
have so I’ve tried to tie them together. Episode 9 leaves us with the cliffhanger of Alpha, and I propose that we pick up season 2 with introducing some new characters, foreshadowing the issues we will explore in the season, and introducing guilds or some other form of Evoke groups who could also work on small group tasks and where geographically feasible assemble and doc**ent real world act missions in the “think globally, act locally” frame of mind.

For the first episode of season 2, we travel to the Galapagos Islands and join a secret meeting with representatives of other like minded groups (i.e. introducing new characters) so we can pool our resources and information on the nefarious Alpha who is the cliffhanger of episode 9. The new characters would be fellow futurists, think tankers and brain trustees. Each of the new characters would be a fictional representative from organizations such as: the Club of Rome, Fundacion Alternativas, the Rand Corporation, the Brookings Institute, ect., who we would meet in this instance and fictionally discuss Alpha. As the new characters meet the protagonist and share their mission statements and goal of the groups they respectively represent as a way of introducing themselves and establishing their bona fides with one another, our protagonist character would also explain the Evoke group introducing ourselves so to speak for new players in the context of the story. The characters would settle into
a discussion of what each of them can add to the puzzle that is Alpha, preparing the players as to what we are going to be dealing with on that front. The characters would agree that Alpha is a problem to be considered, and a more rash or impatient character would insist “Alpha isn’t as much of a problem as… or… or…” thereby bridging the conversation to various social issues that affect the groups these new characters represent and leaving the Alpha issue hanging for the players to pick up. The
characters discussion, while serving to foreshadow various social issues that would be addressed during the upcoming season, should also take a tangent to explain collective intelligence. The players ought to quite readily make the association with Evoke as harnessing and focusing collective intelligence which seems to be what’s behind the game, so it shouldn’t be overdone or it could become a heavy handed turn off. As to the topics discussed as needing to be dealt with: we could examine overpopulation and the world’s exceeding human sustainability to feed ourselves that’s expected to occur around 2050, we could examine nuclear proliferation and the danger these weapons pose to everyone everywhere,
we could examine education both pragmatically in what skills our students will need for the job market 25 years from now taking the worlds rate of change into account and holistically in how we teach our students what they need to know, and we could examine some of the even more pressing issues other Evokers are urging for season 2 as I am writing this. Regardless of which issues lend themselves most readily, the new characters introduced here are intended to return as future information sources in the
story arc and quest instigators so the “alert from Alchemy” won’t get stale and trite. The new futurist/brain trust characters also encourage a broadening of the game world to be inclusive of
other groups with similar aims, as well as act as springboards for future challenges in examining how we can network with other groups sharing our collective intelligence resource and utilize what resources those groups may have to share with what we’re trying to implement.

The small group meeting can also be a springboard for a new guild or team feature where players could organize into squads based on geographic closeness for local act missions or squads based on
particular specialties or issue interests. These squads could work together on guild quests to help implement some of the ideas we’ve come up with or they could work together on more elaborate
issues that can be broken up into parts or that can be served by more detailed examination or more specialized insights to help bring to fruition. Maybe unique or not, but I think we should be able to be a member of multiple guilds as these guilds or teams would organize themselves towards a particular shared focus.

Although this idea is more of a scaffold for including what you and others have in mind, I hope you’ll consider it or include some aspects of grounding the game in what organizations also exist in the real world to balance out what fancies we might fly to with Alpha. That having been said, what I think would be clever for that episode’s particular issue is carbon sequestration. (http://fossil.energy.gov/sequestration) With the amount of carbon that is being absorbed by the ocean and the atmosphere,
how can we 1 best sequester that carbon out of the environment and 2 make carbon sequestering profitable so that people will engage in it. There are some markets and industries which can make use of carbon but what really could make this a lucrative endeavor. If we find a way to make money out of doing it, I bet it’ll get done. As a “learn” perhaps we find out in our discussion about Alpha that he can trace our carbon footprint and follow us by tracking our carbon trail (I know it’s ridiculous, but gamers
love puns) so we would need to plot a course from the Galapagos Islands to wherever the Evoke network will focus on next in a way that leaves no carbon footprint. While obviously sailing from
the island, wherever our destination will be we would need to find ways to offset the carbon footprint created by our travels and have a time limit for the trip so you couldn’t just walk it when you reached the preferred continent. If we will be in South America for season 2, global warming and Brazil’s harvesting of the rainforest come to mind as additional issues that would work well for this episode.
Assuming this is the case we could then “act” to calculate our own household carbon footprints and then find ways where we can reduce it. We can “imagine” ways to make carbon sequestration something viable and self sufficient since those trees have yet to stop falling.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to play and I look forward to being able to really start playing in the coming season.