What's Past Cooper Point? Is a multimedia Alternate Reality Game (ARG) created by and for the students of The Evergreen State College.
The game stemmed from roots of community-based storytelling, with the goal of providing an immersive solar-punk experience that conveys the message of optimism and hope in the face of dark times, and building on that hope with others.
What's Past Cooper Point? Was designed with Evergreen students in mind, but open as an archive to anyone wanting to examine a post-apocalyptic community-building game.
As a game designer, my role was to not only provide art assets (both visual and written) but to aid in the creation of game aspects (or modules) that drove the plot forward. In those cases I was a plot writer and one of the lead directors of the search and rescue module.
Each module had its own learning goal that connected back to the overarching themes of climate justice, community building, and hope. In the case of Search and Rescue, our learning goals were team strategy, cooperation, and reasoning skills.
The "Problem" involved in the making of the module was "how are we going to solve the story crisis of missing people?" Each module represents a "problem" that the universe has encountered, and how it is getting fixed, which includes game assets.
We began this project On April 16th, the same day of the catastrophe, and have since diligently worked until June 4th, for a total of about seven weeks. Modules were split up into two "acts" the first act of modules having a two week window to be worked on, while act two modules had a total of three weeks to be put together.
Pictured throughout and below are my visual contributions to the What's Past Cooper Point? ARG. At the bottom is a link to all non-published works, inspirations, and unfinished products. Welcome to the journey!
