Terrarium from a Player’s Perspective

On behalf of everyone on Team Nudged!, I’d like to extend a huge thank you to everyone in the Fourcast Lab—namely Ashlyn, Patrick, and our team mentor, Rebecca Husk—for creating such an engaging experience and supporting our work throughout the summer.

I am a first-year student, and I participated in the Terrarium alternate reality game over the summer. I discussed the design of Terrarium with my teammates after learning about it in class, and we found that familiarity with both the player’s experience and creators’ intent gave us a more thorough understanding of particular motives and their efficacy.

I fell down the first “rabbit hole” on May 7th during my senior year of high school. I had committed to the University a few weeks prior, and I was happily receiving school merch, pamphlets, and endless emails about navigating college life. One such email contained bolded letters spelling “select all.” At the postscript of the email, written in white text, were the words “forecast dot uchicago dot edu slash terrarium dot pdf.” (I saved that email, though unfortunately, my school has since deleted my account.) And so, what a group of overly-curious students called “Act 1, Scene 1” began.

At first, I was hesitant to join; I had exams to worry about, friends soon to leave, and end-of-the-year projects piling up. Nonetheless, I took a few hours out of my day to solve puzzles embedded in syllabi and follow my classmates’ progress, as partially documented here. I wasn’t fully engaged, nor was I oblivious to our small operations.

About three days later, the group had relocated from the UChicago Class of 2023 Facebook page to a discord channel—a 150-person slice of the entire class. I was only marginally involved, debilitated by a severe case of senioritis. We had moved on to “Act 1, Scene 7,” when a student pinged everyone in the channel and asked for environmental art. Despite my illness, I drew landscapes every day; I had even drawn a tree growing inside of a terrarium. I gladly submitted two digital paintings to the Fourcast Lab Facebook page.

The response I received, not only from Professor Coleman but, more importantly, from my peers, was so encouraging—so dramatically against the cutthroat stereotype of top-school students. For me, this moment materialized the “alternate reality” element at the bottom of the rabbit hole; we were immersed in a world free of competitiveness, in which we genuinely felt that the success of one member advanced the group. I was sucked into the experience, and I eagerly watched the Fourcasters' live streams over the next few months.

By early July, I had received a flyer for the Futures Design Challenge (FDC), a competition surrounding solutions to climate change. I had recently graduated, and I was busy sleeping 16 hours per day, eating Ben and Jerry’s cookie dough ice cream straight out of the tub, and occasionally watching live streams. I threw the flyer away immediately. I didn’t even recycle it, which demonstrates that I was completely unqualified to participate in a competition about saving the planet.

On July 7th, a student from the UChicago Class of 2023 Facebook group asked if any artists would like to join his team. I offered to help, though I did not expect him to accept. (He would like me to state that 1) he is not a robot in person, and 2) he was incredibly kind to invite me to the team.) This interaction marked my second rabbit hole.

Our team of five hailed from three continents, occasionally meeting across four different time zones. We moved passed the initial awkwardness, thankfully, and agreed to create a mobile app that reduces household energy consumption, which you can read about here.

The rest of our journey revolved around building the app from scratch. We averaged at about 6 hours of work per day from August through September, picking up to around 8 hours towards orientation. The Fourcast Lab had also released minigames called “climate quests” that involved analytical and creative thinking around different facets of climate change, for which the team with the highest number of points would receive an award.

By the night before the competition, our app was incomplete, our scripts were unedited, and we trailed the top ranking team by 13,000 points, equivalent to about 20 climate quests. We spent our evening huddled in a study room on the fifth floor of the Reg, arguing about who should say what or stand where during the presentation. We left feeling defeated about our prospects of winning but determined to rack up the highest number of points for the climate quests.

I found myself sitting in the basement of I-House at 5:00 am with one of my team members, typing a response to a climate quest on David Archer’s models with one hand and holding my third can of Monster Energy in the other. Since our team formed, we had completed almost 100 quests. The competition was a few hours away, and I was convinced that we had lost.

We did not lose. However, winning was undoubtedly the least exciting part of playing Terrarium; being surrounded by my peers tackling the most pressing issue of the 21st century was nothing short of awe-inspiring.

From left to right: Zhang Zhi, Keshav Khosla, Noor Amin, Warren Liow, and Alexandre Gaubil

I find it difficult to criticize Terrarium. Often, students spoke about Terrarium as the “game” and the FDC as the competition. To my knowledge, very few students participated in both; I was the only person on my team, for instance, who regularly followed the Twitch streams. The disconnect, I believe, stemmed from too much distancing between realities. Terrarium challenged us to imagine the world in 2049, which seemed altogether separate from how we addressed issues in our presentations. Games—transmedia or otherwise—often fail to instigate change on the same level as traditional activism platforms, such as speeches, protests, and autobiographies. Hence, if the purpose of the puzzles was to lead students into the FDC, perhaps rooting the puzzles in ideas closer to the present would have been a more effective approach. Despite this disconnect, I find myself becoming more mindful of my consumption, which is perhaps a more significant impact than encouraging students to compete.

It takes an extraordinary kind of student to think about climate change throughout the summer of their senior year. The University of Chicago is full of them. For me, Terrarium served as a platform for bringing students together, not only for academic vitality but to employ human resources to bring about change. I'm excited to see the future of ARGs and how they help us think about the problems in our reality.