Sandbox Summit: Vanished // Update on the Curated Game

Caitlin Feeley, and Dana Tenneson

Vanished
https://vanished.mit.edu/

Game that advertized some kind of mystery to create anticipation. The anticipation was a video of three MIT middle school students who introduced themselves. In the background of the video, every once in a while some letters appear that the students are oblivious to. The students talk about how their game has been hacked and they need help to fix it.

The video guided people to a forum called ‘hacking forum’ to figure out what happened to the game. Kids had to decipher a code to get to the next level.

It was interesting to see how kids collaborated – a lot of it was the process of being a scientist – data collection, processing and interpretation.

In this game example, a minimum of 99 people were needed as there were 99 parts to the message. However thousands actually got involved. The idea was that there was a message from the future asking to help the kids figure out what happened to civilization during ‘The Epoch’.


There were group challenges – eg. Calibrating units:
- distance
- temperature
- latitude and longitude

The message from the future asked them to translate these units in to units that are used in the future – so kids needed to figure out some complex mathematics, which they did. They were also asked to figure out why it appears to have been cooler in the ffuture and hypothesized about reasons for other environmental changes that had taken place.

How did kids who didn’t already have scientific concepts down pat play this game?
MIT students were on hand to help assist, provide clues. At Smithsonian there were also experts on hand to help guide them through concepts. In addition, there were video chats available with Smithsonian Scientists as well as flash games to help educate.

Where are the kids right now in the game?
They are now a month into the game. Kids have recently discovered an asteroid strike caused the Epoch – and now figuring out why it couldn’t have been stopped, and where the crater might have actually hit on the earth.

Next broadcast from the future is May 4th.