Missions Ideas

= Organization =

The organization the player interacts with is composed of several departments. Recurring missions (that can be repeated) are marked with "(R)".

= Human Resources Department =

Handling recruitment, training and personnel issues.


 * (R) Quizzes (answer, create &amp; review)
 * (R) Watch video &amp; answer question
 * Take a picture of you recycling your garbage (post &amp; review)
 * Tutorial missions

= Intelligence Department =

Gathering information and verifying it - like the CIA.


 * (R) Sign of Gaia waking up (post &amp; review)
 * YouTube missions : find videos of famous people doing thnigs that can reveal their position towards environmental issues.
 * Google maps : for instance, let's assume that a suspect individual has been spotted at a given coordinate somewhere in Washington. The mission can be to find a specific information related to the company this individual works for. To complete the mission, the player must find the adress on google maps that corresponds to the coordinate and discover that on the corresponding street, there is a lobbying firm related to the nuclear industry. The player should then go to the web site of this firm and scan it, which will reveal the information that the mission was asking for.
 * Wikipedia : use the depth of wikipedia, for instance, let's say there is a chemical element that the organization is interersted to sudy, they know that it is related to two products that have a page on wikipedia, and the player by looking at the discussion related to these two products (let's assume that the element is not mentioned on the page itself), can identify the common chemical element to these 2 products and therefore complete the mission.
 * Mini-scenario that links together various missions in order to retrieve an information. These missions can all be of the information gathering genre, but they can also mix other genre of missions.
 * Ex : Find a web site quoted in a video. Then, scan the website in order to retrieve the name of the owner of the website (NPC or player), then find a post where this person has submitted an information and finally submit this information in the chat in order to validate the mission. It can be more elaborate and mix more genres.
 * Ex : see this document for an example of treasure hunt related to 2012
 * Hiding information on behalf of the organization.
 * The organization does not want its secret info to be centralized, so it's asking the player to hide it somewhere on the web, and to give in exchange a secret code that should make it possible to retrieve the information.
 * Then, this can become a mission for other players, who must retrieve the information with the code.
 * Then we could follow the card stories gameplay : if some players find the information but not all of them, it means that it was hidden with the adequate level of difficulty, and the player who hid the information wins. If no one or everyone finds it, then he loses.

= Communication Department =

Propaganda on the Web and in the medias.


 * Sign a petition on thepetitionsite.com
 * Find out a post about ecology that need attention (post &amp; review)
 * Comment on a post about ecology
 * Post on digg/FB/etc (submit &amp; verify =&gt; posted by shared account)
 * [Plugin/outside] Like a post from the game facebook feed
 * Post a video of you making a speach about ecology
 * Get 2000 people to do mission X before October 10th or another catastrophy will happen.

= Field Operations Department =

Going in the "real" world to perform actions.


 * Once a clue about Gaia waking up has been found and validated by other players, we can hide it on "real" places. Two missions: one to go and put it there, one to get it back afterwards. (and maybe another one, with a picture of the person putting the clue there - possible verification by having to scan and post the article)
 * Flash mob: 50 people checkin on a given place (FB Places/Foursquare)
 * Take a video of you cleaning up a place (post &amp; review)

= Research & Development Department =

Developping or acquiring new technology or tools.


 * Suggesting new missions
 * Rating other players' missions' ideas
 * Implementing a given mission

= Central Security Department =

Computer & Internet security operation - like the NSA.


 * (R) Hack a petroleum/nuclear/etc company website to gather information
 * Gaia or a bunch of crazy eco-terrorists spread a virus. It surfaces from time to time, infecting websites, and then you have to go and try to clean it... The tension would come from the fact that you may not always know when it's going to surface, and since the virus spreads from website to website while you're trying to clean it, you have to act fast.
 * Also, there could also be a multi-player variant of that game - with some players being able to detect where the virus is, others would be able to clean it, some others would create new antiviruses when it mutates...
 * The virus cleaning mission can be associatedto the fact of 'cleaning' (equivalent of scanning) 5 web sites that contain a specific tag. This tag can be generated out of a list of tags related to the environment.
 * Hidding from government agencies. And possibly another multiplayer mission: the government agency is trying to hack WWF.com - it needs at least 2000 players who go on WWF.com and click "protect" to divert the hacking attempt...
 * Retaliate by infecting some web sites that belong to the external threat.
 * Resource gathering - Hack web sites (maybe find another word than hack) in order to let the organization gain control over it.

= Division & Board =

The department that supervises the activity of all other departments (maybe can only be seen after a certain level?). It also includes the internal investigation, accounting and legal personnel.


 * On missions done for other departments that asks the player to validate actions of other players : division sometimes inserts fake pictures (for instance someone throwing some oil in a river...) to test how the player reacts to those, and act accordingly if he validates the pictures that he should have denunciated. It can be a way for the organization to check if the player can be trusted.

= External organization =

Actions that other organizations could ask the player


 * Fake environmental mission : we can imagine that a faction is acting against the interests of the organization that recruits the player, and for some reason tries to sabotage the actions of the latter. This faction could pose as an environmental organization, contact the player and asks him to perform actions that might seem pro-environment but in fact aren't. For instance support (on facebook, forums, ...) a product that seems pro-environment but that in fact contains an ingredient that is toxic for humans/nature/... This could make the organization that initially contacted the player question his loyalty and trigger some new missions.

=Ideas to engage with existing communities=

Fun missions

 * Obama / whitehouse.com ( => posted on Digg ?)
 * Hack the republican party website
 * Expose controversial measures by asking the player to do it as if he was a FBI/CIA agent
 * Afghanistan war
 * combat videos http://helpers.hackit.cx/video/test3.html
 * WikiLeaks http://wardiary.wikileaks.org/
 * War stories http://www.esquire.com/features/afghanistan-war-stories-0809
 * Google Maps
 * Korengal valley story and map


 * Y-Combinator
 * Player recruited by Paul Graham to analyze startups (submit startup & retreive from http://searchyc.com/submissions/%2522review+my+startup%2522?sort=by_date )


 * Other potential places:
 * Digg /Reddit
 * Slashdot
 * YouTube
 * Something with cats/dogs videos? http://www.aspca.org/news/photo-contest/

Serious propaganda

 * Missions Ideas/WikiLeaks
 * Free software
 * Spread Firefox
 * Creative Commons / April (Mission posted on Slashdot & LinuxFR?)
 * Wikipedia
 * Edit a page?
 * Grade a page for inclusion in Wikipedia 1.0? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/Assessment
 * Task forces - for videogames? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Video_games
 * OLPC - http://blog.laptop.org/


 * Mettre en scene Facebook

=> europe-ecologie.net
 * Nature / ecology
 * Nature Preservancy
 * Email US senator - http://www.nature.org/initiatives/protectedareas/support/art32348.html
 * Plant a tree - http://www.plantabillion.org/
 * Adopt an acre - http://adopt.nature.org/
 * The Cove documentary - Save the dolphins
 * Video of massacre http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHnXyxo5NhY
 * Petitions http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/724/210/624/ http://apps.facebook.com/causes/petitions/252 http://www.thepetitionsite.com/3/stop-the-dolphin-slaughter
 * Watch the movie http://thecovemovie.com/


 * Health
 * Health Map


 * Examples of missions:
 * Find 1000 websites that talk about the website and unlock a video/prize
 * Put a poster on your street about XXX and take a picture of it

= Annex: Concepts =

Validating other players missions

 * A mission for a player can be to validate missions performed by other players.
 * For instance, let's take the 'nature preservation' missions. Players posts a picture of themselves recycling the garbage. The validation mission for the player here could be to validate the pictures posted by four other players.
 * Or verifying that a comment was correctly posted, or a video, etc.

Finding elements on the Internet

 * Find an information and provide it on the chat in order to validate the mission. It can be a text, an image, a link towards a page or a video, etc. (Xav: actually, we can monitor the current page or even the next link the user will click on - so for most of this we don't need the player to copy&paste things in the chat)

Performing an action on a web page

 * Either a 'real' action (for instance 'like', 'share', post a comment, a video, etc)
 * Or an ingame action, like hack/scan. Currently these actions bear 'hack' and 'scan' name but we can imagine to keep the same mechanism but adapt the name to different types of missions. For instance, for the external threats missions, the 'scan' could be renamed 'clean' and would let the player clean the web site from the virus that infected it.

Video chat

 * adding to our current chat system the use of video for some of our missions. The NGO person would give the mission to the player through videos, which could definitely increase the affective bond with our game - you also had ideas on how to make it easy to produce and not heavy in order to preserve the user exp fluidity
 * give the possibility to add in the videos some clues about the missions, or some elements that add to the background. The video is still about the contact from the department who is briefing us on a mission, but we can use this video to add some more value on top of it.
 * Let’s for instance imagine that 2 departments of the NGO are in competition and one of them asks us to find some information about the other – we could browse the video from the department we are enquiring and find a poster on the background of the speaker, of a physical sign, or a paper on a desk, anything, that could give us a hint of the information we’re trying to give to the other department. They were using this in In Memoriam 2 and it worked very well.
 * We could also use the video to have the speaker show some elements that can be useful for a mission, a sound, a picture, etc (with a pretext of security for not sending it through email for example).
 * To push the idea further, we could have videos of missions where the speaker is suddenly kidnapped/murdered/does something weird, that could be cool storyline wise.
 * we would have more flexibility and immersion if the content is text based while we see the contact on the video who is typing, a bit like chat roulette if you’ve tried it. Rather than something more like a war game where the players listen to the brief of his officer on a video (as we can see in sci-fi movies and games). I’m not sure about this yet, but I thought it’s worth noting this comment.