The Guardian - Investigate your MP's Expenses

In June 2009 a scandal in Great Britain was uncovered by several Newpaper businesses upon discovering several documents of members of government and MP's expenses  being misused and costing tax payers tens of thousands of pounds for their leisurely items and hidden charges for unearned money.

Of course this encouraged an outraged and the general public demanded the publication of documents displaying the expenses and claims of MP's and officials.
But the government seemed to provided this information in the most unfortunate way possible, each of the documents were provided as scanned in images rather than the documentation files themselves, making them impossible to cross reference digitally for any abnormalities or inappropriate use of expenses.
Meaning that the process of going through the million of documents would be a long and arduous task.
Some dubbed this "ploy" as "BlackoutGate" and as "The biggest cover up to date".

The Guardian (One of the newspapers involved in exposing this scandal.) enlisted

the assistance of Simon Willison, an accomplished, London-Based Software

Developer who compiled all of the documents into an easily accessible database.

Following a set of rules and guidelines when going through and investigating these

documents had to be followed extensively to ensure no mistakes to be made and in

just 3 days 20,000 players had managed to analyse 170,000 documents affiliated

with this scandal.

Jane McGonigal - World Without Oil

World Without Oil (WWO) is an alternate reality game (ARG) created to call attention to, spark dialogue about, plan for and engineer solutions to a possible near-future global oil shortage, post peak oil. It was the creation of San Jose game writer and designer Ken Eklund, and ARG veterans Jane McGonigal.

World Without Oil combined elements of an alternate reality game with those of a serious game. The game sketched out the overarching conditions of a realistic oil shock, then called upon players to imagine and document their lives under those conditions.

Compelling player stories and ideas were incorporated into the official narrative, posted daily. Players could choose to post their stories as videos, images or blog entries, or to phone or email them to the WWO gamemasters. The game's central site linked to all the player material, and the game's characters documented their own lives, and commented on player stories, on a community blog and individual blogs, plus via IM, chat, Twitter and other media.

The World Without Oil game asked players to imagine a world reeling from a sudden oil shortage, describe how the crisis is unfolding where they live, and work together on simple and practical ways to adapt.

By playing it out in a serious way, the game aimed to apply collective intelligence and imagination to the problem in advance, and create a record that has value for educators, policymakers, and the common people to help anticipate the future and prevent its worst outcomes. In sum, World Without Oil invited people to, per its slogan, “Play it before you live it."

Jane McGonigal - Gaming Can Make a Better World

http://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_better_world.html




This is the TED Talk presented by Jane McGonigal, she goes into her views of how Gaming is a possibility to develop and harness the skills of Young People and Gamers and convert thier efforts and energy to more pressing issues and problems.

She explains her views and the aspects to how players have spent all this time creating key skills in life from playing games unknowingly. Jane then displays her own games that she has created called Alternate Reality Games.