Terrarium
An alternate reality game for incoming University of Chicago students, combining live broadcasts, multimedia puzzles, and cooperative play to explore climate futures.
- My role
- Game Design Intern Sound Design Intern
- Timeline
- June–October 2019
- Team
- University of Chicago — Fourcast Lab
In the summer of 2019, incoming University of Chicago students were invited to make contact with a future they might still be able to change. A device called the SPORE connected them to a research facility in 2049, where a future version of Professor Patrick Jagoda was trapped in a bunker. Although he could examine the room and handle its objects, making sense of what he found depended on help from people thirty years in the past.
That collaboration unfolded through Twitch chat, where players collectively took on the role of TERI, an artificial intelligence guiding the person on the other side of the screen. Helping a character solve the room’s puzzles brought them closer to activating the SPORE, which opened a connection to another possible future and someone new who needed their help. Over the summer, this journey through four worlds led into an orientation-week design challenge, inviting students to consider how their own ideas might change the futures they had encountered.
I joined Fourcast Lab as an intern working on game design and sound design, contributing to a project that explored the possibilities of transmedia gaming and serious games. By bringing live performance, puzzles, and other media into a shared experience, Terrarium sought to encourage meaningful engagement with climate change beyond the game itself. I wanted what players learned to stay with them, shaping how they thought about climate change in their daily lives long after the experience had ended.
Terrarium later received the 2020 IndieCade award for best Location Based and Live Play Design.
Inside the broadcasts
The broadcasts worked as inverse escape rooms, with a remote audience helping a live performer, known as the Anchor, find a way out of the room. A clue uncovered during one transmission might occupy players long after it ended, as they worked together to find an answer. Bringing that answer back to the next broadcast let them guide the performer’s next move and see their progress reflected in the room.
World 1
The first world filled the bunker with familiar objects whose connections were initially unclear: music albums, food containers, recipe cards, game cartridges, and locked bags. Clues passed between the physical set and material that players could investigate online.
One sequence used Super Nintendo cartridges, with the performer reading out game titles and the characters written on their backs. Between broadcasts, players alphabetized the titles and assembled those characters into a YouTube address. The linked video contained clips of different games; identifying each game and using its clip length to select a letter produced a lock combination. Players brought the answer back to the next live broadcast, where the performer could test it.
Another chain used Minecraft food values to point players toward a website and a downloadable Minecraft world. Digging beneath that world revealed an image of Earth; players returned to the broadcast with a word to try on a physical lock. This gave activity between broadcasts a visible consequence in the room. An answer unlocked an object, which revealed another piece of the story and brought the performer closer to the SPORE.
World 2
The second world placed a silent, isolated survivor in a hazmat suit. Symbols appeared over the broadcast image, visible to viewers but invisible to the character. Players had to direct the performer’s body into the right positions, using sound cues to tell whether they were close. The next episode complicated the task: several shapes had to be made at once, using the head, torso, and legs.
Here, cooperation was built into who could perceive and do what. The audience could see the target; the performer could supply the movement. Progress depended on translating between the two.
World 3
In the third world, an Anchor named Darling hid from a totalitarian regime known as the Veilers while working with players to calibrate another AI and reach the SPORE. The process began with a timed climate quiz, then moved into ethical discussions and listening to Darling’s story. Each stage asked something different of the audience, connecting their knowledge of climate change to questions about responsibility and their relationship with someone living through its consequences.
One discussion asked what people in 2019 owed those living in 2049, and how far an individual should change their habits in response to a global problem. The Veilers complicated that conversation: they had found ways to feed a large population while taking away personal rights and freedoms. Players were asked whether a system like this should be changed from within or dismantled, and whether they would reveal Darling’s location to authorities who described them as a criminal. The imagined future gave students a setting for considering contemporary dilemmas, including the limits of individual climate action and the promises of security used to justify authoritarian power—open questions for participants to reason through together.
Those questions also became part of solving the puzzles. Projected ciphers pointed to University of Chicago locations that served as decoys for the Veilers, but signs that messages were being intercepted made players question whether sharing a correct answer could put Darling in danger. By then, Darling had described sheltering resistance members and losing others to detention, and players had offered encouragement as they prepared to activate the SPORE. The possibility of surveillance gave an ordinary game action—reporting a solution—consequences for a person they had come to know. It invited students to consider how information can expose others to harm, and what responsibility comes with deciding to share it.
World 4
The fourth world turned the bunker into a game show. Eleven contestants wore numbered paper bags and blue coveralls. TERI introduced an algorithm for selecting an Anchor and asked the audience to help decide who would remain in the room.
The challenges mixed ordinary party-game formats with the history of a damaged world. Contestants moved between areas of the room to answer questions about their lives. In a word game, viewers proposed constraints and watched contestants move toward TRUE or FALSE. A later round used charades to communicate the titles of novels about possible futures.
The audience had already voted two contestants out when the remaining three took over the microphone on September 5, sharing their histories and asking for help. TERI tried to restore order and proceed with another elimination, but this time the viewers refused to vote. The game show appeared to break down. This moment gave the audience a way to challenge the rules themselves: they could question why helping one person had to involve excluding another, and whether they should accept the authority of the system presenting that choice.
The next broadcast followed the consequences of that refusal. TERI was absent, but the contestants were still trapped, and players’ attempts to open the door through chat commands failed. Rejecting the game’s rules left them with a responsibility to the people caught inside them. The contestants urged the audience to carry that concern into their own present, taking action in 2019 that might help prevent the climate crises and social conditions behind futures like this one. They pointed to the Futures Design Challenge as the next step after the broadcasts, connecting the audience’s concern for these fictional people to the possibility of changing their own world.
Climate quests beyond the broadcasts
Alongside the broadcasts, climate quests invited students to connect with Terrarium’s imagined futures through continued creative experiences. In Fungy, players became a mushroom trying to persuade others to act on climate change; a follow-up quest invited them to rethink the game’s dialogue, world, or rules themselves. Other quests asked students to map environmental organizations or create artwork in response to climate change. Some quests, above all, were meant to bring players together. In Caring for Kalanchoe, students cared for a shared virtual plant, discussing their options and making a case for how to look after it each day.
Helping incoming students develop friendships and connections before arriving on campus was just as important to us as giving them room to explore the questions the broadcasts raised. By offering different ways to participate, we hoped students could follow their interests and discover common ground with future classmates. Working on these experiences reinforced something I value in game design: giving players enough direction to begin, while leaving room for their curiosity and creativity to shape what follows.
Designing for cooperation, diversity, and accessibility
Encouraging cooperation and collaboration
For me, cooperation meant designing situations in which students had reasons to listen to one another and contribute to a shared experience. We wanted them to feel like active participants in Terrarium, with ideas that could influence what happened next. Working together also offered a way to build friendships before arriving at college, and to find collaborators for the Futures Design Challenge.
The broadcasts made that participation visible: students could suggest a course of action through Twitch chat and watch the Anchor respond. We discussed how to make those exchanges feel more personal, including responding to playful questions and making room for speculation about the story. Our role as interns could also extend to informal conversations that helped students feel comfortable engaging with us and with one another. I wanted that sense of invitation to reach beyond the players who were quickest to find an answer.
Supporting puzzle-solving required a balance between guidance and discovery. Early players sometimes needed help recognizing what to pursue next. As they worked through the separate album and Minecraft puzzles, we discussed how to guide transitions between tasks and make the stages within each puzzle clearer. We discussed when a nudge could restore momentum and when to trust players to work things out. The question I cared about was how to help a group move forward while preserving their sense that the discovery belonged to them.
We also questioned whether the activities we proposed actually needed collaboration. For one branching-video concept, we considered giving players access to different paths and clues so they would have to exchange what they found. Simply putting everyone in a shared chat would not create that interdependence if one person could still solve the whole puzzle alone. Elsewhere, proposals for sharing early project ideas and giving feedback aimed to help students discover potential teammates. Across these approaches, we were looking for ways that contributing to the game could also become an introduction to another person.
Making room for everyone
Designing for an entire incoming class meant considering people with different cultural backgrounds, upbringings, financial circumstances, and life experiences. Students would bring different academic interests and levels of familiarity with games, as well as different abilities and access needs, including disabilities. Our aim was to make participation possible across that range. For me, that meant questioning what an activity assumed about a player’s confidence, resources, or available time before treating those assumptions as part of the rules.
One concern was how to include students who were less comfortable speaking up. In a proposed discussion game, we explored letting players vote in support of ideas while the group developed a shared response. Those votes could give quieter participants a way to express a position without competing for speaking time. We also considered contributions beyond solving puzzles, including research, asking questions, presenting ideas, and knowing when to ask for help. I valued giving students ways to recognize their own strengths and appreciate what someone else brought to the group.
Keeping barriers to entry low also meant thinking about cost and access to materials. When considering a moss-based activity, we asked whether students could actually find moss in their neighborhoods—a question about access that also mattered when imagining how students might participate in the broader terrarium activity. There, we considered options that did not require physically building one: drawing or painting a terrarium, creating a blueprint or digital model, or imagining a day in the life of someone living inside it. These were proposed ways to engage with the idea through different resources and interests, rather than a specific replacement for finding moss. Alongside clearer submission requirements and shorter early activities with feedback, these discussions pushed us to question what we were asking students to have, know, or do before they could take part.
Time was another constraint. Students had summer jobs, commitments in their communities, and friends they were preparing to leave behind. We worried that someone who missed a live broadcast might feel they had fallen behind and stop participating, which prompted discussion about timing and the demands of keeping up. That reinforced a principle I want to carry into future work: participation should accommodate different circumstances, and making an experience welcoming requires attention to the small expectations that can quietly exclude someone.
Futures Design Challenge
The Futures Design Challenge was a capstone for both the students and our design team. For students, it was an opportunity to shape an open-ended project from the outset: choosing a climate problem they cared about, deciding what they could accomplish together, and developing their own response. A creative work could sit alongside a technical prototype, a scientific investigation, or a proposal for social change. Over the summer, I had seen students become invested in the topic and develop ideas of their own; the challenge gave them room to pursue those interests and share what they had learned.
For us, it brought together the values we had tried to put into practice throughout Terrarium. Working in small teams gave students a shared purpose around which to collaborate and build friendships before their first day of class. Faculty mentors and members of our Fourcast team supported them as they prepared to present at the Logan Center, connecting them with people and resources they could turn to as they began college. We hoped that taking ownership of a project would also help their engagement with climate change outlast the game, carrying its questions into their studies and daily lives. The challenge was our way of giving that continued engagement somewhere to begin.
I mentored the team behind Boyerbot, a conversational assistant named after Dean Boyer, then Dean of the College. They imagined a bot that could offer climate information while engaging users in more philosophical questions about the subject, and coded a demo to explore that idea. Studying computer science myself and preparing to begin my master’s, I especially enjoyed following how they translated their ambitions into a working demonstration.
Getting to meet the team in person, watch them demo Boyerbot live, and share in their excitement was one of my favorite parts of the experience. They were just beginning college, and this was an early opportunity to present their work in a more professional setting. I was glad to be there for the little things too, like helping one of my mentees tie his tie before the presentation—it was rewarding to look out for the team as a peer mentor, supporting them in their work and as they found their footing in college.