If you follow the field at all, you will already have heard of Evoke, a World Bank-funded game set in 2020, when ecocatastrophes of various kinds are in progress. Ostensibly, its purpose is to crowdsource solutions to global problems, with 'winners' appearing at a World Bank event later this year to pitch their 'solutions.' It's not much of a game qua game; unlike traditional ARGs, there's no prescripted solution to puzzles, so it's more a chatterblog about global issues, which is mildly interesting in its own right, of course.

Enter Katharine Neal, an occasional commenter here who was, not incidentally, part of the team that developed Escape from Woomera, a game satirizing Australia's policy of incarcerating political refugees.

In response to McGonigal's ARG, Neal has created one of her own -- Invoke, wherein your mission is to "whitewash the World Bank's reputation" by playing. It, too, is not much of a game -- again, mostly a chatterblog about the weekly "missions" posted in the form of a nicely-drawn comic.

Unlike McGonigal's game, however, Invoke is pointed, nasty, and quite funny.

invoke is a parody of and response to evoke, an alternate reality game - as in it’s designed specifically to prompt the player to take action beyond the input and output of the digital game world - designed by jane mcgonigal about saving africa, commissioned by the world bank, an organization that exists to (and has historically been very successful at) fuck over the “third world” and steal all their resources.

but here’s the really great thing about invoke: by responding to evoke’s challenge of addressing real world problems with creative solutions (by creating a parallel experience intended to generate discussion of evoke’s sponsorship, motives and effectiveness where there was previously very little), invoke is essentially a legit solution to the game of evoke.