In this ARG experience, players are tasked with saving the world from a mysterious dust that has knocked out all adults on the planet. Players will follow the story of a group of teenagers visiting the Kennedy Space Center during the time of the dust’s mysterious appearance.

These players will use their mobile devices to do tasks, such as scanning adults in their lives to gather data, analyze the scientific data they collect to find the source of the dust, and formulate solutions to the varied problems that will arise as the story progresses.

DUST ran throughout the spring of 2015 and has been developed for a number of educational settings (e.g. schools, museums, after school programs, libraries).

More About Dust

“When the dust falls, will you?” This is the tagline that introduced our audience to our game, and served as an invitation to young learners to take on a challenging series of tasks related to nothing less than saving humanity. DUST follows the story of a group of diverse young people who are visiting a NASA research facility to watch a once in a lifetime meteor shower. However, as the rocks streak across the sky, they begin to release a mysterious dust, and at the same time adults across the world begin to collapse.

Our players followed along with the teens at the Kennedy Space Center as they answered a number of questions: did the dust cause the collapse? how long do the adults have left to live? how can we understand and begin to fix this terrible catastrophe? Throughout the game we asked our players to take scans of collapsed adults in their lives using a mobile phone application (and a little imagination), analyze scientific data to find the source of the meteors, and formulate solutions to problems as diverse as broken telecommunication equipment to decrypting a message contained in alien DNA.

The game ran throughout the spring of 2015, and we have developed a replayable version of DUST which may be used in a number of educational settings (e.g. schools, museums, after school programs, libraries) in order to expand the scope of the original ARG, and to share DUST’s learning potential with students across the world.