Speculation

"N. Katherine Hayles is the James B. Duke Professor of Literature, Duke University. Patrick Jagoda is an associate professor of English at the University of Chicago. Patrick LeMieux is an artist, media theorist, game designer, and assistant professor in the Cinema and Digital Media Program at UC Davis where he co-directs the Alt-Ctrl Lab." 

"Speculation is part alternate reality game (ARG), part hypertextual novel, part ludic archive produced by N. Katherine Hayles, Patrick Jagoda, and Patrick LeMieux which bears witness to and playfully performs the inaccessible scales and speeds of contemporary finance capital. The game begins with a dystopian story of a global financial collapse some time in the near future following the subprime mortgage crisis, the Wall Street bailout, and the emergence of the Occupy movement. In the world of Speculation the Euro has depreciated and the Eurozone has collapsed. An oligarchy of eight corporations offer to bailout the Euro giving them control over the world's monetary systems. Out of this consolidation, a mysterious rogue algorithm emerges. Speculation is a game in which form and content mirror each other: the fragmented, referential and often enigmatic processes of financial derivatives and stock trading are expressed through the distributed, multimodal narrative forms of an ARG. The production of fiction as a literary genre and the production of what Marx called 'fictitious capital' are entwined in Speculation. Distributed in pieces across multiple platforms and physical locations, the game features a range of activities from site specific live events and geocaching to the creation of collaborative creative writing projects to the use of strange encryption technologies and playful puzzles embedded within an expansive webring." -- from Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 3