Just received a note from Jane McGonigal about her ARG World Without Oil, and it's well worth re-iterating and checking out the work towards a solution on Unfiction.com, because it's a pretty interesting project - it was mentioned in passing when GSW covered the SF Weekly article on Jane, but we didn't really focus on it.

Jane explains that World Without Oil is "...funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and it’s the first alternate reality game to harness the collective intelligence of gamers to address a real world problem (oil dependence!)... In the first two weeks, we’ve had 1500 people from around the world (including soldiers in Iraq!) contribute original content to the game (videos, photos, web comics, blog posts, etc.) and over 35,000 people play."

What I found particularly notable is that there's an Unfiction messageboard thread which isn't directly solving the problems of the ARG - but rather, talking about the issues of alternative power, with commentary like this: "Until we build more nuclear, hydroelectric, geothermal, solar, wind, wave, etc. power generation facilities, fuel-cells are not the answer to our problems." So people are thinking about the problem - which is the entire point of this exercise.