Operation C.Z.A.R: corporate zombie active resistance — an alternate reality game campaign on undergraduate transition from school to work.

Abstract

“Operation C.Z.A.R”, short for Corporate Zombie Active Resistance, is a strategic communications campaign designed as a five-week Alternate Reality Game (ARG) undertaken by four final-year students from Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University. The first student-led initiative in Asia targeted undergraduates from NUS, NTU and SMU aged 19 to 25, with the objective of enabling them to properly manage the school-to-work transition. The multi-dimensional campaign builds on nascent frameworks by HPB and MCYS in this respect, instead of adopting tried-and-tested means of conveying work-life harmony strategies to the incumbent workforce. In a narrative driven by fictional elements, the ARG manifested through gamification on offline (98.7FM, guerrilla events etc.) and online (social media, websites etc.) platforms. It succeeded in raising awareness of the means available for an undergraduate to manage school-to-work transition, evident from a pre-and-post campaign survey. The campaign has been featured as a case study on industry publication ‘Campaign Singapore’, an offshoot of ‘Campaign Asia’. This paper discusses research on ARG and audience participatory methods that steered the campaign direction, strategies employed to achieve campaign objectives, an evaluation of the team’s efforts and valuable lessons the students gained from the experience.