Polar Bear Plunge
- Brand
- San Diego Zoo
- Year
- 2010
- Objective
- Other
- Industry
- Other
- Mechanic
- Puzzle
- Platform
- Web
- Agency
- RED Interactive Agency
Objective
The zoo needed to draw visitors to its newly rebuilt polar bear habitat and turn a distant environmental issue — Arctic warming — into something people felt was tied to their own daily choices, using the exhibit's reopening as the hook.
Solution
You land in an icy Arctic scene where a map of sea ice serves as the campaign's running tally: pick a personal pledge — recycle old electronics, wash clothes in cold water, switch to energy-efficient appliances — and your own patch of ice grows on the map while the pledge posts straight to your Facebook wall. From there you can wander into a handful of short games that show how a polar bear actually survives and what melting ice does to it, run your own footprint through a carbon calculator, check the real-time temperature reading from Barrow, Alaska, and switch over to a live camera feed of the zoo's actual bears in their enclosure before logging off.
- 1
The experience opens on a Flash microsite built as an Arctic-themed hub, where players choose among four paths: make a pledge, grow the ice, play a set of mini-games, or watch a live camera feed of the zoo's bears.
- 2
In the pledge section, players select a real-world eco-action to commit to, such as recycling an old computer, printer, or phone, or choosing to wash laundry in cold water or replace an old appliance with an energy-efficient one.
- 3
Submitting a pledge triggers visual feedback on screen: a new chunk of Arctic ice visibly grows as a reward for the commitment.
- 4
The pledge also posts automatically to the player's Facebook wall, pushing the action out of the microsite and into their social feed.
- 5
Each player's ice chunk joins a shared, growing mass built from every pledge submitted site-wide, which had accumulated 7,520 pieces by the time the site went dark.
- 6
A separate games section runs players through a series of short mini-games depicting a polar bear's life in the Arctic and how climate change affects that environment.
- 7
Within that section, an on-screen readout displays real-time temperature data pulled from Barrow, Alaska, tying the game world to actual current Arctic conditions.
- 8
A carbon footprint calculator lets players tally their own environmental impact and then offers a way to offset it.
- 9
A live-camera section streams real polar bears from the zoo's enclosure, linking the online experience directly to the physical exhibit; in the archived version this feed no longer functions.
