World's First "Multiplayer Forecasting Game" Asks: What Would You Do If Humanity Has Only 23 Years Left?
by Kimberley D. Mok, Montreal, Canada on 07.16.08
Image: London in 2019? from Futurelab
In an increasingly unpredictable world besieged by melting ice-caps, earthquakes and floods, it’s not difficult to see the advantages of so-called scenario-thinking to help humanity quickly adapt to the vagaries of climate change. Take it one notch further, make it virtual, collective and collaborative, and you’ve got Superstruct, the world’s first “massive multiplayer forecasting game.”
Developed by the Palo Alto-based non-profit think tank Institute for the Future, it will launch on September 22 for six weeks. Superstruct is another addition to a line of recent “alternate-reality games” (ARGs), such as “World Without Oil” (WWO), which allow participants to use their “collective intelligence” to create solutions that can apply to real-world problems.
Like WWO’s motto to “play it before you live it,” Superstruct has a survivalist strategy behind it: ie. imagine the world as it is in 2019 and how we might tackle the problems we will face then. The game is also a race against time, based on a fictional year-long supercomputer simulation called Global Extinction Awareness System (GEAS), which predicts that homo sapiens has a “survival horizon” of a mere 23 years.
In addition to identifying humanity’s survival horizon, the GEAS models also determined five environmental, economic, and socially-derived “super-threats” which will challenge the human species’ ability to survive.
Anyone can “superstruct”
Given these dismal (even if imagined) numbers, it makes sense that the creators of Superstruct would want to transform a rather ominous forecast into positive action. The game can be played by anyone on “forums, blogs, videos, wikis, and other familiar online spaces,” but what does “superstructing” mean exactly? According to their website:
Superstructing is what humans do. We build new structures on old structures. We build media on top of language and communication networks. We build communities on top of family structures. [..] Superstructing has allowed us to survive in the past and it will help us survive the super-threats. [..] The existing structures of human civilization—from families and language to corporate society and technological infrastructures—just aren’t enough. We need a new set of superstructures to rise above, to take humans to the next stage.
If you are familiar with massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) such as World of Warcraft and Everquest, then it is easy to see the powerful, large-scale potential of this kind of game for connecting, educating and re-inventing the future of the human species through the virtual world. It’s a puzzle, it’s a game, it’s our future lives – it can be whatever we can collectively imagine it to be. See the preliminaries here.
::Institute for the Future via Futurelab
Related Links on Alternate Reality Games
“World Without Oil”
Ten-Year Forecast (IFTF)
Serious Games: ARGs Challenging Us To Play A Better Future (blog)
Alternate Gaming Reality Network
Related Links on Scenario Thinking
Living In The Up-Down, Hot-Cold, Dry-Wet Future
Millennium EcoSystem Assessment
Water Crisis Scenarios For The US Southeast
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I better think about how the world should look like in whatever years we want. I like more to create visions about a better world.
Having these games could have a huge effect on people giving a insight to what truly happen, it would also serve to educate us. On the flip side playing these games could trivialise and see the real issues at stake be seen as just a game. www.aninconvnientblog.co.uk
I don't think humanity is doomed, so this article feels kind of stupid, but I'd promote a big black death to swallow most of humanity. That'd solve the problem, nice and easily.
Even if the kyoto protocol was enacted, and EVERYONE FOLLOWS the plan, the THEORY is that we would effect the global temperature about .07 deg. The question to ask is the harm that kyoto would be to our economy and your lifestyle(if you think $4 gas is bad watch out!!) is worth it based on theory?????? It is just another tax scam to take from rich countrys and give to poor countrys with the politicians taking a nice cut in the middle.
I remember back in the 80's they were saying 20 years left! Here we are and nothing has happened. I thinks it is all BS
I will only play it if it's hooked into WOPR and I can start a global thermonuclear war.