Christine Peterson passes along this news from the quarterly update of the Institute for the Future (IFTF) as something worth considering: “Foresight members and Nanodot readers may wish to join this collaborative forecasting effort.” The IFTF announced their First Massively Multiplayer Forecasting Platform (MMFG):
MMFGs are collaborative, open-source simulations of imagined future scenarios. Designed to address real world problems by harnessing the wisdom of crowds, IFTF’s new MMFG platform launches with multiple games this fall that invite diverse global groups of people to contribute to futures research through games. Unlike predictions markets where answers fall within a finite range of outcomes, the Institute has created MMFGs to gain insight into situations where the outcome is unknown.
The first game in this series launched on October 6. Superstruct focuses on life in the year 2019.
Superstruct invites players to imagine life in 2019 and to document and record how they, their families, local communities, or extended social networks might respond to a catastrophic population collapse. Beginning today players can register at www.superstructgame.org. Six-weeks of global gameplay will begin on Monday, October 6, 2008.
About the Game:
Set in the grim future of 2019, Superstruct begins with the findings of a fictional supercomputer that, after a year-long analysis, predicts the extinction of the human population in 23 years. A potentially terminal combination of five so-called “super-threats,” which represent the collision of environmental, economic, and social risks, are causing massive disruptions of global society. The existing structures of human civilization—from families and language to corporate society and technological infrastructures—just aren’t enough. Superstruct is played on forums, blogs, videos, wikis, and other familiar online spaces. We show you the world as it might look in 2019. You show us what it’s like to live there. Bring what you know and who you know, and we’ll all figure out how to make 2019 a world we want to live in.
“Superstruct is mass collaboration wrapped in a high-stakes, challenging game environment that will appeal to gamers, but also to creative thinkers of all ages and types,” said McGonigal. “By harnessing the thinking and input of thousands, or millions, of minds, research shows that we can tackle massive problems faster and find tenable solutions.”
—Jim
