Superstruct Update: This Game Could Change Everything!
Ok, now that I’ve got your attention…
First, as timely and effective as Superstruct will be, this game will not change everything. No “one thing” will change everything! I actually intended the title as a little futurist humor (very little) in response to a post by Futurist, Speaker, and Writer Jamais Cascio. Click here to see what I mean. 
Second, since I last wrote about Superstruct, the game and its launch have been gaining more attention from the media. Here is an excerpt from a recent article appearing in Discover magazine, detailing the purpose and potential of this exciting online project:
It’s a warm September morning in the year 2019, and you snap on NPR’s Morning Edition to catch a few minutes of the news before biking off to work. But an older and wiser Steve Inskeep has grim news for you today. The Global Extinction Awareness System, a supercomputer that accurately predicted the extinction of red squirrels several years ago, has run the numbers for our own species through the computer, and our odds of survival aren’t good. According to GEAS, Homo sapiens may go extinct by the year 2042.
That’s the scenario that greets players in the forthcoming online game Superstruct, which is being run by the think tank Institute for the Future. Beginning on September 22nd, players will be invited to plunge into the troubled world of 2019, and to begin to work towards solutions that could buy our species a little more time on the planet. They’re forced to cope with five “super-threats” that are wearing down our civilization, including devastating outbreaks of a pandemic respiratory disease, climate refugees who have fled homelands made unlivable by global warming, and legions of hackers who exult in bringing down global information networks…
The team called the new game Superstruct because “society’s existing structures and organizations aren’t up to the incredible challenges facing us in the 21st century,” Vian says, and players will have to build new structures on top of the old. The threats the players will confront are based on the institute’s own research about how things could go horribly wrong for humans over the coming decades. “There are some scenarios out there that talk about the real threat of human extinction by the end of the century,” Vian says. “So the circumstances present in the game world are a little exaggerated, but it’s a plausible worst-case scenario.”
In Superstruct, players will bring their own personal knowledge and experiences to the table. “We don’t need everybody to be experts on how climate might change and how the economy might be impacted,” says McGonigal. “If you’re a teenaged girl, tell us how a teenaged girl would respond to this crisis. We need that personal intelligence from everybody.” The players will help imagine and document the world of 2019, and will work together to come up with solutions to the challenges that are presented throughout the six-week game. Cascio says that his highest hope is that the collaborating players will come up with innovative ideas that have applications here, in the real world of 2008. “The mass of ideas can become almost an epiphany engine,” he says.
Forecasting the Future May Be a Matter of Fun and Games, Discover, Eliza Strickland
I’ll be posting my first Superstruct scenario and strategies very soon – right here on my blog – as I am on the Superstruct Advisory Board for the “Outlaw Planet” scenario. In this scenario,
Of course, there are four other scenarios in the game, and you can take a quick look at the Superstruct site in the link above, request an email alert for the game launch (October 6th), and even try out a special advance mission. I hope you enjoy the story-line and Super Structure that begin to unfold for my particular scenario, as well as the others in the game, and I definitely hope that you will participate in game play to help develop solutions to very real problems now facing the human race!
UPDATE: Check out this post from Jamais Cascio on how Superstruct could elicit some “War of the Worlds” type responses from viewers, with IFTF playing the part of Orsen Wells, I assume. (Yeah, if anybody actually believes that aliens are attacking, don’t blame me!)
