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.
Image courtesy of Institute
for the Future
But this isn't just a chance for gamers to flirt with the dark edge of disaster; they'll also be participating in a cutting-edge experiment that tries to harness the wisdom of crowds for a higher purpose. Superstruct is what the institute calls the world's first "massively multiplayer forecasting game." The Institute for the Future doesn't like to put it this way, but it's essentially trying to use crowdsourcing to predict the future.
The Palo Alto-based institute doesn't have a problem with the crowdsourcing lingo; distributing creative work to the masses is all the rage these days. It's the idea that the institute tries to predict the future that raises hackles. While the non-profit institute does keep itself afloat largely by selling its 10-year forecasts to corporations who are very interested in what the future may hold (and what it augers for their brands), institute employees say that forecasting is a very different thing than prediction.
"Future forecasting is all about testing strategies—it's like a wind tunnel," says Jamais Cascio, one of the game directors for Superstruct. "We create scenarios with different kind of challenges that may come to pass, and you can test your strategy." Now, instead of having that wind tunnel be designed and constructed by what Cascio calls "our little hermetic cabal of thinkers," the institute is handing the toolbox to the unruly mob. For a think tank that has taken pride in doling out expert opinions, giving control to the multitudes is a dramatic step.
The idea of using the masses' collective intelligence to peer into the future isn't new; prediction markets (modeled after stock markets) already exist to let people bet on the possible success of presidential candidates, sports teams, and Hollywood blockbusters. But such prediction markets can only get you so far, says Jane McGonigal, another of the game's directors, because they can only ask questions in which the entire range of outcomes has already been determined. "We want to ask questions where we have no idea of the range of outcomes," McGonigal says. In Superstruct, the players will be presenting their ideas on how to cope with the crisis of 2019, and McGonigal hopes they'll come up with solutions and outcomes that she never imagined. "That's why the tagline for the game is 'Invent the Future,'" she says. "Because the future doesn't just happen, somebody makes it."
