Jane McGonigal dances

Someone in Superstruct just linked this video of Mastar in Abu Dhabai.

Frankly, I can no longer tell what's Superstruct, and what's real life.

Superstruct is live.

Superstruct is going live within the next 24 hours or so.

For a glimpse of me in 2019, start following Tihuanaco Techno.

Applied Materials have another eco-educational card game.

I'm thinking of proposing one as a Superstruct.

Superthreats go live!

Superstruct starts now. Go watch 'em!

The Archers is clearly playing Superstruct. In today's episode their alt.money initiative (the Ambridge TEA) is under attack from "griefers" writing spoof IOUs and endangering the Swap Club and the whole Transition Town initiative.

Synchronicity or what!

Some quick(ish) news about a few changes that are going on, spread over a number of posts :

News 1 : Superstruct

In the next two months or so, I'm going to be heavily involved in Superstruct as an assistant game-master, "community leader" in the "Outlaw Planet" scenario. What that means is that I'll be writing somewhere (not 100% sure where yet) in the role of myself in the year 2019.

By then we'll have had another 10 years advance in ubicomp (the device swarm gets faster, cheaper, denser.) The swarm will become a focus of conflict between "legitimate" authorities (who would obviously like to use it as an instrument to protect and promote the nation-state) and anti-state, 4GW, criminal and general miscreant groups, who for a variety of different reasons are trying to use the swarm destructively.

This conflict is played out against a backdrop of four other super-threats : a peak-oil related energy-crisis; a virulent new respiratory disease with no known cure; an increase in mass-migration as people flee wars, extreme weather and other natural problems; and a break-down in the current food supply-chain (due to energy and environmental problems).

The task of the players is to tell stories about themselves and their lives, 10 years in the future, while inventing new social institutions (purposeful collaborations between previously non-collaborating groups, that we call "superstructs") to help humanity cope with the catastrophic results of the combination and interactions between these threats.

Having been doing some preparatory collaboration with other members of the Superstruct team, and going through our orientation meetings today, I can see that this is actually going to take up a lot of time and energy. (More than I originally thought.) So, expect to see lighter than usual blogging from me, or engagement in other projects (both here or on Smart Disorganized, Platform Wars, OPTIMAES etc. etc.)

(Apart, that is, from a collaborative project I have in the works with Zby, and a couple of outstanding things that are basically done and I just need to write up.)

Jane McGonigal: I just got rabbit-holed by my own game.

People are starting to play Superstruct! Even though we haven't officially launched yet. (I'm writing my first scenarios)

Oli asks wrt Superstruct :

Have I missed something?

It looks like this 'massively multiplayer' game is basically a themed blog where people 'play' by playfully imagining the future.

Which is clearly my cue to say a bit more.

No, you pretty much got it. It's "role-playing" in the good old fashioned "use your imagination" sense rather than the video-game-inna-dungeon sense.

The assistant game-master role is a kind of moderator / collator. Somewhere between stimulating discussion by starting forum threads, finding the best posts on the subject, highlighting them, and bringing them together into a wiki to create a more intelligible permanent record. There's also some giving of feedback to players in the form of rewards for "good ideas" or "good play". Which is obviously going to be subjective (although based on more than one moderator's assessment.)

Oli's also right that this is coming from the science-fictional wing of futurology; the super-threats are deliberately played-large. Think "scenario planning" not "forecasting"; we're not aiming for the most accurate prediction of the near future but to stimulate the most creative thinking about it. The fascination is in the new institutions that the players (representing humanity) have to invent to help cope with these threats. The aim is quite serious, to use a game-like format to gather a wide-range of opinions and suggestions, which the Institute of the Future will then "reduce" into more accessible form.

For me there are two reasons I'm excited to participate :

1) the scenarios are obviously interesting in themselves. My personal expectations are not as apocalyptic as the game's, but I do think that peak-oil and the end of cheap-energy, climate change and the disruption of our food-production patterns, the break-down of the nation-state, and pervasive, non-state-controlled surveillance technologies and weapons, are almost inevitably coming in the next 20-40 years. I believe that new diseases and large scale migrations are quite possible.

So what are we going to do about them? Are we just going to carry on as normal until we crash into circumstances? Or can we start doing some planning at least?

2) The other interest is the method itself. How good are the internet and the social software tools we have at enabling constructive discussion and problem solving? Does this kind of "game" help? As you know I vary between enthusiastic boosterism and occasional crises of doubt.

I believe that the overall trend is good, but there's a need for new tools and styles of discussion. There's a danger of ignoring and talking past those you disagree with; you can destroy intelligent public discussion in a hail of FUD.

Here's a chance to work with people trying to apply the tools and the "game" milieu to this problem. Let's see how it works or how it can be made to do so.

As I see it, the game occupies an interesting position (assuming that we get the expected numbers of players). To gather information from larger groups of people you usually use something like a market (eg. a prediction market) or maybe large scale opinion polls or "market research". All of which reduce the information contribution of the individual dramatically. On the smaller scale you have journals that bring together papers by multiple researchers or reports with for or five authors.

Superstruct sits somewhere between : there's an attempt to systematically gather ideas from an order of magnitude of 1000s using a mixture of human selection (organized in a fairly flat hierarchy) with some automation (the social software tools) and some game-mechanics to structure the contributions. I don't know how it will work out, and I suspect the organizers don't either. But it will be fun finding out.

All readers of this blog are invited (and positively encouraged) to join in, of course.

Disclosure, this is actually a (modestly) paid gig (ie. being a game-master). Although clearly I wouldn't have applied if I hadn't believed it was interesting.

w00t!

It's official. I'm going to be an assistant game-master in Superstruct, the internet "role-playing" game run by The Institute for the Future.

More soon ....