Monday 22nd saw the official launch of Superstruct, an online ‘game’ devised by the Institute For The Future, which aims to be the world’s first massively multiplayer forecasting exercise. Currently in preview mode, the game is due to be ’switched on’ on October 6th, but some of the responses to Superstruct’s scenarios already show the level of creativity that might be expected.

Superstruct presents a scenario set in 2019, in which the Global Extinction Awareness System (GEAS), a computer simulation that predicts the extinction of the planet’s species, has forecast 2042 as the year in which the human race dies out. According to the Superstruct press release, this forecast differs from previous doomsday predictions in that

“GEAS does not link this extinction to a single factor. No one disease or war or environmental hazard poses a sufficient danger to draw us to this conclusion. Instead, it is the combination of factors, each below the threshold necessary to put our survival at risk. These factors–which we are calling “super-threats”–reinforce each other in substantive ways, creating a set of conditions that we believe capable of ending the human experiment.”

The five superthreats © IFTF. Click for larger image

The superthreats will form the basis of the game – the idea is that players will use blogs, videos, social networking sites etc to imagine and discuss their lives in 2019 and how the threats have shaped those lives. Until the game is launched fully it’s difficult to know exactly how it will work, but the grander ambition is that players will work out solutions to the problems the threats pose, thus feeding into some of the Institute for the Future’s own forecasting work. The ITFT is careful to avoid talking about prediction however; speaking in Discover magazine Jamais Cascio, one of the game’s directors claims that:

” ‘Future forecasting is all about testing strategies – it’s like a wind tunnel’… 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.”

Whilst it’s clear what Cascio means, this view has to be balanced by what Superstruct actually presents to those who want to become involved. The five threats are titled Outlaw Planet, Power Struggle, Quarantine, Generation Exile and Ravenous, and are described as follows:

Outlaw Planet: “In 2019, the mobile internet and sensor networks we rely on to hold our societies together are being hacked, griefed, and gamed.”

Power Struggle: “In 2019, we’re all caught up in the ‘alternative fuel’ wars as the world fights over what will take the place of oil.”

Quarantine: “In 2019, Respiratory Distress Syndrome is here, and it’s not going anywhere. Outbreaks are just something we live with.”

Generation Exile: “In 2019, our neighbours are climate refugees and economic collapse victims who are swarming the planet, looking for a place to live.”

Ravenous: “In 2019, the food chain is broken. So we’re inventing new ways to feed ourselves.”

It is of course easy to criticise such scenarios, and given that they are set in the future there’s little a scenario’s author can do to ‘prove’ their accuracy. Personally I think they are pretty interesting, with the right mix of present-day relevance and future possibility. But it’s quite clear that players of the game are not, as Cascio would have it, designing and constructing a wind tunnel. At most they are deciding what goes in the wind tunnel, and what they’re certainly not doing is deciding whether a microscope, a telescope or whatever, might be a more appropriate tool for looking at things.

This is interesting to me, because it touches on one of the issues I am investigating – how much control do you give people to design their own products? In Superstruct, each superthreat contains a number of questions which the players are expected to consider. In Generation Exile for example, it is proposed that climate change refugees will migrate from low-lying areas, forcing others to find ways of accommodating them. This may well be a realistic scenario, but it doesn’t allow players to suggest ways that such migrations might be prevented in the first place.

Superstruct Challenge from Generation Exile © IFTF

There are societies which have found ways of coping with rising sea levels (dykes in the Netherlands, houses on stilts in Bangladesh) or extreme temperatures (Australian aborigines or North African nomads); perhaps it would be possible in the 23 years between 2019 and 2042 to learn something from these cultures. Perhaps also some countries would declare refugees “a threat to our way of life” and use lethal force to prevent them entering. But the game doesn’t appear to allow for such outcomes. In design terms, the brief is too restrictive.

There are sound reasons for taking such an approach; Superstruct is, after all, a game, and good games need strong story lines and rules. But that’s where the idea of a game as a forecasting tool might break down. It’s possible that when the game is finished, the way the Superstruct world looks will be largely a product of the starting scenarios. The other issue is that all five superthreats are quite obviously dystopian views of how the world might be progressing ten years from now. Dystopias are generally much more interesting worlds to play in (how many computer games are built around utopias?) but they are also much easier to imagine. It’s far harder to conclude that in 2019 life will be largely the same as it is today, and then to predict the impact of the things that are different.

This is another factor I’m acutely aware of in the PhD – the difficulty of predicting a technology’s impact accurately, and not getting swept up in either the enthusiasm of its proponents or the pessimism of its nay-sayers. It has become a maxim in forecasting that “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” The designers of Superstruct are undoubtedly aware of the maxim, given that it was first formulated by Roy Amara, a past president of the Institute for the Future. But it seems the significance ascribed the superthreats over a ten year period was again the result of the balance between the need for accurate forecasting and interesting gameplay.

© The Weather Project 2019

Given that the game proper has not even started yet, it has already generated a lot of content from those interested in playing. Jane McGonigal, another of the game’s directors, has eleven pages of responses on her blog to a request to players to imagine where they’d be having dinner in 2019. She also reports receiving a package from the 2019 Weather Project containing eight glass bottles with instructions to fill them with air samples and return for inclusion in a weather tracking system. ARK (Art Replacing Knowledge) have released an official response denying responsibility for the hacking of the Republican Bank of Malaysia reported in the Outlaw Planet scenario. And reBang 2019 is posting images of his sea voyage from Hamburg to New York. What’s also interesting is that when searching for players, as well as turning up sites such as the Daily Dystopian and The Gupta Option, I found some non-Superstruct sites which really looked like they should belong. My favourites are Project 2019, a “Movement by Black Americans to gain educational parity with the rest of America by 2019 (The 400th Anniversary of the beginning of slavery in America)”; and this one, a film by David Bray looking at a “holistic approach to National Security” brought about by the hyperturbulent pressures of globalisation in 2019.

“A small unidentified vessel tailing my ship out of the English Channel as we head into the Atlantic Ocean” © Rebang 2019.

Personally, though I’m going to be following the progress of Superstruct closely, I’m not going to be participating. The reason is that right now I’m working for a client developing future scenarios, and although the timescale isn’t exactly the same some of the issues would definitely present a conflict of interest. When Superstruct is over, it will be interesting to see how closely its world corresponds with the project I’m involved with. I also wonder whether the game will actually ‘end’ when it’s supposed to, I can already imagine that some of the player’s constructs will take on a life of their own…