A new online multi-player game has been launched by the Future Institute in Menlo Park (Silicon Valley) called SuperStruct:
….the world’s first massively multiplayer forecasting game. By playing the game, you’ll help us chronicle the world of 2019–and imagine how we might solve the problems we’ll face. Because this is about more than just envisioning the future. It’s about making the future, inventing new ways to organize the human race and augment our collective human potential.
By getting involved in a massive social networking experiment through blogs, forums, videos, wikis and other Web 2.0 tools, the games aims to get you involved in the chronicling and shaping of the world of 2019. game starts with a doomsday premise:
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.
According to Discover magazine 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 Future 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….visit SuperStruct.