Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (47 page)

It was called Superstruct, and its promise was simple: Play the game, invent the future.

Every year, the Institute for the Future produces a Ten-Year Forecast. It’s a look ahead at the next decade, to identify new economic forces, social practices, and changing environmental realities that will impact the way leading businesses, governments, and nonprofit organizations work, and to define the new challenges they’ll face. As we like to say at IFTF, “Ten years is a good, useful horizon—distant enough to expect real changes, close enough to feel within our grasp.”
²⁴

Each Ten-Year Forecast (TYF) has a defining theme, a driving question. In 2008, the TYF program director Kathi Vian decided that the driving question for the next year’s forecast would be: What is the future of scale for human organization?

Clearly, we were embarking on a decade of extreme-scale challenges: economic collapse, pandemics, climate change, the continuing risk of global terrorism, and disruptions to our global food supply chain, to name just a few. We knew that existing organizations would have to reinvent themselves in order to simply survive, let alone make a difference.

“We know that the old ways of organizing the human race aren’t enough anymore. They’re not adapted to the highly connected world we’re living in. They’re not fast enough, or collaborative enough, or agile enough,” Vian wrote during our early brainstorming meetings. “We need to design better ways for the world to work together in the future. We need networked organizations that can solve problems better, move faster, be more responsive, and overcome the old ways of doing and thinking that paralyze us.”

So we wanted to find out: How might businesses, governments, and nonprofit organizations team up to make each other more resilient during crisis? How could existing organizations work together to tackle these planetary-scale problems? How should these entities engage the super-empowered individuals who want to be a part of changing the world—and who will go it alone, for better or for worse, if they don’t feel engaged?

Our hunch was that surviving the next decade would require entirely new ways of cooperating, coordinating, and creating together. So we wanted to find a new strategic language for talking about revolutionary ways of working together at extreme scales—language that could completely shift our thinking about how to adapt for the coming decade.

We looked at a lot of potential language, but as soon as we hit on the term “superstruct,” we knew we’d found it.

“Superstruct” is a term that shows up most often in the fields of engineering and architecture. To superstruct a building is to extend it, to make it more resilient.

Superstructing isn’t about just making something bigger. It’s about working with an existing foundation and taking it in new directions, to reach beyond present limits. It means creating flexible connections to other structures, to mutually reinforce each other. And superstructing means growing in strategic and inventive ways so that you can create new and more powerful structures that would have been previously unimaginable.

So
superstruct
really seemed to capture the process of extension and reinvention that we wanted to explore in our Ten-Year Forecast. But what would be the best way to investigate a process that didn’t quite exist yet?

My graduate studies background is in a social science called “performance studies,” in which one of the core research methodologies is to actually
do
, or
perform
, the thing that you’re studying. So we decided to build a superstructure.

We decided to superstruct our own Ten-Year Forecasting project by opening it up to the public. We would conduct our primary TYF research as a live, online six-week collaborative experiment—completely open to anyone who wanted to join us.

We called this experiment, naturally, Superstruct, and we framed it as a massively multiplayer forecasting game. We wanted the world to help us forecast the future of organizing at extreme, or epic, scales in order to survive real global threats and solve real planetary-scale problems. And we committed to using whatever collective forecast our players came up with as the foundation for our annual research report and conference the following spring.

The core creative team for the project was made up of program director Kathi Vian, scenario director Jamais Cascio, and myself, the game director. We spent six months working with a team of a dozen additional IFTF researchers and designers to develop the 2019 scenario, research the game topics, create the immersive content, design the gameplay, and build the website.

The game launched on September 22, 2008, with a press release from a fictional organization called the Global Extinction Awareness System. The press release was dated September 22, 2019.

We chose an intentionally provocative starting point for the scenario for several reasons. First, we wanted players to propose awe-inspiring solutions. So we had to pose a scenario that would inspire a sense of awe and wonder—an epic “What if?” What would you do if you woke up one morning to discover that the world’s most trusted supercomputer had calculated the entire human species was as endangered as tigers, polar bears, and pandas are today?

Second, we wanted to learn something new, so we had to push our players to imagine previously unthinkable ideas. We aimed to create a forecasting context so far from their ordinary day-to-day concerns that they would feel free to practice extreme creativity and be comfortable pitching “outlier,” or unexpected, ideas.

And third, we wanted to give our players a clear goal, a way to measure their success in the game. The GEAS survival horizon gave us the perfect way to do both. We would challenge our players to work together to extend the survival horizon from the year 2042 as far as we could possibly take it. Each year they added to the horizon would represent a significant milestone in the game. (Advances in the survival horizon would be based on an algorithm factoring in the number of active players, how many game missions they completed, and how many achievements they unlocked.)

To ground the game in some specific forecasting topics, we identified five key areas in which players could make a significant impact on our survival horizon. These were the five superthreats, extreme-scale challenges that posed the greatest threat to humanity’s survival. But they weren’t just threats—they were also opportunities, key areas for coordinated effort and innovation, among organizations and SEHIs alike.

If you wanted to make a difference in our game world of 2019, you had to pick one of these superthreats and start tackling it with the biggest, most surprising ideas you could come up with. These were the five superthreats:

To help players quickly grasp the details of this complex scenario, for each of these superthreats we created a short video trailer and a series of news headlines describing unfolding events. We also released an online report, set in the year 2019, outlining some of the dilemmas each of these superthreats might provoke, and how they might interact with and magnify each other. In the report, we emphasized a sense of optimism about humanity’s ability to overcome the superthreats.

Both the report and the trailers ended with the same call to action: Join us to invent the future of the human species. We announced that volunteers were gathering on an online social network site called Superstruct. And we issued a public invitation—on blogs, on Facebook, on e-mail, on Twitter—to join the network. Our core message: Everyone has a part to play in reinventing the way the world works. And in the end, we attracted 8,647 super-empowered hopeful individuals to contribute their best ideas for the future to our superstructing experiment.

But before they tackled the superthreats, our players had an important first mission: invent their future selves.

Like any present-day social network, our 2019 social network asked you to fill out a personal profile. But our profile was different: it focused on
survivability
. What are the specific skills, resources, and communities you can bring to bear on these superthreats? What are you uniquely qualified to contribute to reinventing the world? We encouraged players to have fun imagining their future selves, but we also told them to keep it real. This was essential.
Don’t
invent a fictional character, we told them. This is about real play, not role play. We want to know who you
really
think you might be in 2019. Feel free to dream big, but make sure it’s grounded in reality.

Here’s the profile. How would you answer these questions? Remember: It’s not who you are today. It’s who you might be in the future.

This first mission helped immerse players in the future. It required them to vividly imagine the year 2019, and how their work and lives might be different by then. It also helped them identify specific personal resources they could bring to bear on the superthreats. At heart, Superstruct was about figuring out new roles for individuals, organizations, and communities to play in much bigger, longer-term efforts to make life on this planet better. To accomplish this goal, we had to help our players make direct connections between their current skills, resources, and abilities and the demands of the future.