Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (48 page)

If you were to ask an ordinary person if they could personally fix the economy, stop a pandemic, or prevent famine, they probably wouldn’t even know where to begin. So we gave the players a specific place to start: in their own communities, groups, and social networks, using whatever they knew best as a foundation for suggesting solutions.

Finally, this mission gave us some concrete data about our players. We asked players to tell us, confidentially, a little bit about who they were in 2008, to help us put their forecasts and ideas into context. This 2008 data didn’t appear on their public profile; it was only to help during the research process, so we could cross-reference their future ideas by real-life age, location, and occupation. We wanted to find out more about how SEHIs think of themselves and what kinds of projects they are most likely to tackle.

So who superstructs? Here’s what we found out.

Out of just under nine thousand forecasters who joined the effort, the vast majority were between the ages of twenty and forty, with the rest spread out like a bell curve. Our youngest player was ten (he was particularly interested in the future of food, especially “lab-grown meat,” which is in fact an emerging food technology). Our oldest player was ninety (she was interested in the future of education).

We had players from forty-nine out of fifty U.S. states and more than one hundred countries worldwide. We had a startlingly diverse group of professionals, including chief engineers, chief technical officers, chief creative officers; longshoremen, hotel concierges, and museum curators; astrophysicists, atmospheric scientists, mathematicians; nurses, plumbers, and photographers. There were also numerous college and graduate students, senior executives, members of the armed forces, and public servants.

What expertise did these diverse participants bring to the game? Players identified expertise in areas as wide as labor activism, transportation and logistics, and robotics; specialty coffee, the comic book industry, the steel industry; immigration, forestry, and fashion; tourism, health care, and journalism ; chemical engineering, caregiving, and e-commerce; consulting, defense, and human resources; forensics, human rights, and nanotechnology.
²⁶

These were among the skills and resources we asked players to bring to bear on the five superthreats. And we asked them to tackle the superthreats in a very specific way: by inventing superstructures.

The most important rule for inventing a superstructure was that it should be unlike any existing organization. It should be a fundamentally new combination of people, skills, and scales of work. But it also had to be a plausible approach to a problem—a way to give people who don’t ordinarily work on challenges like hunger, pandemic, climate change, economic collapse, or network security a way to make a difference.

Inventing a superstructure was the core element of gameplay; it was how players earned survivability points (up to one hundred), which tallied into a total survivability score. The more thoughtful, clearly explained, creative, and surprising the superstructure, the more points a player earned. A player could also earn points by joining and contributing ideas to other players’ superstructures.

What, exactly, is a survivability score? We described it to players as follows:

In other words, our scoring system wasn’t meant to be competitive, but simply to represent your personal progress.

Let’s take a look at some brief descriptions of some of the particularly high-scoring superstructures, and the SEHIs who created them.

The We Have the Power superstructure was founded by SEHI Solspire, or, in real life, Pauline Sameshima, an assistant professor in the department of teaching and learning at Washington State University. She led her design class in creating a series of real, working prototypes and impromptu campus fashion shows for clothes that incorporated the kinds of wearable energy technologies described above. Their SEHI mission: to use rapid prototyping and design innovation to tackle the Power Struggle superthreat, and help invent the future of energy.

This superstructure was invented by SEHI Jorge Guberte, a twenty-five-year-old digital artist in São Paulo, Brazil. With no direct connection to the food industry or agriculture, he proposed a completely unexpected, extreme-scale solution to the Ravenous superthreat. His SEHI mission: to make access to food a basic civic right, and help invent the future of how we feed ourselves.

The DCAR superstructure was founded by SEHI Hexayurt, or Vinay Gupta, a noted world expert on disaster relief. He is also the inventor of the Hexayurt, an inexpensive, lightweight shelter designed to provide sustainable housing for refugees. He wanted to address the Generation Exile superthreat in the context of the ongoing African refugee crisis. His SEHI mission: to help invent the future of peace and government.

 

 

NONE OF THESE
ideas will reinvent the way the world works on its own. But alongside the more than five hundred other superstructures that players created, they effectively prove a new reality: that problem solving at extreme scales can involve ordinary people; that all scales of human organization can combine and recombine in startling ways; that continuous reinvention is not only possible, it’s an evolutionary imperative for the next decade.

 

 

WE RAN SUPERSTRUCT
as a live forecasting experiment for six weeks. So what were the final results?

After the game, our players inventoried and organized their efforts into a catalog of solutions called the Whole Superstructure Catalog (a play on Stewart Brand’s
Whole Earth Catalog
), which you can view online, at Superstruct.
wikia.com
.

In addition to their catalog of 550 superstructures, our players created more than a thousand vivid first-person accounts of the superthreats, told in videos and photos, blogs and Twitter updates, Facebook messages and podcasts. This world lives online as a resource for other forecasters, policy makers, educators, and interested individuals to explore and analyze.

We set up traditional discussion forums to provide players with a sounding board for strategies they wanted to apply in their superstructures. The players held court across more than five hundred different forum topics, such as “Networking the offline world: How do we reach out to people who aren’t online?”; “What can we do with bicycles: Beyond exercise, how can we use bicycles to help solve some big problems?”; and “Art for art’s sake: What is the role of arts in 2019? What role can art play during times of epic crisis?” There’s enough reading material on these forums to comprise dozens of future-forecasting reports—and it’s all saved online for public browsing.

In terms of gameplay, we had nineteen players achieve a survivability score of 100—the equivalent of winning the staff of life in
Spore
, or creating a level 80 character in
World of Warcraft
. We invited these nineteen players to become our “SEHI 19,” and we extended invitations to them to continue collaborating with the Institute for the Future. All of the players, but in particular the SEHI 19, became a kind of superstructure for IFTF itself.