SuperStructing Society

Kama

Curious if anyone has been watching/is playing Superstruct? Just go to SuperStruct.org and have a looky. Basically, a research thinktank set up a collaborative forecasting mmo set in 2019 with various global threats people need to find solutions to on an optimistic-survival basis. That or just another excuse for forum circle o'jerks and blogging with even less factual content hehe...


The year is 2019, and the survival horizon for humanity is quantifiably closer. 5 different SuperThreats have been identified.

Quarantine:

Extrapolated from Bird Flu to Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ReDS). Issues of global disease management and their political and economic effects. Travel restrictions (slum lockdowns) and trust breakdown, and the threat of newer plagues. How should people (and policy) respond to this threat?

Ravenous:

Food security, food web breakdowns, supply problems, global famines; a hungry world. We are forced by this supply break to find new ways to produce food to feed ourselves: how can this be best accomplished?

Power Struggle:

A struggle over what energy system replaces oil, political economy of energy producers, emissions and waste accountability, replacing carbon economy with green one. Emphasis on conflict/competition in changes of energy production and usage.

Outlaw Planet:

Hacking of Teh Nets, online security, infoterrorism, and conventional crime. Surveillance and transparency (EFF), hacking of voting seats (Diebold anyone?), spam (including fabber spam)

Generation Exile:

The mounting problem of transnational immigration, global sans papieres, the excluded strangers of the State system. Resettlement of internally displaced. Problems arising from incoming migration into an area; extrapolate from something Texas (both post-Katrina and generally as a frontier with Mexico). How can global population flows be systemically 'solved', or mitigated?

All the problems are seen as interdependent, and awards are granted for solutions which work across multiple scenarios/levels. People suggest solutions/approaches to the problems, or SuperStructs, and you develop them with other people, and flesh out the details of what happens. The text description have a lot more depth than the linked videos, and provide a textual anchor to the collaborative-emergent side of it.




The game is set in 2019, but all the scenarios are quite recognizable current problems; it's been often said that science fiction is always about the present. Putting that 'gap' of time makes it a game though...:D
There's an emphasis on optimising between positions of interest, and optimistic-constructive approach to these social problems as engineering problems...I'm quite reminded of Buckimnster Fuller by all this...

I like the approach of these guys; there's some funky people like Warren Ellis involved, and even if you dislike details in their scenarios, or just the Anonymous-Compter-Voice-Over, that's not really the point; thinking about how we could deal with various problems is the point. Having simulated low-cost-in-failure learning environments is the point, and seeing if anything interesting comes out as a product is, I suspect, the point. Encouraging and providing an outlet for positive thinking about the future may well be the 'point', or the 'point' can be whatever people do with it. They've provided a platform, and taken a 'if you build it they will come' approach from what I can see.


Also, lest someone at this point cry 'Sure, Kama, but wtf is this to do with Politics?', let me explain. In a not-terribly-utopian way, politics can be about answering the question 'How do you want to live?', and 'How do We want to live?' (or at least so some naive fools thought in earlier more innocent times, without the benefits of hipster irony or Arrows Impossibility Theorem to tell them not to bother).
If you want to be highly formalist about it, you can talk about it being a vote, and call it a day; I've never found this very sufficient. Expressing hopes, views, and preferences seems a political act, and imo games like this have pretty interesting political ramifications on this level, in terms of active political 'Voice' rather than more passive-reactive 'vote very couple of years and sure it's grand''; a pretty anaemic conception of the political imho.

(The frequency with which I've heard fatalist approaches to politics, the future, and human decision-making abilitiesb gets me down of times, so when I see any optimist approach to the future it generally gets my vote, tbh...;))


Anyway...It's social research on a massive scale using scenario planning, which is a first that I know of. If you think telling stories about possible situations is all D&D, made-of-ghey and pretty-girls-with-ribbons-in-their-hair, please tell Shell, as they were groundbreaking in scenario based corporate planning, and have attributed a large degree of their success and corporate culture to using it. It also imo raises some really interesting possibilities for emergent planning, citizen involvement, view aggregation, crowd filtering: social network stigmergies, or swarm behaviour. You design 'yourself' in ten years time, where you live, what you do etc, within the context of 2019, and then work out how you are going to act/react, and associate with other people who are also trying to deal in a 'glocalized' way with the Threat.

Any boardsie got any reports from 2019?