Narrative:Institute for the Future Superstruct Game

From FORwiki

(Difference between revisions)
Jump to: navigation, search
(Further reading)
Line 150: Line 150:
== Further reading ==
== Further reading ==
-
* [[File:2009_MOTD.pdf|Map of the Decade]]
+
* Map of the Decade [[File:2009_MOTD.pdf]]
-
* [[File:Handbook READER.pdf|The Superstuct]]
+
* The Superstuct Handbook [[File:Handbook READER.pdf]]

Revision as of 03:20, 12 April 2010

Superstruct: Reorganizing for the 21st Century
Institute for the Future
Palo Alto, CA

What was the motivation to start your Foresight in the first place?

Su`per`struct´ v. t. 1.To build over or upon another structure; to erect upon a foundation. Superstructing is what humans do. We build new structures on old structures. We build media on top of language and communication networks. We build communities on top of family structures. We build corporations on top of platforms for manufacturing, marketing, and distribution. Superstructing has allowed us to survive in the past and it will help us survive the super-threats.

The evolution of life on this planet has been the story of increasing levels of complex organization to support ever more life. As we enter the next decade, our project is nothing short of reorganizing life on the planet to support the 9 billion people we may be by the end of this century.

We must turn to our social structures, drawing on evidence that, collectively, we can act with intelligence that none of us could individually bring to bear. This is superstructing: working at both larger and smaller scales than our current skills allow. Superstructing our institutions is the fastest way to reorganize ourselves for the challenges we face.

Superstructing requires imagining new ecologies of structures and practices and trying to understand how certain forms might co-exist to increase the overall energy efficiency of the system. We can imagine these ecologies at the scale of large institutions that currently have (sometimes unproductive) silos of activity; we can imagine them at the scale of networks of institutions that could be reorganized as superstructures. And we can imagine them at the scale of landscapes of superstructures.


What was the key problem driving the launching of the exercise?

We wanted to understand the changing ecologies of institutions, to tap into a large-scale, passionate community of futures thinkers to answer the question: how are we going to put our communities and economies and governance structures together in order to meet the challenges of the coming decades?


What were the objectives of your Foresight?

The goal of Superstruct was explicitly to understand the impact of networks on solving large-scale global problems: health, food, energy, security, and mass migration. Players were tasked with creating “superstructures” that could use the affordances of networks to go beyond conventional institutional forms. We asked participants from the public to help us imagine a future landscape of new institutional forms, to help us create a forecast not just of individual superstructures, but entire ecologies of superstructures.


How did you design the exercise?

There has been growing attention to using massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) on the internet as platforms for learning, planning, and policy-making in a wide array of domains. Massively multiplayer games promise the benefits of scale by engaging hundreds and even thousands of participants in gameplay. In 2008, the Institute for the Future conducted its first massively multiplayer forecasting game, Superstruct, designed by a team that included IFTF’s Director of Game Research and Development Jane McGonigal, Director Kathi Vian, and Research Fellow Jamais Cascio. The game lasted for 6 weeks.

Superstruct took its cue from the alternate reality game World Without Oil, which Jane McGonigal had also designed. Both of these games created a specific scenario world in a dedicated website. The goal was to transport players into an alternative future world where compelling conditions demand their attention, and to structure engagement so as to elicit personal forecasts and strategic foresight that would not otherwise emerge. Participants were encouraged to play not a fantasy role, but to play themselves. Their engagement began with their personal profiles in the game: they told us about who they are in the future world, who their families are, what kind of work they do, and what they care most about. In other words, gameplay began with identity crafting. In all, about 7000 people from 95 countries signed up.

Players were tasked with creating “superstructures” that could use the affordances of networks to go beyond conventional institutional forms. They were encouraged to join these and link them together. They created more than 500 superstructures in the course of the game, but these were disappointing as loci of collaboration. The best collaboration happened outside the game platform. Players collaborated in building wikis and websites. They held face-to-face group meetings in caves along the Pacific Ocean and began a cross-country relay. After the game was over, some even collaborated in new business ventures. The most successful in-game collaborations happened around superstructures that could be elaborated in narratives. For example, the New Pony Xpress superstructure spawned several stories and videos that told the story of how bottom-up networks might replace a collapsed postal service.

Did you have a team, external support?

We had a team of about a dozen people including game designer and director, Jane McGonigal, scenario directors Jamais Cascio and Kathi Vian, programmers, video production, and in-game community managers who worked closely with players during the 6 week game period.

What were the key formal methods you used?

Game design was the primary method for provoking and collecting foresight. To analyze the results of the game we used both qualitative and quantitative methods. These included:

Player-generated ranking: Players linked to new organizations or organizational structures that they found most effective to meet the challenges posed in the game future. Those superstructs that were most densely linked were a form of player analysis.

Contest, judged categories: We had a panel of judges who examined superstructs and awarded them honors based on a range of qualities.

Network analysis tool: to interpret the data and show us how superstructures were connected by membership. To create an ecology, we selected a single superstructure as a starting place. We then set a threshold of density to define the ecology. For the smaller ecologies, the threshold was as low as two shared members. For some of the more densely connected ecologies, the threshold was as high as five shared members. Adjusting the density threshold allowed us to maximize the visibility of connections. Too low a threshold would show everything as connected; too high would leave out important connections and only reveal a familiar set of the most highly connected superstructures.

First-order and second-order connections were identified. Thus, in addition to the core superstructures, which were all connected to one another, other superstructures emerged from the intersections of two or more of the superstructures. A tool was developed to support this analysis and could be used to analyze any ecology, starting from any of the 500+ superstructures.

Ecological view: we ask the ecologist’s questions as we studied the ecology maps: Who’s here? Who are they connected to? Why are they occurring together? And how do they improve the energy-efficiency of system they define? (Or do they?)


How did you approach participation?

Game mechanics are some of the most effective and exciting ways to engage participants. The game play included in-game rewards, achievements, and feedback. Compelling, immersive, introductory content (videos, text) was designed to quickly convey background information and provoke action in the form of text or multimedia. During live gameplay, in-game community managers continued to introduce thematic updates to core scenarios and frequent missions to inspire participant submissions.

We also had a panel of 8 well-known judges who awarded honors on the most interesting Superstructs. Panelists included science fiction writer Bruce Sterling, technology innovator Tim O’Reilly, and online performance artist Ze Frank, and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.


How did you select and approach the participants?

The game was promoted via the IFTF website, Jane McGonigal’s blog Avantgame, and through television and print media as the game was in process.


What were the outcomes (tangible/intangible)?

More than 7000 people worldwide created and joined nearly 600 superstructures. As people joined, they created links among the superstructures—which, in turn, created ecologies of superstructures.

IFTF created a series of reports and presentations from the game, all of which are available on the IFTF website, www.iftf.org, via the Ten Year Forecast program page.

The core deliverables from the game were a 2009 Map of the Decade; a set of Superstructing Strategies, or how-to instructions; a set of Superstruct Ecologies, or important new social configurations that provide insight into what kinds of social and organizational solutions might emerge in the next decade; and a few Superstruct Hypotheses for further exploration.

Superstructing Strategies were lessons learned from the game play itself, which form the basis for new social organizing as well as, more practically, instructions for those who want to create massively multiplayer collaborative forecasts of any sort.

File:2009 MOTD pg3.jpg

Superstructing Strategies

EVOLVABILITY. Nurture genomic diversity and generational difference. Take advantage of the fact that evolution is cleverer than you are, and embrace continuous cycles of incremental change. • give others freedom to make independent improvements • make the genome visible—be as transparent as possible • open trumps control

EXTREME SCALE: Layer micro and massive scales for rapid adaptation. Micro-scale means you need to reach down the scale to engage in crowd-sourcing. Invite individual actors to make micro-scale contributions. The contributions need to be small and well-defined enough that massively many individuals or smaller groups can successfully undertake them. These individual crowd contributions can add up, of course, to extremely significant collaboration results. • push both up and down the chain of scale • optimize participation bandwidth for different levels • offer 15 minutes of contribution

AMBIENT COLLABORATION - Leverage stigmergy with environmental feedback. The bigger and more complex a collaborative community gets, the more important it is to provide ambient tools that support real-time self-organization. • offer both “blanket” and “opt-in” collaboration feeds • give would-be collaborators visual tools for broadcasting their talents, resources, and status • enlist live superstruct spotters

REVERSE SCARCITY - Use renewable and diverse resources as rewards. In any community, different members value different rewards. There doesn’t have to be competition for a single reward resource. And the resources you are using as rewards can be completely renewable ones, based on social esteem, social support, and positive feedback. • increase your social capital • use improved reputation, rather than financial compensation, as a scalable reward •I nvent new measures of potential rewards • create egalitarian opportunities for success

ADAPTIVE EMOTIONS. Confer evolutionary advantage with awe, appreciation and wonder. Extreme-scale cooperation provokes more intense positive emotions, and positive emotions spur even more intense collaboration behaviors. So by deliberately stimulating these highly adaptive emotions in ourselves and others, we are tapping into our neurological hard-wiring for good. • unleash your “vagus nerve superstars” • develop your positive emotional radar

AMPLIFIED OPTIMISM. Link amplified individuals at massive scales. Super-Empowered Hopeful Individuals are the bottom-up engine of any superstructure. But they need large-scale organizational and institutional amplification to augment their bottom-up optimism with experience, reach, and resources. • turn your colleagues, constituents, and customers into SEHIs • look for ways to amplify opt-in SEHI missions • set goals in with an eye toward the super-long term ROI

PLAYTEST - Challenge everything and everyone in fun, fierce bursts. In a time of major institutional upheaval, play may seem to be the last strategy you would want to adopt. But Superstructures develop and work differently from other kinds of organizations—so they need to be tested and challenged every step of the way. • plan for failure early and often • launch open proof-of-concept demonstrations • use awe-inspiring challenges, with metrics, to get seemingly impossible things done

Superstruct Ecologies

Appleseed Ecology: Food as disruptive economy. Appleseed is a twist on self-sufficient farming, rethinking cultivation in the urban context, not only suggesting things like rooftop and vertical gardening, but also leveraging the new urban infrastructure of communication and commons to make it work. The Appleseed ecology is highly cosmopolitan.

Natural Currency Ecology: Linking Sustainability to Sociability. Underlying all of these currency ideas is a new level of knowledge about the environment—both the natural environment and social environment. Currency becomes the mode of exchange for this information. So currency actually becomes the message, as well as a way to build local value.

Community Works Ecology: Building emergent local and global infrastructures. This ecology re-imagines our infrastructures for community, energy, and education..The internet has defined a basic model for an emergent infrastructure. This model uses openness, peer-to-peer structures, social networks, and most importantly scale. Leveraging patterns of human behaviors and actions that add up to something big…for example, generating energy rather than consuming it.

The Open Fab Initiative Ecology: Remaking the material world out of poverty. The Open Fab Initiative is the starting node for a densely interconnected ecology of superstructures that span the major ideas and innovations in Superstruct. Like its close affiliates, Screaming 3D Bootstrappers and Mobifab, the Open Fab Initiative explicitly links new very small-scale fabbing tools and practices to solving the problems of local distressed communities—creating new local material and economic realities.

Quantum Governance Ecology: bridging across realities. The Quantum Governance superstructure sparks an ecology rich in superstructures concerned with ideas, stories, and knowledge. This is not surprising: in a quantum world, point of view is everything, and many of the superstructures in this ecology—from Meme Machine to Foundation of Hope, and even Open Source Scientists—are designed to help citizens makes sense of the world. Even Quantum Governance, with its Quantum Manifesto, is not so much an action superstructure as an invitation to ideate.

Superstruct Hypotheses

In a superstructed world, the leading organizations are those that are highly interconnected, process-oriented organizations.

Superstructing tends to reject traditional forms of security and boundary based protections. It makes sense that structures that are tying to secure their boundaries would be the least connected.

Superstructing is an inherently creative endeavor that tends to emphasize art and design competencies. The rank and file superstructures of the future will be engaged in these expressive activities.


What was the main difficulty you encountered?

Programming the engagement platform, and analyzing the large volume and diverse range of material created by players: video, emails, text, stories, superstructs, websites, wikis, etc.


What would you do different next time?

Use tools that players are already familiar with, such as wikis and social media platforms, rather than rebuilding them within the game platform, if possible.

Provide more support for building user profiles.

Create effective in-game private/instant messaging as a key to driving both engagement and collaboration.

Dashboards for both gamemasters and players to track what’s happening in-game are critical, given the large amounts of content generated. This poses particular problems when game activities are occurring outside the game site.

Further reading

Personal tools