Geek Gestalt

If you knew the human race was facing imminent extinction, what would you do?

For the folks at the Institute for the Future, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based think tank, creating a fictional scenario in which five "superthreats" have coalesced in 2019 to augur the end of the human race by 2042 became the basis for a new alternate-reality game (ARG) in which players the world over have been weighing in with ideas for staving off disaster.

The game the IFTF created, known as Superstruct, launched October 6, and is the first of what could be many so-called massively multiplayer forecasting games. The idea behind Superstruct and others that could follow it is to leverage the wisdom of the crowds to come up with solutions to complicated problems and do so in a fun, challenging, and entertaining way that encourages people's participation.

The five superthreats include "quarantine," which involves "declining health and pandemic disease," "ravenous," which deals with the world's collapsing food system, "power struggle," which revolves around declining energy and the fight over remaining energy resources, "outlaw planet," which focuses on the erosion of civil rights and "generation exile," which looks at the worldwide "diaspora of diasporas," or a worldwide refugee epidemic.

And it may be working. Already, the game--which ends November 17--has more than 5,000 players from across the globe who have contributed hundreds of ideas, in the form of stories, intended to mitigate the coming faux-disaster.

As of Monday, those user-submitted ideas have already been deemed strong enough that the Superstruct site now says that the end of the human race has been pushed back at least six years, to 2048.

To be sure, Superstruct is nothing more than scenario planning in the guise of a game, and despite the many, many drastic problems Earth faces these days, it is very unlikely that the human race is actually down to its last 40 years.

But for many participants in the game, being involved has satisfied an itch to make some sort of difference in the world.

"It appears that people are extremely motivated by the challenge of fixing the future," said Jane McGonigal, the lead designer on Superstruct. "People are unsettled right now, with the economy (and other crises and) that makes us hungry for the opportunity to contribute."

McGonigal, who previously helped design the famous ARG, I Love Bees, A World without Oil, and more recently led the design on the Olympic-themed ARG, The Lost Ring, said that the early planning of Superstruct involved asking participants to submit stories of dinner conversations they might have in 2019.

She said that very quickly, more than 1,000 people came forward with such stories, something that caught her, and her fellow Superstruct lead organizers, forecast director Kathi Vian and scenario director Jamais Cascio, off guard.

"That signaled to us that people will take this very, very seriously," McGonigal said. "That was the cue to me that this was going to be big and was going to tap into this unmet hunger for contributing."

Among her favorite dinner stories, McGonigal said, was one that a married man from New Zealand who currently has no children, but hopes to one day, came up with about what he would say to his kids about the fact that they could be the last generation of the human race.

"It was really thoughtful, not (like from a) B-movie," McGonigal said. "It was serious, and reflects what people are thinking about today."

And while Superstruct is clearly fiction, McGonigal and her colleagues at the Institute for the Future see it as imperative that scenarios like the ones raised in the game get talked about now.

"The world will almost certainly be a worse place for the next generation," she said. "If we don't act now, we're going to have a lot of explaining" to do.

Because Superstruct takes place across a wide range of media--including wikis, blogs, YouTube, forums, and others, some feel that it can help players with their own professional development even as they participate in bettering the understanding of how to deal with the problems of the future.

"I think one of the coolest parts of the game is how it takes advantage of players' existing participatory media literacy and pushes them to develop new ones," said Dale Larson, a mobile and social media strategist. "The transfer from game to real world is not only...solving the future problems but (also fostering) real world collaboration from both social and technical perspectives that lead to job skills and organizational skills."

As the game progresses, a series of "game masters" are taking some of the stories submitted by players and incorporating them into the larger Superstruct scenario.

That's why the date of humanity's extinction has already moved from its original 2042 to the current 2048--because of the value of the many user-created submissions.

Indeed, one of the goals of the game seems to be to turn the superthreats on their head and use the submissions made by player in each of the five categories to come up with solutions to the problems. And that's why each superthreat is subtitled, for example, "inventing the future of food," or "inventing the future of security."

Each week, a new update is posted for each superthreat, bringing the scenario current according to the game masters' incorporation of submissions.

So, for example, this week's assessment of the food crisis includes the following: "There are big ideas afoot to confront the Ravenous Superthreat head-on, like irrigating the Australian desert with solar-desalinated ocean water. Alongside this are more subtle ones oriented to ecological stability; this week, for instance, has seen no fewer than three Superstructs proposed to address the challenge of maintaining bee populations. As solutions continue to arise, however, so do the challenges. We're getting reports of continued battles on the home front for personal food security."

Of course, the stories that are used to create these ongoing scenarios are available for public viewing as well. And the best are given awards based on creativity and other attributes.

One example came from a player called Tiny Tegan, who posited a scene from Amsterdam, where supermarkets have closed down due to a lack of stocked shelves--and government regulations against imported food. The fictional Amsterdam resident reported that he (or she) walked past a closed market, only to see people milling around inside. Climbing through a shattered door to see what was going on, the resident found a number of "ragged farmers" trading various meats, cheeses, bread and so on.

"I purchased (an apple) for a resaonable fee and asked (the farmer) where she had come from," Tiny Tegan wrote. "She explained that these farmers were part of a virtual collective, sharing agricultural tips and political news across Netherland's rural expanses--and that the urban food shortage has inspired them to start a co-op in the city. They had arrived that morning and were planning to open their doors the next day. Needless to say, I was ecstatic and asked what I could do to help. She said, 'Spread the word.'"

Hundreds of similar stories exist for each of the five superthreats.

And that's precisely the point.

"It's exciting stuff," said Ron Meiners, the director of community for the Hollywood Interactive Group. "It creates a new forum for people to collaboratively address issues and problems we all face. The technology offers new opportunities for people to work together, but we are just learning the roles we can have together. Superstruct is a very creative way for people to effectively discuss different Issues, and ideally, meaningful solutions...We need to evolve new social structures to collaborate and work together."

As the game has moved forward and players have impressed the game masters with their submissions, the human race has gotten a little more time on its clock.

McGonigal acknowledged that she and her fellow planners did consider letting the clock run in reverse, meaning that humans could die off before 2042.

Thankfully, though, it will only be possible to make our race live longer, at least under the rules of Superstruct.

"We decided that just by throwing your lot in and putting attention on problems," McGonigal said, "that will only do good, so we've decided that there's very little players can do to hurt" mankind's future.

As has become increasingly obvious over the last few years, games are being used more and more as tools for helping people and organizations work their way through all kinds of problems and scenarios.

That's been the reasoning behind the steady growth of initiatives like the serious games movement, whose practitioners promote the idea of deploying games in education, government, military, and other sober institutions that need new ways to resolve troubling issues.

And now it appears that an august group of futurists is hoping that they can employ large numbers of people to play collaborative games in search of solutions to some of the world's most vexing problems.

That was the word Tuesday from the Institute for the Future, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based think tank that focuses on identifying the directions that mankind will take down the line.

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Over at The New York Times on Tuesday, Stephanie Clifford has a piece (Free registration required) pointing out that McDonald's is the main sponsor of the new Olympics-themed alternate-reality game, The Lost Ring.

The piece quotes McDonald's Chief Marketing Officer Mary Dillon as saying, "The Olympics in Beijing are a very big event for us, and we have a lot of different types of activation, with The Lost Ring being the most creative. Our goal is really about strengthening our bond with the global youth culture."

I appreciated that The Times got someone from McDonald's on the record about this. When I first wrote about the fast food company's involvement, as well as that of the International Olympic Committee, last month, I didn't get a chance to speak with them, so it's good to get their thoughts on the matter.

Well, it's been a couple of weeks since we had anything here about The Lost Ring or its lead designer, Jane McGonigal, or how the game works. So, it seemed like a good time to catch up with the players and see what they're up to in the snow in Canada.

It turns out that up in Kitchener, Ontario, a bunch of players spent some time over the last few days taking part training for the "lost" sport of Olympia, the human labyrinth, McGonigal told me Tuesday morning. Of course, the overarching story line of The Lost Ring is to discover the great lost sport of the Olympics.

So I trundled over to Flickr, where one of the major players of The Lost Ring, a fellow called thebruce0, or Geoff May, has a bunch of pictures from the training session.

May also posted a video of the exercise.

To my untrained eye, it's hard to tell exactly what the folks are doing in the snow up there in Kitchener. And, being that this is April 1, I suppose I should don my hat of skepticism and wonder if maybe someone's trying to play a little joke on those of us who weren't there to hear the secret whispers of those involved.

But, then again, maybe these folks really were taking part in a legitimate exercise in the long and still unraveling story line that is The Lost Ring.

I suppose if you want to find out, you'll need to dig your way through the forum threads on Unfiction.org, one of the main community Web sites devoted to ARGs.

As for me, I have to figure out what the proper revenge is to take on a colleague who has decided that today, finally, is the perfect day to discover Rickrolling and to spend the day perpetrating that crime against humanity on everyone in the newsroom she can think of.

AUSTIN, Texas--Game designers may be the professionals best suited to help humans find happiness in the future.

That was the thesis of world-famous alternate-reality game designer Jane McGonigal's Tuesday keynote address at South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) here.

McGonigal began her talk by looking at the idea that happiness is something scientists and sociologists are increasingly studying and that embedded in the mechanics of games may be the very things that people need to be happy. And quality of life will likely be a key consideration of many interactive media projects.

"Because positive psychology will be a principal, explicit influence on interactive design and development," McGonigal said, "we're also going to see communities forming around different visions of a real life worth living....We will see communities forming around different brands, platforms and visions....Value will be defined as a measurable increase in real happiness or well being. Well being becomes the new capital, something we can trade, and which might increase or decrease."

So designers might benefit from heeding and incorporating into their games what McGonigal defined as four distinct things that make humans happy: satisfying work, being good at something, spending time with people we like, and having the chance to be a part of something, she said.

"What just completely blew my mind was the realization that nothing in the whole world gives these four things in higher quality than games," McGonigal said. "Games give you satisfying work, (players can become very good at them), multiplayer games give you time spent with people you like and games give you the chance to be part of something bigger with their mythologies...I'm pretty sure that most of us in the game development business are in the happiness business."

A big part of the picture, McGonigal added later, is that games have the power to kill boredom, alienation, anxiety and depression.

"Games have a value as an aid to quality of life even greater and more direct than has hitherto been suspected," a slide from her presentation read. "The ordinary routine of playing a game is fatal to conditions of depression, existential angst, human suffering and other serious afflictions of real life."

One part of her keynote that many attendees were particularly taken with was a description of "ten strengths mapping ARGs against what scientists say is needed for happiness."

These were: "mobbability," an ability to collaborate and coordinate on really large scales; cooperation radar, the ability to decide who would be an ideal collaborator for any given mission; the ping quotient, which measures your ability to reach other people in a network, and your ability to respond to people reaching out to you; "influency," the ability to adapt someone's persuasive strategies to specific and distinct individuals since each community requires different motivations; "multicapitalism," an understanding that people are increasingly trading in new currency systems; "protovation," an understanding that failure can be fun because that's when people learn the most; open authorship, a comfort with giving content away and knowing it will be changed; signal/noise management, an element of games that is able to handle large amounts of "noise," and to be able to detect right away which data are relevant in the moment; "longbroading," an ability to think in much bigger systems, bigger cycles and bigger scales; and "emergensight," being able to spot patterns as they emerge and take advantage of them.

McGonigal suggested that the next thing for game designers to do would be to look for systems that incorporate some of these ethos and others that allow users to seek happiness.

Based on her talk, McGonigal proposed several takeaways.

First, she said, most game designers will "soon be in the happiness business." She suggested that such designers spend some time reading many of the recent books on happiness science in order to prepare for when that science is in demand in the game industry.

Second, she said game designers have a head start on providing additional quality of life because that pursuit is built into virtual worlds and simulated environments.

And finally, she said alternate realities signal the desire, need and opportunity for people to redesign reality for a real quality of life.

"It's our responsibility to hear that signal," she said, "to say you're right and that life doesn't work as well as games. It's our job to fix" that.

See more stories in CNET News.com's coverage of SXSWi (click here).

AUSTIN, Texas--To players of alternate reality games (ARGs) like I Love Bees, Tombstone Hold 'em, A World without Oil and others, Jane McGonigal is a household name.

If the people at the International Olympics Committee, McDonald's, and worldwide brand experience firm AKQA have anything to say about it, the list of people who know McGonigal and her work will soon expand geometrically.

That's because she's the lead designer on The Lost Ring, a new ARG that launched earlier this month that is tied to this summer's Beijing Olympics and which McDonald's, AKQA and the IOC are partnering on with McGonigal.

The game is built around the fictional concept that more than 2,000 years ago an Olympic sport was lost to history and that now, five Olympic-caliber athletes have turned up in corn fields around the world, amnesiac but sure they've been tasked with some great mission.

Players of The Lost Ring, then, are similarly tasked with helping these five people figure out their identities, and in the process, rediscovering this lost Olympic sport.

On Tuesday, McGonigal was the keynote speaker at the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) festival here and talked at length about the philosophies she uses to guide her game design approach, as well as to talk a little bit about her new project.

Afterward, she sat down with CNET News.com for an interview about The Lost Ring, in which she talked about how she hopes the game will change the perspective of people around the world and how she expects this game to be by far the largest game of its kind in history.

Because the game is still in its infancy, however, she didn't want to talk much about the process of its creation or about working with corporate partners like the IOC and McDonald's. Instead, she preferred to focus on how the game is innovative and what players can expect to learn from it.

Q: Talk about how The Lost Ring came about.

Jane McGonigal: I should say, we're not talking a lot about the process, because we want to keep the focus on the game itself, we don't want to get meta on process yet. I definitely want people to be thinking about the experience, and to have the experience before we get deconstructive.

Where the idea for the game come from?

McGonigal: AKQA has developed ARGs in past, on smaller scale. They really believed that this was the new genre to invest in, and to take seriously as a creative form. So they decided to talk to the different partner organizations to see who else might get this idea. McDonald's and the IOC said, 'We don't understand it, but we love it. It sounds risky but if anything is going to be the next big art form, this is it.' That all happened before I got involved. They decided to make the biggest most global ARG ever. It made sense for these gigantic global organizations, this idea to bring the world together through play...and with collective intelligence. And the Olympics brings the world together, but through sports.

For me, I thought, 'Oh, my God, this is the greatest opportunity ever,' because I knew working with those two organizations meant it would be huge, and that they were committed to making it truly global. That this would be the chance to make ARGs what they want to be. We talk about making them global, but so far, they're not really. But you have the Olympics everywhere, and McDonald's is everywhere. I just knew this would be the one that would just blow up the scale and possibility of ARGs. And obviously, with the Olympics theme, you couldn't ask for a richer, more historical theme to design for.

When did it begin?

McGonigal: I started working on it last June, right at end of World Without Oil. I was very happy that AKQA, McDonald's, and the IOC approached me on the heels of World Without Oil because it meant they wanted to make a project for good.

How much control did you have?

McGonigal: It was an intense collaboration process. They didn't have design ideas, but every time we had an idea, we were like, 'Is this cool?' And, 'Is this exciting?' But to some extent, one of my colleagues at AKQA said there's only one person who knows where this is all going. I have a lot of this stored in my brain exclusively. And I think McDonald's and the IOC feel like they're going on a ride. We can't wait to find out what happens.

You've told me that you think this game will be orders of magnitude bigger than any previous ARG. How so?

McGonigal: We're taking everything we've seen work in ARGs and amplifying it so more people can have the experience. We've seen ARGs in five cities, but now it's going to be on five continents. We've seen puzzles in other languages, but this whole game is in eight languages. Every piece of content will be translated into eight languages. And localization has been a huge part of the development process, and it's very challenging, but so rewarding. The first week of game, a whole faction of players from Argentina who have never been participants in ARG forums (became very active) on Unfiction....And people wrote in and said, 'This is amazing, this game is showing us how small our world really is.'

This seems like a pretty good example of collective intelligence at work.

McGonigal: We talk about collective intelligence, but you need a diversity of participants to really make it work. It's not just intellectual diversity, but also gender diversity and age diversity. One of the things this game can do is show what the truly geographically collective intelligence really looks like. I don't know that we've really seen one. The Wikipedia articles, maybe. In this game, everyone's writing the same article, to use that metaphor. So we just sit around thinking about how lucky we feel to be doing this.

How many people are involved?

McGonigal: Last weekend, after one week, we had 1,000 players. That's not a lot. We want millions of players. So we're putting the trailers online, and we're hoping tens of thousands of people watch those and that it grows from there. By Beijing, we hope there will be millions. That has to happen.

But it's a slow ramp up?

McGonigal: Yeah, one of the things I learned about I Love Bees is how important it is to respect the ARG community and give them the opportunity to play with something first, and kind of get things organized, and set up for when someone who's never played before shows up. So we sent out The Lost Ring rabbit holes--a box of clues to the game--to about 50 all-star players to get them going. It's not we were advertising on TV. So by time other players show up, they won't get lost. We're thinking about how to make this huge narrative experience not be overwhelming.

So the game is for people at any level?

McGonigal: Yes. I'm so excited about the historian podcasts. If someone did nothing but listen to the historian podcasts, which blend history with our alternate reality, if they did nothing but listen and then take the quiz, take the poll, if that were all that you did, you would have such a great experience of the summer Olympics. Your head would be full. You'd be like, I know the secret reality. I definitely hope that when people put the Olympics on the TV, they'll feel they're not vicariously experiencing it, but feel, 'I'm in it, it's not something I'm experiencing remotely, I'm having my own true, real Olympics experience.'

What can people learn from the game?

McGonigal: They're going to learn about their own strengths. We're going to help them learn what they're good at and then give them missions that are totally customizable to their personal strengths. That's the part of the game I'm most proud of, that innovation. In the ARG world, you don't always know what you're supposed to do. You spend a lot of time waiting and waiting. So we wanted it to be so that for everybody, every time you come to one of the game sites, you know exactly what you're supposed to do, and that we need you because this is what you said you were good at. But that part hasn't started yet.

How can this game impact someone in China or India?

McGonigal: The answer to how any ordinary person will experience this game lies in the Lost Sport podcast. It will be the first alternate reality podcast. It appears that this ancient sport has been lost for 2,000 years, and if people can figure out how to play it, this new sport will be something anyone in any country can play. And the experience of playing it is going to be a very big part of the mainstream experience.

See more stories in CNET News.com's coverage of SXSWi (click here).

For anyone who follows alternate-reality games (ARGs), it should come as no surprise that the latest entry in the genre, The Lost Ring, is the brainchild of, among others, Jane McGonigal.

Until now, it was only suspected--though with extremely high levels of confidence--that the game, which is centered on helping a fictional amnesiac woman named Ariadne discover her identity, was a promotional vehicle for this summer's Beijing Olympics.

But McGonigal, who is keynoting at the South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin on Tuesday, confirmed to me that the game was in fact designed in collaboration with the International Olympic Committee and that McGonigal's partners in the creation of the game were McDonald's and global interactive experience design shop, AKQA.

"This ARG extends McDonald's historic sponsorship of the Olympic Games in a brand-new direction," said McGonigal, who is a research affiliate with the Institute for the Future. "Its goal is to create global collaboration and bring the spirit of the Games to people around the world. It will invite players from across the globe to join forces online and in the real world, as they investigate forgotten mysteries and urban legends of the ancient games."

McGonigal, an alumna of leading ARG design firm 42 Entertainment, has either been lead designer on or helped create a wide variety of multimedia games such as A World without Oil, Cruel 2 B Kind, Last Call Poker, and I Love Bees.

Since The Lost Ring went live on Monday, its Web site has offered up a number of clues for players to follow, while ARG-related sites like ARGNet and Unfiction have been actively discussing the game. It will play out over many months, likely not finishing at least until the closing ceremonies of the Olympics on August 24, 2008.