I've been asked to be a member of the Superstruct advisory board! Superstruct is basically a massively multiplayer online forecasting game, set up by the non-profit Institute for the Future. The game designers have written the framework of a scenario that takes place in 2019, organized by five interlocking "superthreats" (disease, food distribution, power distribution, mass migration, internet attacks), in order to see trends in how players would react to these changing global conditions in the course of their everyday lives. I'll be posting more about this as the game approaches launch on September 22. In the meantime, you can check out the game's teaser site, or this article about it in Discover Magazine.
4 comments:
This is freakin awesome: a good example of how technology allows the reliable (and even fun) analysis of everydayness, and can do away with needs to assert that some overarching metaphilosophy/ontology of some sort--postulating states of being where things are really how they are (and not how they are in the everyday--I am thinking of Heidegger but also of recent virtue ethics)--would be the only way to solve a problem. Sometimes solving possible catastrophes can be fun.
I just remembered: Richard Rorty once said something about how no one really seriously believes in the need for a theory to adjust itself around so as to be able to be implemented in practice. Otherwise they wouldn't be theorizing. The same sort of sensible conclusion--I think one of the few, but significant, sensible conclusions to come out of pragmatism--could be at work, I think, here: theories like this are already practical. This is the benefit of the particular type of data-gathering operation that will go on here. It isn't strict empiricism, since it is not exactly looking for results. Rather, the people are trying to come up with sorts of guidelines that might help them develop, eventually, something they themselves could suggest as a possibility. But this is not vague theorizing: it's a sort of practical activity to restrict and make relevant the set of questions that you are asking and the sort of solutions you are coming up with. Thus, no crazy hypotheses (though there can be radical ones), and no fanaticism (that is, more rational hypotheses, not talk about it just for the sake of talking about it) about the end of the world or the huge risks in saving it--like that I found in this NYT article just a month or so ago.
Oops--not up on my html. Here it is: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/12/science/12ethics.html
Mike, I'm so glad you put it in those terms. You've actually anticipated a post I've been planning to put up closer to the game's launch on monday, on not so much a theory, but a gradually circumscribed field of possibilities--something like a system--built up out of individual, everyday practice, or at least a simulation of it, if that makes sense.
So stay tuned! Same goes for all you lurkers out there…
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