When reality outruns imagination

I wrote this reflection a few months ago, just after the COVID-19 pandemic was recognised as such. Now posting here to make it easier to find.

***

A key purpose of futures practice is to invest thought in possible contingencies, so that when something unexpected suddenly happens you are better prepared.

COVID-19 is a vivid illustration of both the importance and the limits of foresight. Let me tell you a story.

This story is about how the first serious game funded by the CDC came about –– a near-future pandemic simulation, back in 02009 –– and how it was overtaken by real events. And what we learned from that.

In 02007, my colleague Jake Dunagan (now at Institute for the Future) and I were both grads in the futures program at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. In our work there, at the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies, we had already designed and run immersive scenarios, set in the year 02050, to engage lawmakers and public in the state’s sustainability planning process.

We then started experimenting with other approaches we hadn’t seen in futures work before, but that seemed worth exploring too. One thing we tried was doing physical installations and encounters in public to bring possible worlds to life, which we called guerrilla futures. It drew inspiration from some early interventions by The Yes Men, tactical media and culture jamming à la Adbusters, Brazilian forum theatre pioneer Augusto Boal, some then-recent alternate reality games, and also, well before any of the above, Situationist détournement.

We developed scenarios for our favourite neighbourhood, Honolulu’s Chinatown, through conversations with residents, and then collaboratively translated these futures into experiences in the streets.

One was about the cultural changes gentrification might bring to the area.

Another explored the potential meaning for Chinatown of China’s geopolitical rise.

The last scenario was about a deadly flu outbreak. It came partly from our research into the history of the Chinatown district, which at the turn of the 20th century had been burned down after being struck by an epidemic of bubonic plague.

This experiential scenario was specifically designed to echo history, in order to help generate connection to and discussion about future possibilities. Outbreaks, like earthquakes, happen periodically. They can’t be completely avoided; only mitigated through effective anticipation, preparation and response.

The gentrification scenario landed our guerrilla project, FoundFutures: Chinatown, on the front page of the state's daily newspaper. It seems we had staged it plausibly enough that some people briefly thought Starbucks, TGI Fridays, and overpriced luxury lofts were really moving in.

But it was the pandemic scenario that caught the attention of the Hawaii Department of Health (DOH). They came to us and asked how experiential futures might help prepare the population. We started exploring, and the DOH set about the slow process of seeking grant funding.

A year on, they had received a grant from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and still wanted to collaborate. By then, late 2008, I was working as a Game Master on Superstruct, “the world’s first massively multiplayer forecasting game,” an online social platform staged by IFTF and designed by Jane McGonigal, Jamais Cascio, and Kathi Vian. Superstruct was seriously groundbreaking, engaging thousands of players internationally in imagining themselves a decade later –– “real play rather than role play” –– telling stories collaboratively to extend humanity’s survival horizon in-world.

Especially with this successful alternate reality game (ARG) as a newly-minted reference point, the health department loved our pitch: an online pandemic flu ARG with added real-world discovery vectors on the ground in Hawaii; future artifacts installed in public places to boost awareness, participation, and ultimately, resilience.

The core design team set to work –– me, Matthew Jensen, and Nathan Verrill, with Jake Dunagan helping out as permitted by his new full-time job at IFTF –– and we quickly identified the overarching storytelling challenge at hand; one set to make or break the whole project: How could we help our audience with no living memory of a precedent, most anyone under 45, to connect viscerally to what it feels like to live through a pandemic? By this point, early in 02009, there had not been one in more than 40 years –– the 'Hong Kong Flu,' in 01968.

We constructed our in-game scenario around a hypothetical, peer-to-peer, Hawaii-based disaster response org called Coral Cross, which had been founded, in our telling, after a devastating hurricane hit the islands in 02011. This part was sort of modelled against the real example of Hurricane Katrina (02005), to help people connect to the stakes. But it posited a constructive, emergent use of social media –– still very new in 02009. We basically planned to have people roleplay online within that frame.

We also had to produce near-future media assets to put on the diegetic (in-world) Coral Cross website. These would be aimed at helping players grasp the strangeness, and seriousness, of being able to catch a deadly disease from a doorknob. The hypothetical pandemic was inherently challenging to us, too, because of course we hadn’t had that experience either.

So one day in April 02009, I'm at the East West Center directing a film shoot for the project: a press conference set in 02012, three years into the future, where the Hawaiian Governor’s office announces the WHO declaration of a fully-blown, level 5 pandemic of this imaginary in-game disease.

In the midst of filming, a text message appears on my phone from Matthew, then working from Chicago. One word: “Oink.” Plus a link to an obscure report about an emerging swine flu strain apparently showing up in Mexico and California.

Everyone agreed this was a very strange coincidence.

The disease spread. Within days it had graduated to the front pages of newspapers all over the world.

And the major push we had put in to making this unfamiliar experience of a pandemic more imaginable was instantly made redundant by reality.

For me and the project team, this was just about the most bizarre and unexpected conceivable turn. An elaborately constructed "what if" that we had spent months plotting out, unprecedented in the past 40 years, was now being outstripped by events in real time.

I was reeling.

We were still some weeks out from launch, and quickly realised: our plans, this project, absolutely had to change.

We contacted our clients at the health department, who at first tried to reassure us it would be fine to stay the course. We politely insisted otherwise. Fortunately, soon enough everyone was on the same page: it would not be responsible, or even make sense, to run a live social online game about an imaginary pandemic against the backdrop of an actual one.

We had to move quickly. What’s the only thing that can spread faster than a virus? Information.

Our elaborate hypotheticals went out the window. “Alternate reality game” morphed into “emergent reality game.” While still a playable pandemic preparedness campaign, we were now racing a real disease, H1N1 swine flu. The new plan: harness unfolding events to fuel engagement. We rebooted the whole effort to have it revolve directly around helping players learn how to avoid getting sick and spreading illness.

The new Coral Cross launched some weeks later. Players everywhere registered, earned “vigilance” for engaging the medical quiz content we had prepared with expert CDC guidance, and shared their views on the delicate, serious ethical dilemmas around allocating an eventual vaccine.

H1N1 marched on. However, it was gradually becoming clear that, thankfully, mortality rates were well below those feared at first.

This welcome news had a dark underside. Concern was activated, only to be followed by an experience for many no different than a regular flu season. The medical establishment, in good faith, had cried wolf, and the wolf duly arrived! –– technically it was a pandemic –– but instead of a terrifying monster, this toothless creature had limped into town. We were left wondering: was the net effect maybe in fact less preparedness?

Hawaii DOH and the CDC were awesome to work with. They were also incredibly happy with the project as, we were told, their first experiment with a "serious game". Many players showed impressive, genuine, heartening engagement.

And yet.

As you know, last week the WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic. Not influenza, of course, but for our purposes, a similar enough breed of fiasco. I’ve been flashing back to Coral Cross the past few weeks, and I’ve been asked about the project and its lessons.

First, making Coral Cross was I think the first time I’d personally learned or thought much about the catastrophic 01918 Spanish Flu, as well as the best practices for avoiding sickness, etc. A decade ago, sneezing into cupped hands was still pretty standard polite practice.

Second, it is a genuinely humbling, quite surreal, and deeply ironic experience to have a well-meaning initiative that is all about thinking ahead and resilience get blown out of the water while it is diligently being set up. As ever, “The best laid schemes of mice and men…”

But I think the main lesson is this: Pandemic preparedness is not a one-shot proposition. Neither, for that matter, is community resilience. Nor is the capacity for foresight more broadly. These things require habit. Collectively, they are cultural. Society critically needs an ongoing, collective, plural, high quality forward view.

I look at it in terms of three dimensions: difference, diversity, and depth. We must address not just the difference of a single (however currently-likely-seeming) scenario, though that's as far as many folks go. We also need a diversity of alternative futures, constantly updated. And depth, reckoning with what these entail as lived experiences.

Granted, this is a tall order. But it is also what over half a century of futures/foresight practice and education are all about. Our community is worldwide, not just in one particular place, culture, or department. Many hands have helped to develop, hone and share these skills. (Note: not everyone with "futurist" in their bio necessarily knows about the field, history, methods, etc) If new to you, let me invite you to explore.

To be clear: current urgencies need urgent attention. In addition: we need to cultivate wiser, more farsighted and systemically-literate habits of mind, as individuals, as organisations, and yes, as whole societies; a distributed capacity that some of us call social foresight.

I know it can be done at those smaller scales, because I've spent more than a decade and a half doing it. Meanwhile, what we must do collectively is increasingly clear. Whether we will step up is currently an open question.

“History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.”
–– Kurt Vonnegut, Slapstick

***

(Originally shared on Twitter, then LinkedIn.)

Related:
> Three Dimensions of Foresight
> Hawaii 02050: Ghosts of futures past

> Guerrilla Futures (slide deck)
> Foundfutures Chinatown: The Bird Cage
> Superstruct

> Coral Cross is coming / Coral Cross concludes
> Boing Boing post from back when this happened

This is not a game

The Coral Coral website yesterday (27 April 02009)

I haven't been posting lately due to intensive work on Coral Cross (described in the previous post). Also, the last week has been one of the strangest of my life. A little background...

Back in October 02007, Jake Dunagan and I ran a project called FoundFutures: Chinatown, wherein we created a series of alternative futures for this historic Honolulu neighbourhood, and with a little help from our friends, manifested these possible future Chinatowns in tangible form during a multi-part 'exstallation' in the area. One of the stories concerned a flu epidemic that took place in (a version of) the year 02016, and this caught the attention of some folks in the Communications department of the State Department of Health (DOH).

Wearing our Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies hats, we started talking about doing some kind of project for DOH using this distinctive "experiential futures" approach, and they applied for a federal U.S. grant to pursue the idea. That was early in 02008.

By September that year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that Hawaii's grant application for a demonstration public engagement project about influenza preparedness had been successful. We at HRCFS then pitched an alternate reality game (ARG) that would build both on our experiential scenarios for FoundFutures and Hawaii 2050, as well as on the success of 'serious ARGs' such as World Without Oil (02007) and Superstruct (then soon to launch) in addressing near-future challenges.

A particular aim was to help people provide input for the state about who ought to be vaccinated first, once a vaccine were to become available, a life-and-death question laden with ethical, political, and cultural implications. To answer it, however, required enabling folks to grasp some important, and frequently misunderstood, background facts: pandemic flu is different from seasonal flu; vaccine is different from antivirals; and vaccine specific to a pandemic flu strain -- since by definition such strains are immunologically unfamiliar -- would take months to formulate, produce and distribute.

We considered that an accessible, immersive storytelling effort should help people to take the premise seriously -- a challenging proposition since the last pandemic was in 01968, and out of sight generally means out of mind. For months, then, the HRCFS team has been working intensively on creating the architecture and content for an experience that would enable people to project themselves undergoing the experience of a flu pandemic. The scenario was set in 02012, partly to avoid a War of the Worlds-esque confusion on the part of our audience. In order to tell the story authoritatively from within the 'alternate reality' scenario, but without pretending to the mantle of a real organisation like DOH or CDC, we created an entity called the Coral Cross. This was a grassroots network, a product of Obama-era public service and web savvy, which in our story emerged in September 02011 after a category 5 Hurricane Cyrus devastated the island of Oahu.

However, after months of design and research, and just a few weeks prior to the scheduled launch, an extraordinary coincidence has occurred. Just before the world's first pandemic flu-themed alternate reality game was to begin -- and following pregame media coverage by ARG websites and local news -- an actual outbreak of swine flu in Mexico, quickly spreading to other locations, has made the fictional premise redundant.

The flu crisis is now real.

And now, so is Coral Cross; transforming, seemingly with its own alternate-reality momentum, as our design team works at full speed to adapt an 'alternate reality game' to a 'reality game' supporting real-time futures exploration as this story unfolds.

As I said, the last week has been one of the strangest of my life.

For me, the swine flu news, which at first I found curious but in no way alarming, came via the CDCemergency twitter feed -- which, bizarrely, I happened to start following last Wednesday (22 April) before any of this was in the headlines, and the most recent message was the first hint of a story soon to erupt:



It has been truly eerie to see this once-in-a-blue-moon scenario occurring just on the verge of hypothetically staging just such a scenario. Last Thursday afternoon, as I was setting up to shoot a Coral Cross press conference set in 02012 -- announcing the onset of a pandemic -- as part of our pre-launch storytelling effort, our lead designer Matt Jensen sent this email:

Subject: Oink

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N23355101.htm

Do we have a contingency plan if a pandemic strikes before our game launches?

We did complete the shoot, incidentally, but in view of events since then, won't be using the footage anytime soon.

Part of me of course finds it hard to say goodbye to the carefully crafted alternate reality premise and extensive in-world storytelling we had undertaken. It is weird -- a mixture of vindication, disappointment, and deep concern -- to see scenaric details, carefully imagined and crafted by our team, being supplanted by reports in the same newspapers and press conferences whose style and conventions we'd been drawing on to tell our story. But the strangest thing is seeing our advocacy for preparation and forethought so swiftly outrun by the flux of events themselves. I can't help but relish the irony that we have spent months strategising the incursion of a hypothetical future into the present, when in a matter of days, we’ve seen instead the incursion of reality into our hypothetical future.

"Any useful statement about the futures should appear to be ridiculous."
~Jim Dator

Embracing that change as best we can is, ultimately, the only option that makes sense. Will the 'swine flu' develop into a full-blown pandemic, or prove to be a false alarm; or rather, something between those extremes? No one can say. But the only sensible way to complete the project we have begun, while accommodating the genuine and pervasive uncertainty that attends these unfolding events, is to make that very uncertainty the subject of our exploration. This is the option that we recommended over the weekend to the Department of Health, and that, as of last night, they confirmed.

The core design team on Coral Cross consists of visual designer Matthew Jensen, interaction designer Nathan Verrill, creative consultant Jake Dunagan, and me as the project lead. I consider myself highly fortunate to be working with such adaptive and ingenious people that we can even consider spontaneously turning a simulation into a real-time futures exploration. But that's what's needed. And we applaud the Hawaii's DOH for recognising and acting so swiftly on the need to (as we've half-jokingly been saying internally) 'turn the Titanic'.

All this raises some big questions which are still only dimly defined in my mind (and which I don't have time to articulate and address properly right now) about the usefulness of emergency preparation, and the relationship between such preparations and the realities to which they ostensibly refer. (Emergency: an interesting word.) But I trust there will be time enough for all that in due course. For now, we're trying to rapidly reinvent the game to support real-life contingencies, exploration and decision-making; an interesting and difficult but necessary -- and perhaps unprecedented -- task.

Our sincere hope is that this event will prove not to be the pandemic that, at this moment in time, it could yet become. Still, whatever happens, Coral Cross will be there to help. All interested are encouraged to register at coralcross.org.

"History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again."
~Kurt Vonnegut, Slapstick

The Coral Cross website today (28 April 02009)

Your destiny is no longer in question

Above, two videos from NEXTgencode, "the industry leader in personal genetic life enhancement" [link > About Us].

These ads, and the website to which they point, were part of a promotional campaign for sci-fi writer Michael Crichton's 02006 novel Next.

A Wall Street Journal article at that time examined the hazards of hoax-like advertising material that manifests, so to speak, fragments of the in-scenario universe.

Fake videos are part of a broader trend in marketing involving the creation of pseudo events or phony organizations aimed at sparking buzz among fans. Among big marketers to take similar steps are Volkswagen AG's Audi brand and Walt Disney Co.'s ABC TV network.
...
ABC is still studying in the impact of its fake-marketing campaign [for TV series Lost].
...
Such efforts are known as "alternate reality games." They tantalize consumers with a mysterious story line, then ask them to explore more deeply.

To gauge the success of these marketing ploys, advertisers will typically examine consumer posts on blogs and elsewhere on the Web and see if they sound positive or negative, according to David Cohen, an executive at Interpublic Group of Cos.' Universal McCann.

~Jeffrey Trachtenberg and Brian Steinberg, "Believe It or Not, Fake Biotech Firm Is Key Marketing Ploy for Crichton Novel", Wall Street Journal, 16 November 02006

Online videos may still be relatively new, but Crichton has long used material of (if I may put it this way) ambiguous facticity to prop up the conceits of his science fiction. The first novel he published under his own name (The Andromeda Strain, 01969) was garnished with plausible, yet fabricated, scientific-looking footnotes. Back in high school, the first book of his I read (Jurassic Park, 01990) strove for and, I think, achieved terrific verisimilitude in the same way; using the false document technique.

So, I read Next sometime in the last year. The characters are thin, and the plot is less than convincing; it's certainly not his best work. I do, however, really like this playful use of quasi-documentary material to draw potential readers into a story which, like much of Crichton's fiction, although set in the present day, is predicated on the idea that cutting-edge technology is considerably more potent than you realise. In other words, the promotional medium matches the message, which is, as the book's blurb puts it, "The future is closer than you think." The brief moment when one is taken in by the video(s) or website -- if it happens this way for you -- thereby entertaining the reality of the fictitious premise, may be accompanied by a minor shock that such a thing could be possible, or already here (future-shock therapy).

Now, from a foresight communication perspective, there's a tricky balance to be struck in all this, which we face in designing experiential or immersive scenarios. The depiction of a near-term future may come across as more urgent, more frightening (for example), and more likely to be mistaken for actual fact, while being less responsive to intervention (since there's less time to do something about it); whereas a further-out scenario, in terms of timeline and plausibility, may allow more scope for action (i.e., avoid or pursue), yet could be less likely to seem salient, and hence to find or engage an audience. This dilemma may be of little concern where the primary goal is to entertain, but it's important for a futurist attempting to generate present-day traction for real problems and opportunities on (or over) the horizon. Only once have I been involved in experientially manifesting a scenario that could on closer inspection still be regarded as plausibly happening at that moment, as opposed to decades into the future; it gained attention, but as much for the strategy itself as for the issues it raised [link]. I've also seen scenaric possibilities that would be far more impactful in reality being dismissed or ignored altogether, where they are understood from the beginning as "art", or a mere "exercise".

In-scenario communication elements can draw criticism for their supposed deceptive qualities, even though often, as with this particular example, the dislocation isn't meant to last, and it's not at all difficult to debunk. From the WSJ article:

HarperCollins says the approach reflects Mr. Crichton's innovative style and is intended to be provocative and mysterious. "It's not about fooling people," says Kathy Schneider, associate publisher of the HarperCollins imprint. "It's about creating a playful add-on to the book."

Well, I guess the publisher would have to say that, even if it weren't the case. Another view, from Steve Bryant of The Hollywood Reporter [original; subscription required]:

Don't call HarperCollins' plan a hoax, though. That's ascribing too much narrative depth to a transparent scheme that isn't intended to fool the doggedly curious but to coddle the easily bemused. Rather, HarperCollins' plan is more of a "faux hoax," a mystery that winks at you. Subtle enough to be interesting and transparent enough to be followed, the videos gin up interest and eventual sales.

It all depends on how it's done; but such campaigns raise questions about to what degree, or for how long, an audience is "deceived", and also what ethical (or legal) consequences may flow from this. Jake Dunagan and I maintain that, in many cases, "it makes more sense to be surprised by a simulation than blindsided by reality" [see comments]. Still, both the "boy who cried wolf" syndrome (where people become inured to false alarms), and people's justifiably adverse reactions to the sense of having someone try to fool them, are hazards of working in this space.

The tagline "Your destiny is no longer in question", at the top of this post, is a semi-sinister figment of NEXTgencode's fictitious in-scenario website. It's one of several elements about the videos and site that satirically represent the intrusion of genetic science into our lives (with what combination of serious and jocular intent, it's hard to tell). And it's arguably more interesting for these -- what are they; future? alternate-reality? however you cut it, ambiguous -- artifacts to occupy a grey zone than to profess an earnest black-or-white adherence to either ideology or comedy. Not that they're brilliant, but from a public discourse perspective they are probably more effective and interesting (though much less profitable) than the book. Bryant again:

A clever Web hoax is the kind of ancillary content that can be even more useful and engaging than the original content itself.

Indeed.

The irony here is that Crichton, a veteran of these epistemological borderlands, has publicly emphasised the importance of being able to separate the two in the midst of our info-glutted media environment. In a 02003 speech which made an impression on me when I came across it online several years ago, he says:

The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the information age (or as I think of it, the disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance.

The original context has to do with certain claims of environmentalists which he characterises as ideologically driven and overblown (while others make much the same argument about his sceptical stance on climate change), but the epistemic challenge he points out remains valid and troubling.

Still, I disagree that it is the most important issue we face. Arguably its equal is the transformative power of our socio-technical process, coupled with our collective unwillingness to take responsibility for its possible outcomes. The melding of fact and fiction, the rigorous exercise of the imagination, the practise of futures studies, have much to offer here. And as alternate reality games, and massively multiplayer forecasting, continue to come into their own, I wonder if more of us will see some value in the deliberate -- not mischievous or pranksterish, but deliberate and temporary -- dimming of the too-bright border between fact and fiction. Where our "destiny" is always in question.

This is where the future lives.

[NEXTgencode videos and website]

Related posts:
> Don't break the universe
> Behold: a disturbing hole!

(Thanks for reminding me about this one, Matt.)

If you want to live you will obey

This morning I took part in a mini-ARG (alternate reality game) called "Eagle Eye: Free Fall", part of a viral promotional strategy for an upcoming movie whose tagline, "If you want to live you will obey", says about as much as needs to be said about its tone of high-stakes intrigue.

All you need is a telephone, a web-connected computer, and ten spare minutes to play. It drew me in right away. So, if you have those things, stop reading this and do it now (although I'm afraid it's probably set up for U.S. customers only; hope I'm wrong about that).

As usual, it's not the specific content so much as the potential of the medium which grabs me. This particular "game", which could more accurately be thought of as a moderately interactive multimedia show, seems to have garnered the approval of the ARG community, and considering its brevity, "Eagle Eye Freefall" does deliver the goods. The coolest part is the simultaneity of Internet and telephone interactivity. Things happen unexpectedly and yet right on cue, which generates a thrilling sense that's hard to describe, but to me it's something like resonance, synchronicity or immersively "being there". Similar to a feeling conjured at certain moments in an urban audio walk.

The repeatability, hence scalability (because of automation) of this immersive-yet-personal mode of storytelling, and particularly the way it railroads the player into pre-scripted behaviour, also made me think of a novel I read a week or two ago, Daemon by Leinad Zeraus (a.k.a. Daniel Suarez). The premise is that a computer game-designing genius unleashes a mind-bogglingly sophisticated bot (automated software program) when he dies, activating a fiendish plan with far-reaching consequences. Suarez elaborated on the real-life concerns behind his Crichtonesque fiction in a recent Seminar About Long-term Thinking for The Long Now Foundation [mp3, 35.9Mb].

Something about this automated ARG performance, and the way it recruits and requires one's cooperation, lends additional plausibility to the chilling , if far-fetched, vision Suarez lays out.

By the way, did I mention the game is really fun? Check it out.

Related posts:
> Humans have 23 years to go
> London's burning

(Thanks Simeon!)

Superstökt

Image: Screenshot from Superstruct

Hot on the heels of a recent post describing the IFTF's new alternate reality game, I'm very happy to announce that I'll be joining the Superstruct team as a gamemaster.

I'd certainly encourage readers of this blog, whose interests obviously stretch to strange immersive experiences of possible futures, to play -- email superstruct@iftf.org now to receive an alert about the September launch.

See you in 02019...

Update (13/08/08): And -- stop the press -- exciting news from HRCFS colleague Jake Dunagan, who will be joining the IFTF gang full-time, also starting in September.

Hawaii won't be the same without you, pardner.

Humans have 23 years to go

Do not be alarmed. Continue swimming naked.

Image: NASA† (via astroThink)

Last month, the newly-quadragenerian nonprofit thinktank Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, California, announced an exciting upcoming project. Superstruct, billed as "the world’s first massively multiplayer forecasting game", is an ARG run by avant-gamer Jane McGonigal and future-opener Jamais Cascio, set to unfold over six weeks, starting in September. Here's an extract from the press release (drafted as an in-world artifact -- nice):

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
SEPTEMBER 22, 2019

Humans have 23 years to go

Global Extinction Awareness System starts the countdown for Homo sapiens.

PALO ALTO, CA — Based on the results of a year-long supercomputer simulation, the Global Extinction Awareness System (GEAS) has reset the "survival horizon" for Homo sapiens - the human race - from "indefinite" to 23 years.

"The survival horizon identifies the point in time after which a threatened population is expected to experience a catastrophic collapse," GEAS president Audrey Chen said. "It is the point from which a species is unlikely to recover. By identifying a survival horizon of 2042, GEAS has given human civilization a definite deadline for making substantive changes to planet and practices."

According to Chen, the latest GEAS simulation harnessed over 70 petabytes of environmental, economic, and demographic data, and was cross-validated by ten different probabilistic models. The GEAS models revealed a potentially terminal combination of five so-called "super-threats", which represent a collision of environmental, economic, and social risks.
...
The spokesperson for United Nations Secretary General Vaira Vike-Freiberga released the following statement: "We are grateful for GEAS' work, and we treat their latest forecast with seriousness and profound gravity."

GEAS urges concerned citizens, families, corporations, institutions, and governments to talk to each other and begin making plans to deal with the super-threats.

Like last year's World Without Oil (McGonigal again, working with writerguy Ken Eklund), Superstruct is a serious game predicated on *real play rather than role play; people remain themselves in the scenario and bring their own resources to the table, making it a psychologically and socially meaningful simulation rather than an escapist diversion. So Superstruct is designed to be not only a source of future-oriented entertainment, but also, and more profoundly, an innovative distributed research strategy for IFTF's 02009 Ten-Year Forecast.

You can find a bit more about the game at the curiosity-piquingly brief FAQ, or this ARGNet article.

While awaiting its official beginning, prospective players and applicants for the gamemaster positions have been submitting short dinner-time vignettes to lead into the game. The scenario outline states: It's the summer of 2019. You are yourself, but 10 years in the future. Describe where you are having for dinner, what you're eating, and what you're thinking or talking about. How did you wind up there, compared to where you had dinner most often in the summer of 2008?

Here's mine:

To my left, the Taedong drifts by slowly. But I'm in a hurry -- for two reasons. First, it's raining like a sonofabitch, and second, I have places to be. So tonight, I'm having dinner at a McDonald's. For the first time in over twenty years.

Back in 01995, at age 15, I launched a personal boycott after seeing the golden arches on the Champs Elysees. It blew me away that the French, in all their gastronomic genius, could be wooed by such inglorious industrial tidbits. But, to be fair now, over the last decade, the company has reinvented itself. Completely. They faced a choice between a catastrophic erosion of customer base, as environmental and personal health came to the fore; or staying big by going local. In the summer of 2008, in New Haven CT, where I was staying with my very health-conscious girlfriend, every night we ate organic food we couldn't really afford, and avoided all foodstuffs deemed too "fast", for reasons that were sound at the time. However: that was the last summer of the old Mickey D's.

Early in 02009 -- just over ten years ago -- way ahead of legislation, and with rising transportation costs hot on their heels -- they were the first major fast-food concern to initiate a strategic five-year shift to a 200-mile limit for key suppliers. Where they led, others followed, pushing the development of hundreds, and eventually thousands, of micro-providers and farms within the radius of each branch. As inventory practices, and consumers, got more sophisticated, the actual carbon cost per item came indexed and included on the menu; as a result they now boast a cheeseburger footprint 20% lower than any other global provider. All-important signature condiments are still usually imported from further away, but the staple supplies come from close by. Of course, as a result, menus vary hugely from place to place; that's the model now. A few recognisable items remain -- the "Kun Mac" tasted more or less as before, though there's a popular animal-free beef option -- but the rice I'm eating tonight, declares the biodegradable package proudly, is from a farm just to the south, in the former DMZ; and my kim chee is made in a facility just a mile or so down the river.

All this is on my mind because of the project I came here to do. This is my first trip to Pyongyang, and with "Dear Leader" departed nine months ago at the ripe old age of 77, the transition to a more open era has been energetic. Many of the high-tech firms established in the south are in the midst of opening northern operations, and the whole peninsula is hungry for foresight expertise. I'm here with a delegation of futurists, many of them based in the lower half of the newly reunited country --- some I've known since we worked in Hawaii together over a decade ago. And now, in about an hour and a half, at the convention centre next door, we're staging an event that translates to English as "Food Court 02049". Executives from some of the biggest enterprises like Samsung and LG, and Daewoo Electric Vehicle Co. are interested in so-called smart- and nu-food technology (the intersection of agriculture, psychopharmacology and info science is a big deal at the moment -- they're touting "consumable software"). As a provocation to their "C-level" and "D-level" -- D for design -- teams, we're offering a series of meal options; some real, others simulated with help from master chefs and artists). There's a fish speakeasy (simulating endangered species that can't be consumed legally), a neo-aztec taco stand (culinary archeology is set to take off -- try the cuisines of an extinct civilisation!), an ayurvedically diagnostic, instant personal currymaker (which whips up a curiously neuroactive Saag Paneer), and just for fun, several bio-electrical charging posts for the possible post-singularity denizens of our imaginary 02049. We won't be serving Kun Macs at tonight's event -- that'll just be my no-longer-guilty indulgence at this newly opened branch. Sure, it would've been a stretch to imagine myself stooping to McDonald's ten years ago: but I figure, if McDonald's can change, then so can I.

My wife is no less health-conscious these days, but I've persuaded her to join me. Everyone says this is the best kim chee in town.

Related posts:
> Gaming alternative futures (anything but text)
> Gaming the end of oil (*See the comments to this post)
> World without oil photo essay

† Link not functioning at time of writing. If you're desperate to get to the original, try Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.

World without oil photo essay

New Summerfield, Texas.
29 December 020XX.











During my road trip in The American South with Mr Matt Jensen -- pretty good driver, really good designer -- at the end of December 02007, we passed this defunct gas station in tiny New Summerfield, Texas (pop. 998). Which gave me an idea for a photo essay exploring the experience of a World Without Oil (a bit like the alternate reality game blogged here recently).

The five shots above are unretouched, and in that sense as close to documentary (vs photoshopped hypotheticals) as photos get. They're plain little snaps -- I took them on a 6.0MP camera set to capture at 3.0MP -- and in the hands of a better photographer there'd be more artistry to them -- but the point that's interesting to me here is the possibility of present-day photographs evoking future scenarios.

In the context of a discussion about a post-oil America, they take on an air of foreboding; begging the question, in tones perhaps more subtle than most future artifacts seen in this space, "Is this our future?"

As I write it occurs to me that these images (and perhaps future artifacts in general) might be considered visual metonyms. Metonymy is a term from linguistics denoting expressions where a part stands in for the whole. (For example, "Check out my new wheels". Here, the word "wheels" stands in for an electric car, wisely selected by its proud owner in anticipation of an imminent oil crisis.)

However far I may appear to stray from it, my point is that such photos, like other futures artifacts, perhaps, serves as a stand-in -- an icon, a tip-of-the-iceberg -- for a much larger, more far-reaching social scenario.

Also, they highlight the fact that images of possible futures, including of post-peak oil scenarios, need not be technologically "futuristic" in the usual way in order to serve as fuel (pardon the pun) for deepening the conversation.

I sense some promise here, in this less labour-intensive approach to futures imagery, which I'm looking forward to exploring as we go along.

More shots to follow...

[On to part two | part three]

Gaming the end of oil

What better way to breathe life into scenarios than to place life inside them? And what better way to explore and stretch our personal and collective capacity for coping with change than through games?
[...]
The freedom to engage in social experimentation and expression is surely the single most precious, fragile, and yet unrealised element of our democratic political mythos. Gaming the future, insofar as it implies the possibility of actually doing what we have for centuries only told ourselves we do, could be revolutionary.

~the sceptical futuryst, Gaming alternative futures (anything but text), June 02006

In our early 21st century stocktake of the global problematique, the ugly twin of climate change is peak oil. The former could be seen as the natural dimension of blowback from our foresight-free experiment in rapacious energy consumption from roughly the dawn of the industrial revolution onwards; the latter as its economic counterpart.

As readers of this blog are well aware, there are disturbing arguments in the wind about the potential for chaos arising from these tremendous forces (e.g. James Howard Kunstler's The Long Emergency), even if their plausibility is hotly disputed by some. Questions invariably arise in the course of this debate around the extent to which businesses, governments, and ordinary people are prepared for the magnitude of social disruption that could occur. I don't find it a difficult argument to swallow that our society is unprepared for any but the most sanguine, mild, and trivial of scenarios in this vein. To the extent the environmental doomsayers prove correct, in light of our individual psychological and collective political difficulties coping with risks of this type, social disruption would seem to follow with inexorable logic.

So to me it's interesting, and for obvious reasons encouraging, to see the emergence of popular simulations of the end of (cheap, readily available) oil.

One is the forthcoming video game, Frontlines: Fuel of War. Here's the trailer:



The narrative voiceover says (posted at Energy Bulletin, 27 August 02007):

Oil was running out.
It's what we grew up in.
Post middle east,
Post peak oil,
Post everything.
What they call the long emergency.
It started slow.
Little things at first.
Lines at the pump,
that hot summer of 2008 when the blackouts started lasting weeks.

They said it would get better.
Something would save us.

Biofuels, solar power, cleaner nuke plants, maybe.

The depression hit in 2012
Africa ran out of food, then we did too.

People stopped trying to do anything about the problem and just tried to survive.

We watched them starve for 40 years and it just didn't seem real. But pretty soon the scenes we used to watch on the news were happening just down the street.

It's been happening for years. Now we're at a tipping point.

I was 16 when the Chinese and the Russians figured out they'd rather fight us than each other. We didn't waste time forming the coalition.

Now, we're staring each other down over the last wells of the Caspian.

... This is where it's going to happen, in towns too small to have a name, built in two weeks by oil contractors.

It's 2024, the 21st century. People ask we how we let this happen. I tell them we always knew.

The storm is coming.

A pretty grim little poem.

This story serves as backdrop (or, if you prefer, pretext) for a military game of the shoot-em-up genre -- check out the game's website, complete with bombastic soundtrack that sounds just like a Hans Zimmer effort -- in short, it seems to be a thrilling Hollywood-style slice of apocalypse as entertainment.

Which begs the question, "what's the message players walk away with?", duly asked in a CNN article published yesterday about the new game:

While Frontlines: Fuel of War is one of the first video games to capitalize on the doom-and-gloom scenario of what might happen when the world runs out of oil, it's not the only video game focusing on energy as oil prices rise, developing nations use more and more crude, and the world grapples with global warming fears.
[...]
Most oil industry analysts say peak oil production is many decades, if not hundreds of years away, and a transition to other sources will likely be more orderly than the scenario depicted in Frontline.

But a small and growing number of experts -- some well-respected -- say peak oil production is close or has happened and the transition will be much more painful than mainstream analysts predict.

Either way, [Frank DeLise, general manager of Kaos Studios, the company behind the game] said he hopes people will get more out of the game than just an adrenaline rush.

"If they play this game they will walk away thinking 'wow, energy is a problem," he said.

Experts say video games can be fun as well as educational, although the outcome largely depends on the content.

"They could in fact lead to changes in attitudes, beliefs, and ultimately, changes in behavior," said Craig Anderson, a professor of psychology at Iowa State University who studies the effects of video games on people.
[...]
But Anderson, the psychologist, is concerned about the message that violent games like Fuel of War may send to players.

"It may well change attitudes towards the use of these tactics as a political tool," he said. Players may think "of course we have to use military tactics to go take oil."

~"The end of oil is just a game", CNNMoney.com, 19 January 02008

I'm interested to know what others think about this kind of game: does it seem more likely to teach people to expect (and submit to) the worst case, or, as the general manager of Kaos claims, to recognise -- and, presumably, take actions to mitigate -- such a nightmare scenario?

There is an interesting comparison to be made here with the alternate reality game, "World Without Oil" (WWO), which ran in mid-02007 and sought to engage a broad audience in a collective simulation or scenario exercise:

It's a "what if?" game.
What if there was an oil crisis?
[...]
Because an oil crisis has deep and subtle effects, we asked everyone to help us imagine what an oil crisis would really be like. That's how people played the game - first they read the official news and what other players were saying. Then they told the story of how a shortfall of oil was affecting their own lives, and what they were doing to cope.
[...]
Over 1900 people signed up as players of World Without Oil, and submitted over 1500 stories from inside the "global oil crisis of 2007." Their work comprises a rich, complex, and eerily plausible collective imagining of such an event, complete with practical courses of action to help prevent such an event from actually happening.

For example, HRCFS's own Jake Dunagan posted this contribution to help flesh out the story for the Hawaii region.

A very effective approach, according to the organisers of WWO:

For [participants] and over 50,000 active observers, the process of collectively imagining and collaboratively chronicling the oil shock brought strong insight about oil dependency and energy policy. More than mere "raising awareness," WWO made the issues real, and this in turn led to real engagement and real change in people's lives.

I wonder in which ways the two approaches are most effective in activating political concern, and beyond that, behaviour change: on the one hand, sophisticated imagery that, although interactive, is basically constrained to a pre-defined narrative; and on the other hand, a less richly pre-imagined, but more reality-integrated simulation?

Of course I don't presume that these types are pure, let alone necessarily or intrinsically separate. Indeed, it seems to me that elements of both types of game -- immersive narratives with an escapist, entertainment objective, and collective scenario-building with a broader social goal in mind -- will shortly be integrated in pursuit of greater effectiveness in bringing scenarios to life, and life to scenarios.

Assuming, of course, that peak oil doesn't get us first.

(Thanks to Ira Rohter for the CNN link. See an introductory QuickTime video about the WWO game here.)