Refugee Run

Invitation to Refugee Run, Davos 02009 | via Aid Watch

Late last month, NYU economics professor William Easterly blogged about an invitation he received for an unusual event in Davos, Switzerland, from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. From the invitation text:

During this year's Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum, we would like to invite you to an experience unlike any other on the agenda: an opportunity to step into the world of conflict and experience life as a refugee.

Just five minutes' walk from the Congress Centre, you can enter a simulated environment that will thrust you into a war zone. You will meet a rebel attack, navigate a mine field and battle life in a refugee camp. (Spoiler alert: No harm will come to you!)

Sounds pretty interesting to me.  But Easterly, a noted foreign aid and development expert, was unequivocal in his disdain:

Can Davos man empathize with refugees when he or she is not in danger and is going back to a luxury banquet and hotel room afterwards? Isn’t this just a tad different from the life of an actual refugee, at risk of all too real rape, murder, hunger, and disease?

Did the words "insensitive," "dehumanizing," or "disrespectful" (not to mention "ludicrous") ever come up in discussing the plans for “Refugee Run”?
...
Of course, I understand that there were good intentions here, that you really want rich people to have a consciousness of tragedies elsewhere in the world, and mobilize help for the victims. However, I think a Refugee Theme Park crosses a line that should not be crossed. Sensationalizing and dehumanizing and patronizing results in bad aid policy – if you have little respect for the dignity of individuals you are trying to help, you are not going to give THEM much say in what THEY want and need, and how you can help THEM help themselves?

To be fair, it does seem wise to question the bona fides of such an unusual attempt to bridge the world of the high-paid executive to that of the global refugee underclass, 42 million strong. Perhaps portions of the ("VIP event") invitation's wording lent it to misinterpretation as a "dehumanizing" exercise. Certainly, the WEF's annual invitation-only gathering of global business leaders at a Swiss alpine resort is not infrequently accused of complicity in the large-scale problems it purports to address, and indeed one could go further along these lines, taking the "development" paradigm in general to task, for selling to the world's poor a tissue of "used futures" (the memorable term of futures scholar Sohail Inayatullah).

So, no doubt the concerns Easterly voices are sincere, but based on the additional information I've been able to find, such as this description by the event organisers, Refugee Run doesn't seem in any way to deserve such unsparing criticism. Like him, I didn't attend the simulation, but I have done some background research (an approach the critics appear to have eschewed) and it comes off looking quite different on closer inspection.

It was not designed solely for the Davos audience, but is in fact one of several "Life X-perience" role-playing simulations developed by the Crossroads Foundation, a nonprofit organisation based in Hong Kong. Their Crossroads Global Village facility regularly stages a range of activities in this vein -- AIDS X-perience, Blind X-perience, Level Playing Field, and others -- intended to "allow participants to walk in the shoes of those who battle global need". Refugee Run, along with Slum Survivor, is given an Intensity rating of ten out of ten.

Check out this news clip (~4 mins) from the Wall Street Journal...

(See also this Bloomberg report via YouTube.)

My own impression is that an experiential taste of refugee life, if combined with a genuine will to compassion -- a key ingredient which cannot be simulated -- could be highly thought provoking in the best sense. It's no substitute, to be sure, for actual lived experience in fear of violence, disease, rape, starvation and pervasive alienation; but by the same token, is bound to be much more effective than any number of speeches, statistics, or videos.

It's interesting to me that some find this bold initiative to be in such poor taste (check out the numerous comments to the original post, which include plenty of readers scandalised on the strength of Easterly's description of the event, as well as some thoughtful replies by folks who have actually taken part in it).

I find myself wondering whether simulation and role play can seem unequal to the task of engaging consideration of serious issues, and thus attract easy scorn, in the minds of those for whom, for adults, at least, they remain peripheral and undervalued forms of learning; especially in some academic settings. For them, perhaps, on hearing about an experiential or immersive scenario, the most readily available analog is what they consider frivolous entertainment; yielding, in this case, the sadly dismissive notion of a "Refugee Theme Park", which, it follows, "crosses a line that should not be crossed".

The net effect is a misunderstood, and so missed, opportunity. As I see it, that opportunity is to address, not just rhetorically but actively, a profoundly important question -- posed by Easterly and quoted at the start of this post -- about the limits of empathy.

Related posts:
> Where every day is career day
> Experiential scenarios on video
> Today at Tomorrowland: yesterday's future
> Visit Venice, see Baghdad

(via Perspective 2.0, "Taking experience design too far?")

Before getting ink, get pixels

Previz -- Tattoo project
Image: Loïc Zimmermann, via CGSociety (also here)

Yesterday I came across a fascinating example of visualisation, or multimedia-enabled forethought, applied in an unusual domain: illustrating the body.

French CG artist Loïc Zimmermann (a.k.a. e338) explains:

I've been thinking of having a tattoo for years and years now. Obviously I wanted to draw it by myself and I recently felt like I was ready for that.

As soon as i found a crazy guy capable (technicaly) of doing something really precise, I started the design process.
...
Since I wanted to do something really precise regarding the anatomy, I felt I could use a little help in order to be as close as possible to the reality.

My work at the moment consists in doing characters for a videoGame company, Quantic Dream, and to do so, after the casting is done, we use 3D scanners of the faces as a guideline for the modelling process.

I asked my fella Thierry, character supervisor there, if we could manage a scan session of my body and he said yeah ( I told you he's cool right?).

Patches from Zimmermann's body scan

A wireframe topology overlaid on the assembled scan

The ZBrush (digital sculpting software) version

The tattoo design, laid flat
Above images: Loic Zimmermann, via CGSociety (see also here)

A rendered digital version of the artist's body...

...with the tattoo added
[See also this version, and a closeup here]

Zimmermann has written about the whole process in a series of posts since mid-02007...

The work in progress, "après 11h de torture"
Photo via Loïc Zimmermann's blog

...announcing in March this year that this, his first tattoo, was complete.

After more than 39 hours of work... done.
Photo via Loïc Zimmerman's blog

First things first: this is a shockingly great piece of artwork. Quite a few comments at his blog are to the effect that "I never wanted a tattoo, now I do". I see where they're coming from.

Second, Zimmermann's is a really interesting, innovative use of 3D modelling. Whether you happen to be interested in tattoo art or not, this process for visually thinking out a high-stakes personal decision represents a mode of engaging possibility that until recently was unavailable. A number of online sources [e.g.1, e.g.2] seem to be labouring under the misconception that this is a brilliant new turnkey program "invented" to enable the tattoo-envying masses to look before they leap. Unless the misconception is mine, at this point it's more in the nature of an extremely labour intensive artistic and personal investment on Zimmermann's part, done for his own purposes. But it does also strike me as the kind of application idea that may well become available before too long (if in a somewhat crappy, attenuated form) to Joe and Jane Internet, using multi-angle webcam shots and user-uploaded designs.

In recent months, we've come across a few interesting instances of wearable foresight aids -- the old suit, the empathy belly, and the alertness enhancing device. We've also seen a concept design for sanitising a dystopian future with a less distressing appearance. Here is a contrasting example of prosthetic foresight, not to be worn on the body but to imagine its transformation; an ingenious and rather lovely artist's hack of 3D modelling tools, powerfully envisioning a future state for Zimmermann to contemplate during his 40-odd hours under the tattooist's needle.

The tattoo has apparently delivered on its promise. This month he made a start on part deux.

(via Yoso tattoo studio)

Update (11FEB10): I wrote in Sept '08: "it does also strike me as the kind of application idea that may well become available before too long (if in a somewhat crappy, attenuated form) to Joe and Jane Internet, using multi-angle webcam shots and user-uploaded designs."

Now the Internet says: "Have you ever wondered what a tattoo or multiple tattoos might look like on you? Why not try it out virtually before you really get it done! You can use pre-loaded pictures and body art or upload your own. Another way to try it before you buy it, and it's all for under $10 for a whole year." Link (Thanks Sarah!)

Related posts:
> Facing future
> Fatigue, irritability, and much, much more!

Where every day is career day

Images of Wannado City via About.com: Theme Parks

A look at Wannado City™, "America's first indoor role-playing theme park for kids":

Wannado City is a theme park the size of three football fields built in the middle of Sawgrass Mills, a shopping centre complex in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. It is a kid-sized replica of a real city and the little ones behave like adults here.

They work, are (mostly) law abiding, put out fires and deposit their pay-cheques into an interest earning account at the State Farm Bank. Not in dollars, but in Wongas, the official Wannado City currency.
...
The value of money is very important to the inventor of Wannado City. "This city for kids should be as close to reality as possible," says Luis Laresgoiti, 41, a tall slim Mexican man who sets out his vision in a quiet, soft voice. "Money is the most important fuel in every city and every country – also in Wannado City."
...
Children three to 13 years old can choose between 120 different professions.
...
In addition, 12 sponsors and their logos give the children's work the stamp of reality. [...] The money that the kidizens (junior citizens) accrue is managed at the State Farm Bank, an American financial firm that offers insurance and bank services. 'Watch how your Wongas grow,' exclaims the bank slogan.
...
Hidden interests are discovered in Wannado City, says [mother Judy Odsess]. "Sarah didn’t know what she wanted to do, now she wants to go in to television." The state of Florida agrees. Schools are sending entire classes on school trips to Wannado City with the blessings of the teachers and the parents.

Judy Odsess also likes Wannado because it’s safe for her daughters. A security system inspired by the casino city Las Vegas takes care of total child protection.
...
In Wannado City no one is unemployed. The choice of profession is free and the middle class is intact. Outsourcing doesn’t exist. Wannado City presents itself as a city without any ideology.

~Peter Hossli, "When I Grow Up", Open Skies (reproduced at Hossli.com), 1 November 02005.

For those of us not blessed to live within an SUV ride of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, it's possible to get a sense of what the Wannado City experience might be like through a variety of home videos posted at YouTube, where one also finds that local TV news services have filed cooperatively infomercial-esque stories about the park (link). Since journalist Hossli interviewed its founder, however, some of the intended verisimilitude appears to have been traded in for unadulterated fantasy. Wannado City has lately been advertising a Jurassic Park-style "dinosaur adventure" in which "an era is reborn" and "mysterious creatures from the past are unleashed" (link). This move highlights the challenge, ubiquitous in pedagogically-oriented simulations, of blending education with entertainment: it's easy to lapse into excess of one or the other.

The experiential learning idea behind the $40 million facility (a figure quoted in a TV news spot linked above) here is fascinating to me. Visiting kids get a chance to do "what they wanna do" (i.e., when they grow up), sampling any of 120 professions, meanwhile earning and spending in the Wannado City micro-economy set within the giant Sawgrass Mills Mall, the largest shopping centre in the state of Florida. It would be great to see some scholarly analysis of the educational attributes of this experience, but a search at Google Scholar for "Wannado" turns up only a few English-language papers, the main theme in which seems to be the use of RFID tags in patrons' wrist-worn tracking devices. Even putting to one side the Foucauldian surveillance apparatus at play here, and notwithstanding its claims to be a "city without any ideology", it's not hard to spot a distinct ideological bent mixed in with all the fun. Where some onlookers will discern valuable learning, or harmless amusement, others are sure to find consumerist indoctrination. Of course, all that depends on your politics: what's intriguing me from a futures perspective is that the role-play here recreates occupations that are liable to change radically, or even disappear, by the time these kids enter the workforce.

Whether or how this matters is an interesting question that goes to the heart of what we believe education is about.

My bias, of course, is that in times of massive change, to prepare ourselves and our children for situations that don't yet exist is at least as important as being skilled in existing ones. Which leads me to wonder about the prospects for role-playing and simulation settings that offer the opportunity to experience not only existing jobs (and animatronic dinosaurs), but also -- or instead -- ways of life that could exist in times to come.

Related posts:
> Today at Tomorrowland: yesterday's future

(Article via swissmiss)

Facing future

Arrested Development is one of the great, and way underrated, television comedies. Written, acted and edited to whip-smart perfection; if you like dark, surreal humour about family dysfunction you owe it to yourself to get familiar. I've just finished watching the first season again, which includes a typically bizarre exchange between Michael (Jason Bateman) and his twin sister Lindsay (Portia de Rossi) about one of Lindsay's doomed business ventures, "Mommy, What Will I Look Like?" (Bluthcyclopedia link).

Michael: Lindsay, I'm not just going to cut you a check so you can throw it away on another failed business, okay?

Lindsay: Hey! "Mommy, What Will I Look Like?" should have worked.

Narrator: Lindsay had once started a photo enhancing service, which gave new parents a glimpse at what their infants would look like in half a century.

Lindsay: You put an ugly kid in, you can't be surprised when an ugly adult comes out.





(Stills captured from Arrested Development, Season 1 Episode 22, "Let 'em Eat Cake")

In the same vein, and also scary as hell, I found a project called "Face of the Future" run by the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. You can upload photos and use the "Face Transformer", "Face Averager", or "Face Morpher" to manipulate them.

Here's me, shall we say, when I'm 64...


I'm not so sure about the full head of hair, but whatever shortcomings this has in terms of realism, it's still a bit unnerving to recognise the likeness in an image thus transformed.

No wonder "Mommy, What Will I look Like?" tanked.

Fatigue, irritability, and much, much more!

Since the Nissan old suit, I've been curious about other wearable simulators. Check this out...

The Empathy Belly® Pregnancy Simulator | Image: Birthways, Inc.

"The Empathy Belly"® Pregnancy Simulator lets you know what it feels like to be pregnant! It is a multi-component, weighted "garment" that will -- through medically accurate simulation -- enable men, women, teenage girls and boys to experience over 20 symptoms and effects of pregnancy, including:

• Weight gain of 30 pounds (13.6 kg.)
• Fetal kicking and stroking movements
• Shallow breathing and shortness of breath
• Increased blood pressure, pulse and body temperature
• Bladder pressure and frequency of urination
• Low backaches; shift in center of gravity; waddling
• Fatigue, irritability, and much, much more!

"About The Belly"

Is this for real, I wondered? Turns out that, yes, it is...

"I wish you were pregnant for a day," she said. "Just to feel what it’s like!"

Millions of women have expressed similar fantasies to their husbands and boyfriends, which explains the ongoing success of "The Empathy Belly" pregnancy simulator.
[...]
As an educational tool, the Empathy Belly has numerous applications.

Hollywood uses it to train actresses preparing for pregnant roles, although the suits are too cumbersome to wear during actual scenes.

Ford Motor Co. engineers have worn them to design more pregnant-friendly cars, and sociologists have used them to study attitudes about pregnancy in the workplace.

Hospitals use the belly to give expecting fathers a taste of the physical and psychological impact of pregnancy. And it is also widely used with teenage boys and girls to encourage celibacy (or birth control).

The simulator is meant to be worn for only 30 minutes. In order to wear it for more than three hours in an unsupervised environment, I had to sign multiple health waivers.
[...]
My wife squeezes my fake body parts and is amused to see me walk like Baby Huey, the oversized cartoon duck. Mission accomplished. But she also notes I am not experiencing any heartburn (her archnemesis) or water retention in my legs and ankles. She’s absolutely correct, but a suit like this could never 100 percent duplicate her experience.
[...]
Overall, simulated motherhood wasn’t too much of an ordeal until the evening, when Stacy convinced me to sleep in the suit for "the full experience." I took her advice and grabbed a couch cushion to use as a body pillow. Resting on my back for the first time, it felt like a rhino was stomping on my stomach in hiking boots.

I spent the entire night shifting between three different positions: laying on my right or left sides and propped up sitting against the couch cushion. Each time I switched positions, I felt the rhino’s boots kick in again. And I asked myself: How do pregnant women get any serious sleep?

Answer: They often don’t.

~Darren Garnick, "Labor of love: Dad tries 'Belly' on for size", Boston Herald, 9 July 02007.

Garnick's 24 hours of simulated pregnancy earned him a measure of notoriety. Other men have since taken up the challenge, for instance, the hosts of Internet TV show Dadlabs; "An edgy, fun and Informative show for dads and the women who tolerate and/or love them".


(Video posted 2 April 02008.)

Meanwhile, the same company can also outfit you to get a feel for the adverse health effects of heavy smoking, with "The Empathy Lungs"™ C.O.P.D. Simulator -- C.O.P.D. stands for "Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (which is comprised primarily of Emphysema and/or Chronic Bronchitis), as well as Asthma and Lung Cancer."



Although like all infomercials it verges on self-parody, to me this really is a fascinating intervention. A couple of observations made during the video by Empathy Lungs co-inventor Linda Ware:

Both I, and the professionals I interviewed, all agreed on one fact: that whatever wrongdoing or self-destructive behaviour people are engaged in, be it smoking, drinking too much, overeating until they're obese etc, people are experts at rationalising and staying in denial about how much harm they are causing themselves.
[...]
Given this pervasive denial of smokers, and knowing as an educator that experience is a much more persuasive teacher than just words, I set out to develop a device that would simulate the experience of C.O.P.D. to let smokers get a sneak preview of the probable future if they kept smoking.
[...]
The Empathy Lungs is a multi-component garment, put on only by a professional in the medical, educational, or social service fields. It is designed to be worn once by each person, for as little as ten minutes, in an office or classroom setting. In a medically accurate manner, the Empathy Lungs realistically simulates ten of the physical and emotional symptoms of C.O.P.D.
[...]
The exciting thing about the Empathy Lungs is that, since it gives people an experience that is tangible, here-and-now, visceral and emotional, it gets past the wall of denial. You put it on someone, and suddenly they feel debilitated, handicapped, and sick. Then, even after just ten minutes, you take it off of them, and they are elated that the C.O.P.D. wasn't real -- this time.

The Empathy Belly and Empathy Lungs each simulate physiological states that in some cases represent genuine future possibilities for the wearer, and in other cases might be used by parties seeking a more empathic (Greek: empatheia "passion", from en- "in" + pathos "feeling") comprehension of the lives of others -- for instance, the belly for fathers-to-be; the lungs for families of elderly smokers. In relation to the pregnancy simulator, the verisimilitude of the suit may be less important than the heuristic value of encountering the "shape" of the experience, so to speak; not to mention the social importance of simply being willing to try it on. This certainly seems to be the case with the men who wore the belly in public -- both Garnick's article and the Dadlabs show emphasise, if light heartedly, the extremely positive response from women to their daring.

Both these outfits prompt me to spend more time considering the values and limitations of "embodied foresight" generally. For me, the specific bodily states (old age, pregnancy, ill health) stand as examples of a "wearable" approach of thinking and feeling ahead, which can also be accomplished by other kinds of intervention. Simulated and vicarious experiences of possible futures range from thought experiments, to films, to participatory exercises and games, through to -- some day soon -- direct neural interface; all these and more can be located on a continuum of foresight (or rather foresense) activities.

Now, the particular uses that existing simulation suits may be put to are bound to vary, of course, and I'm less enthused by some than others. For instance, I'm not especially keen on the Empathy Belly being used to scare teenagers into not having sex. Then again, maybe ten minutes in a "harrassed parent of a pregnant teenager" suit would change my mind.

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.)