From amara at amara.com Fri Oct 10 17:30:11 2008 From: amara at amara.com (Amara Graps) Date: Fri, 10 Oct 2008 11:30:11 -0600 Subject: [Exi-bay-announce] Superstruct: How to invent the future by playing online games Message-ID: Hi there... this looks like an interesting talk for you Bay Area folks... Amara Stanford EE Computer Systems Colloquium 4:15PM, Wednesday, Oct 15, 2008 HP Auditorium, Gates Computer Science Building B01 http://ee380.stanford.edu[1] Topic: Superstruct: How to invent the future by playing online games Speaker: Jane McGonigal Institute for the Future About the talk: Jane McGonigal, PhD takes play seriously. She is the director of game research and development at the Institute for the Future, where she studies how the games we play today might change the way we do real work and live our real lives in the coming decade. She has spent the past year developing a new platform at IFTF: massively multiplayer forecasting games, which aim to apply crowdsourcing theory and mass collaboration strategies to imagine and engineering a best-case scenario future. The first version of the platform -- a game called Superstruct -- launched October 6, 2008. Her talk will explore the theory behind MMFGs and the design principles of Superstruct -- and reveal the most interesting insights from the first 10 days of live gameplay! About the game: Visit Superstruct,the on-line game, at it's sites, http://superstructgame.org, and participate if you want. Superstruct is the world???s first massively multiplayer forecasting game. By playing the game, you???ll help chronicle the world of 2019--and imagine how we might solve the problems we'll face. Because this is about more than just envisioning the future. It???s about making the future, inventing new ways to organize the human race and augment our collective human potential. Q: Why should I play Superstruct? A: Here are some of favorite reasons: Because you???re curious about the future, because you want to make friends and collaborators all over the planet, because you want to learn how to become a future forecaster, and because you want to change the world. Q: What does ???superstruct??? mean? Su`per`struct?? v. t. 1.To build over or upon another structure; to erect upon a foundation. Superstructing is what humans do. We build new structures on old structures. We build media on top of language and communication networks. We build communities on top of family structures. We build corporations on top of platforms for manufacturing, marketing, and distribution. Superstructing has allowed us to survive in the past and it will help us survive the super-threats. Q: Who can play Superstruct? Everyone! The more players, the better the collective forecast. Q: How do I play Superstruct? A: Superstruct is played on forums, blogs, videos, wikis, and other familiar online spaces. We show you the world as it might look in 2019. You show us what it???s like to live there. Bring what you know and who you know, and we???ll all figure out how to make 2019 a world we want to live in. Q: Who is making Superstruct? A: Superstruct is being developed by the Ten-Year Forecast team at the Institute for the Future, a not-for-profit think tank based in Palo Alto, California. Project leads include TYF director Kathi Vian, blogger and futurist Jamais Cascio, and game designer Jane McGonigal. Q: When can I play Superstruct? A: The game starts October 6, 2008, and it will last for six weeks. Top Superstructure Honors will be given out by our celebrity game masters??? favorite superstructures at the end of the game, on November 17. Slides: There is no downloadable version of the slides for this talk available at this time. About the speaker: In addition to her work at IFTF, Jane is the founder of Avant Game and has designed numerous award-winning games, most recently The Lost Ring, in which she invented a new sport for the Summer 2008 Olympics, and World Without Oil, a collaborative simulation -- or historical pre-enactment -- of a global oil shortage. Her academic research includes articles on how to design games that create collective intelligences, how to architect massively-scaled community, and how to develop scoring algorithms that motivate collaboration. Embedded Links: [ 1 ] http://ee380.stanford.edu ABOUT THE COLLOQUIUM: See the Colloquium website, http://ee380.stanford.edu, for scheduled speakers, FAQ, and additional information. Stanford and SCPD students can enroll in EE380 for one unit of credit. Anyone is welcome to attend; talks are webcast live and archived for on-demand viewing over the web. MAILING LIST INFORMATION: This announcement is sent to multiple mailing lists. If you are signed up on our private EE380 list you can remove yourself using the widget at the upper left hand corner of the Colloquium web page. Other lists have other management protocols. +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | This message was sent via the Stanford Computer Science Department | | colloquium mailing list. | | To be added to, or removed from, the list, please go to: | | https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/colloq-local-list | | For more info, send an empty message to colloq-request at cs.stanford.edu | | For directions to Stanford, see http://www-forum.stanford.edu | +-------------------------------------------------------------------------xcl+ -- ********************************************************** Amara Graps, Ph.D. | Department of Space Studies | amara at boulder.swri.edu Southwest Research Institute | tel: +1 (720) 240-0128 1050 Walnut St., Suite 300 | fax: +1 (303) 546-9687 Boulder, Colorado 80302 USA | www.amara.com ********************************************************** I'M SIGNIFICANT!...screamed the dust speck. -- Calvin From wingcat at pacbell.net Thu Oct 16 00:35:38 2008 From: wingcat at pacbell.net (Adrian Tymes) Date: Wed, 15 Oct 2008 17:35:38 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Exi-bay-announce] Superstruct: How to invent the future by playing online games In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <468725.12521.qm@web81601.mail.mud.yahoo.com> > Stanford EE Computer Systems Colloquium > 4:15PM, Wednesday, Oct 15, 2008 > HP Auditorium, Gates Computer Science Building B01 > http://ee380.stanford.edu[1] > > Topic: Superstruct: How to invent the future by playing > online games > > Speaker: Jane McGonigal > Institute for the Future I was there. Jane was not. Neither was anything to do with EE380; that time/date slot for that room was, it turns out, reserved for another course weeks in advance. That said, Superstruct seems to be a game of disasturbation. The game posits that, in 2019, the world has gone to hell in a handbasket. The people who register on the site are supposedly empowered to Do Something About It. The way to do it is by joining groups, chatting about it, and posting stories of the world in 2019. ...almost all of the posted stuff is about how the world is getting f'ed up, with few suggestions about how to save the world. The only in-game rewards come from agreeing with philosophy stated in hard-to-penetrate jargon (unless you read the detail pages). Just for grins, I posted one story that takes the above and goes over the top, to see if perhaps that can get a message across to the game's moderators...but I doubt it'll even be noticed: http://superstructgame.org/StoryView/449 TLDR version: it's a big waste of time. From amara at amara.com Thu Oct 16 07:08:55 2008 From: amara at amara.com (Amara Graps) Date: Thu, 16 Oct 2008 01:08:55 -0600 Subject: [Exi-bay-announce] Superstruct: How to invent the future by playing online games In-Reply-To: <468725.12521.qm@web81601.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <468725.12521.qm@web81601.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: I'm really sorry Adrian, I copied and pasted that info directly from the information I received that they sent on the Stanford mailing list. They must have changed the location or something about the talk and then did a lousy job of informing people of the change. So I won't trust anything from that mailing list from now on. Many apologies. :-( Amara > > Stanford EE Computer Systems Colloquium >> 4:15PM, Wednesday, Oct 15, 2008 >> HP Auditorium, Gates Computer Science Building B01 >> http://ee380.stanford.edu[1] >> >> Topic: Superstruct: How to invent the future by playing >> online games >> >> Speaker: Jane McGonigal >> Institute for the Future > >I was there. Jane was not. Neither was anything to do with >EE380; that time/date slot for that room was, it turns out, >reserved for another course weeks in advance. -- Amara Graps, PhD www.amara.com Research Scientist, Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado From wingcat at pacbell.net Thu Oct 16 07:53:32 2008 From: wingcat at pacbell.net (Adrian Tymes) Date: Thu, 16 Oct 2008 00:53:32 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Exi-bay-announce] Superstruct: How to invent the future by playing online games In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <216038.87993.qm@web81602.mail.mud.yahoo.com> For what it's worth, I checked the course Web site. It still says the talk was then and there - despite that time slot being reserved for a ME course (I forget the number, but it was "Technology In National Security"). You might want to point this out to whoever put it on the mailing list you got it from in the first place: they may think it happened, and need to know about this disconnect. --- On Thu, 10/16/08, Amara Graps wrote: > I'm really sorry Adrian, I copied and pasted that info > directly > from the information I received that they sent on the > Stanford mailing > list. They must have changed the location or something > about the talk > and then did a lousy job of informing people of the > change. So I > won't trust anything from that mailing list from now > on. Many > apologies. :-( > > Amara > > > > Stanford EE Computer Systems > Colloquium > >> 4:15PM, Wednesday, Oct 15, 2008 > >> HP Auditorium, Gates Computer Science > Building B01 > >> http://ee380.stanford.edu[1] > >> > >> Topic: Superstruct: How to invent the future > by playing > >> online games > >> > >> Speaker: Jane McGonigal > >> Institute for the Future > > > >I was there. Jane was not. Neither was anything to do > with > >EE380; that time/date slot for that room was, it turns > out, > >reserved for another course weeks in advance. > > -- > > Amara Graps, PhD www.amara.com > Research Scientist, Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), > Boulder, Colorado