[Exi-bay-announce] Superstruct: How to invent the future by playing online games

[Adrian Tymes]

>               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.