Inventing The Future With Games

A new online video game launches today that challenges users to invent what the future will look like.

Superstruct plunges players into the world of 2019. Multiple threats face humankind, and our role as players is to come up with solutions for survival. Players need to propose ways of dealing with devastating outbreaks of a pandemic respiratory disease, feeding the world’s hungry after the food supply chain is broken, a power struggle over which alternative energy will replace oil, climate refugees who have fled homelands destroyed by global warming, and hackers who are bringing down global information networks.

The world’s first massively multiplayer forecasting game is a project of a California thinktank called The Institute for the Future. We called the Institute’s resident game designer, Jane McGonigal, to find out more.

The much-hyped game Spore is billing itself as a massively single player game. The newest brainchild of game designer Will Wright, creator of the Sims franchise (SimCity, SimEarth, SimAnt, etc.) has gotten a lot of buzz, and incorporates elements of social networking. BBC reporter Molly Bentley attended the game’s official launch in California last month, and filed this report for BBC's Digital Planet.

Spore has done quite well, selling more than a million copies since it launched a month ago. Forbes reports that at least half a million people have downloaded the game illegally via file-sharing networks. Many Spore owners are upset, though, with the game’s publisher, Electronic Arts, for adding a copy protection system called SecuROM that limits the number of times you can install it on your hard drive. Gamers say it’s too restrictive - they’ve filed a class action lawsuit against the publisher.