The Futures Foundation

Massively Multiplayer Forecasting Games could offer a new tool for exploring the future, using "the wisdom of crowds" to imagine new solutions, according to the California-based Institute for the Future (IFTF), an independent non-profit organization.  The Institute has launched a new research platform composed of games designed to address real world problems.

"Chronicle the dark world of 2019. Then help us figure out how to fix it," says the IFTF, inviting players to participate in what they call the world’s first Massively Multiplayer Forecasting Game: Superstruct.

"More than just about imagining what lies ahead, Superstruct is about building a better, stronger future. It’s about inventing new ways to organize the human race and augment our collective human potential. 

The recent FAO Summit in Rome called for $10 billion more to pay for higher food prices. Yet, without financial reforms, this money will merely fatten the players in the global casino.

The games of traders, speculators, hedge funds, private equity and even pension funds and charitable foundation and university portfolio managers, driving up prices of oil and food, invoke increasing outrage and demands for reform.

Ever since the 1980s when Britain’s Margaret Thatcher and US President Ronald Reagan spurred de-regulation of global finance and privatization, market fundamentalism became the main game.

But at last the world is seeing the difference between money and real wealth, between “demand” in markets and the real needs of people without money.  We cringe at the tragic pictures of poor people eyeing abundant, tempting supplies of food in the local markets around the world but who are forced to go away hungry or make their children patties made of mud, spices and whatever scraps of vegetation they can find.