Superstructing

When the world lies close to disaster, who do you call? Everyone.

Superstruct is a new online and real-life forecasting life game that presents players with the scary scenario that we have suddenly been popped into the year 2019, faced with a variety of globe-destroying threats.

Thousands of people around the world are going to be playing it, in the hope of stumbling upon some useful solutions to future problems through the entropic process of crowdsourcing. Last night I went to a Superstruct meeting in the City of London, where a group of girl geeks (and a few blokes) gave it a shot.

The threat we dealt with was called 'Ravenous': The earth is in the throes of a food crisis, the price of tortilla flour has gone through the roof, and the food chain is broken:



So what did we come up with? Well, one person suggested that, rather than rearing conventional livestock, we should start eating more productive, GM-manipulated animals ("clonetucky fried chicken" anyone?). Others backed the more sober idea of food rationing, along with a return to a more self-sufficient lifestyle.

My little suggestion was that rather than using land to grow biofuels, we should source energy from more exciting quarters. If not nuclear, then by 2019 it's possible that fission power will be closer to reality, or we could create massive renewable plants, like solar farms in the world's deserts.

The details of our brainstorming session will soon be available on the Girl Geek Dinners website.

What I'd really love to know is if anyone has any innovative technological solutions to the 'Ravenous' problem. The nice thing about playing a forecasting game is that your imagination can go wild, so feel free to post any wild ideas...

Photo of our Superstructing session courtesy of fellow girl geek Rebecca Caroe.