==== Superstruct ====

Report by Martin Brolin about activities in the Superstruct [[ARG]].

== What is Superstruct? ==

It's the world's first massively multiplayer forecasting game.
  * 5 supertreats are identified for the year 2019, GEAS volunteers (players) are joining in this game to find solutions.
  * You can file a report about your 2019 experiences (= a story)
  * you can discuss tactics (= a strategy)
  * you can find new ways to collaborate, or build solutions (= a superstruct)

== My activities ==

  * filed a report about how an organization (Tsunamipants Un-Ltd.) has grown from a movement of part-time survival-engineering enthusiasts to become the worlds leading knowledge base on portable solutions to surviving extreme weather, disease and guerilla warfare.
  * Joined Urban Gardening initiatives and set up Superstructs for protection of urban gardens from poaching and bio-piracy.
  * Set up initiative to connect Urban gardens with green corridors for pollinators.
  * Set up a superstruct to find out what happened to things like Permaculture, Cradle to Cradle, etc.
  * Set up 'GEAS volunteers coordination Superstructs' for all continents and one for international waters.
  * Put out call for 'First Aid hacks' among amateur survival engineers.
  * First medical hack: the Darun Setan ZD-314 series of fruitjuicers can be hacked as an Implantable Cardioverter-Defibrilator.
  * Second medical hack: Nasal purifier can be made from: http://www.cpapman.com/DREAMFIT.JPG
  * Report: Botanical sanctuaries and national parks are plundered for possible cure against ReDS (a disease in 2019).
  * introduced the term Terror Retail, black markets selling dodgy health solutions.
  * Report: The Association of European Zoo-s is organizing a quarantine of all primates against ReDS to Gibraltar.
  * Joined P2P Medical Care superstruct.
  * Report: Fruitfly navigated ReDS reconnaissance ROV, blueprints available for fabbers.
  * Discussion: What do we do if the initial excitement of our Superthreats wears of and it just becomes uninspiringly awful?
  * the introduction of the term [[Galactus Syndrome]]

== Interesting ideas in the Game ==

  * hacking homo sapience: ways we can exploited our own primate behaviours.
  * criticism against the prolific use of urban gardening and solarpanels as ultimate solutions to all problems everywhere.
  * Cross-species-politics: artificial intelligence, human enhancement and human rights for all Great apes diffuse old borders.
  * Viral sovereignty: any pathogen found local to a state (whether existing in nature or engineered) is the inherent intellectual property of that state.
  * A public map of urban wild food sources.
  * [[foxp2]]
  * A Distributed Workforce Network, in emergency situations, turn your large company into many small ones.
  * Dunbar's Number; a direct corrolation between brain size and size of social groups. We have a very direct, very hardwired limit on the number of people who we are capable of treating like people. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

== My observations ==

  * This looks like much more text-based than I thought and there is very little contact between players so far.
  * Some people use the game to promote their site / idea, I guess I do that too, I've put my survival engineering research in there.
  * Third day of the game the first criticism of 'unrealistic' forecasting has appeared. I view this as the first signs of real discussion.
  * most activity until day 4 is mainly targeting niche problems or very general philosophy, the organizational stuff looks very Western, with a lot of fabbing, hacking and gardening involved. The stories that are written are very personal, while the strategic things are written rather dry and impersonal.
  * The actual superstructing is quite ineffective, you set up your kind of structure for people to join. Then some join it, and then nothing happens  any more. Within this superstructing-set-up there is not enough infrastructure for people to work together.
  * The discussions are not turning up many brilliant new insight yet. Day 8.
  * Contact between players is slowly picking up.
  * There is a kind of rather vulgar excitement in Superstruct, the kind that drives disaster-tourism. It's not a pretty sight. I wonder how many African former child-soldiers would be eager to play this game. As Busdriver says: Recreational Paranoia Is the Sport of Now. A superthreat, it worked for Bush and it works for Superstruct.
  * Looking at player profiles I estimate 60% of players is a small sustainable farmer in 2019.
  * I get the impression the game is massively dominated by American and European players of a certain age-group, with few specialists like physicians, farmers, etc.  This probably makes the forecasting unreliable.
  * I've not played for two weeks, but little seems to have developed in the discussions. Somebody made a better website interface called Reconstruct but it has only 40 members.

== Game technical points ==
  * player-profiles should have been searchable so you can connect to people you need.
  * the computervoice in the 5 introductions to the game is too difficult to understand for non-native English speakers.
  * a few too many links are not working on the site
  * any player with a 'space' in his/her name errors when sending a message.
  * early work disappears beneath more recent stuff, so ideas and discussions tend to be repeated.
  * Superstruct and Discussion titles are now editable, which helps to improve their efficiency during the evolution of the game.
  * On day 9 new features have appeared on the site, live chat, support pages, a more official complaints department, and an announcement of skills search among players. This was sent only to the **335 players** active in more than 1 superstruct.