What could you do if access to space was as cheap and accessible as the Web is today?
This is the premise of a genius massively multi-player thought experiment game invented by my idol Jane McGonigal, amongst others who I can’t quite determine, is to contemplate the answer to the above question. We are in the future, we have technology that allows us to put cheap open personal satellites into orbit for $100, and we now need to figure out how this will change the world.
You get points for creating a forecast. A forecast can be for a best case scenario or a worst case scenario. For any given scenario, you can add on to it with further comments, a disagreement, an alternate forecast, or a question. If your scenario leads to 10+ responses, you get more points, and if you get selected as a favorite forecast by the game designers, you also get more points.
It’s a very well-designed game, and has an interesting premise, and has true applicability to real life. It’s awesome.
Here’s my profile badge:
And here are some of my favorite forecasts:
Okay, some of them are a little silly, but I actually think the time-capsule and weather decider ideas are pretty good. Overall, thinking about this on my walk home tonight, I realized that having a satellite is actually not that different from having an iPhone, or a website, these days. We have ridiculous amounts of information available to us cheaply and smartly, it’s just a matter of thinking big and figuring out what to do with it, right? Satellites, in this scenario, represent something that seems to be in the future, but actually being up in the sky isn’t going to give you a whole lot of advantage that we don’t already have. Google is in the sky for us, and they give us almost all of their data. What more do we need?
The great thing about this game is that it has a beautiful spirit and a beautiful execution. I honestly want to give it some forecasts that justify the effort that went into it. Thinking about the future is the first step in making the future, and I hope that the positive forecasts win out in the end. We need to remain optimists about the future.