The year is 2019. Respiratory Distress Syndrome, or REDS, has appeared in Stockholm, the first city outside of the tropics to see a case. The disease is known to overwhelm local health resources everywhere it goes, and news of health insurance companies going belly up has become routine. Word is spreading that in the absence of effective governmental responses, ad hoc militias have been forming to forcibly quarantine infected populations around the globe.

On its own, REDS sounds like a major disaster, but it is not the kind of thing that could put an end to the world. But in Superstruct, a large-scale online game put on by the Institute for the Future, REDS is merely one of five independent “superthreats” coming to a head in 2019. The others involve 250 million climate change refugees, the steady breakdown of the global food supply, increasingly brazen attacks on the world’s cyber infrastructure and the rising international tensions surrounding the world’s failure to agree on standards for renewable energy.

Taken together, these five threats pose a catastrophic risk to the human species. The game forecasts that humans will be wiped out by 2042. The point of Superstruct, which anyone can begin playing on October 6, is to work together with fellow players and find brilliant ways to avert this fate.

The Institute for the Future: Predicting the future for the last 40 years

The Institute for the Future (IFTF), founded in 1968, is a non-profit think tank that has sustained itself primarily by collecting annual fees from governments, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and large corporations, who pay to get access to the Institute’s 10-year forecasts. It also does consulting projects. If you’ve ever seen one of Gartner’s Hype Cycle graphs, which chart predicted adoption patterns of various technologies over time, you have a sense for what technology forecasting looks like. The IFTF’s forecasts are kind of like this, but from a “macro” perspective. They take a deeper look at how technologies will integrate into people’s lives and affect society at large.

Throughout its entire existence, the IFTF has relied on its own researchers to generate the reports. But, Executive Director, Marina Gorbis, says, the social technologies of Web 2.0 — tools like Facebook, wikis, Twitter and YouTube — give the IFTF a chance to turn for the first time to the wisdom of the crowds. In an inspired twist, the Institute decided to do this by creating a platform for elaborate alternate reality games (ARGs) and bringing in a woman named Jane McGonigal to design it.

Alternate Reality Games play in the real world

Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) create scenarios that tie together the online and real worlds. Instead of sitting in front of a screen for most of the time, ARG players get their orders online and then go out into their cities to both follow and create the story.  Jane McGonigal is one of the concept’s pioneers. Perhaps the most well-known project she worked on was I Love Bees, an ARG commissioned by Microsoft to promote the release of Halo 2.

In I Love Bees, a fictional military spaceship crashed to Earth and released an artificial intelligence that proceeded to take over a bee enthusiast site called ilovebees.com. Players who went to the hacked site were given clues by the AI that sent them out into the real world to do things like find specific pay phones and be there when the game masters called. (They made 50,000 pay phones ring at the same time, each with a separate message for the game which fans had to reconstruct into a six-hour broadcast). Thousands played the game. Hundreds of thousands watched its progress online. Those players who stuck it out to the end were rewarded with