Solving+the+worlds+problems+through+videogames+-Brendan+Hall

= = As has become increasingly obvious over the last few years, games are being used more and more as tools for helping people and organizations work their way through all kinds of problems and scenarios. That's been the reasoning behind the steady growth of initiatives like the serious games movement, whose practitioners promote the idea of deploying games in education, government, military, and other sober institutions that need new ways to resolve troubling issues. And now it appears that an august group of futurists is hoping that they can employ large numbers of people to play collaborative games in search of solutions to some of the world's most vexing problems. That was the word Tuesday from the Institute for the Future, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based think tank that focuses on identifying the directions that mankind will take down the line. The IFTF said Tuesday it is launching a new research platform composed of massively multiplayer forecasting games--a play on the increasingly well-understood massively multiplayer online (MMO) games genre--designed to "address real-world problems by harnessing the wisdom of the crowds." The institute plans to launch a series of the so-called MMFGs this fall that they hope will attract participants from around the world eager to participate in futurist research in the guise of game play. multiplayer forecasting games' designed to help researchers come up with solutions to long-term global problems. The first game, //Superstruct//, will launch October 6.As has become increasingly obvious over the last few years, games are being used more and more as tools for helping people and organizations work their way through all kinds of problems and scenarios. That's been the reasoning behind the steady growth of initiatives like the serious games movement, whose practitioners promote the idea of deploying games in education, government, military, and other sober institutions that need new ways to resolve troubling issues.