How can you save the world? Play more games.

Not just any game will work. You’ll need to focus your gameplay efforts carefully, on games like Left 4 Dead, Rock Band, World of Warcraft, Little Big Planet, SF0, Halo 3, Groundcrew and my current game — Superstruct. All of these games are masterfully designed to provoke intense coordination, collaboration, and cooperation - and that’s why they’re all slowly teaching us how game players can one day save the world together. In fact, I’m convinced that either a game developer or a community of online gamers will be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize by the year 2032.

Why am I so confident that gamers can save the world? It all boils down to this: Online gamers — even the most competitive gamers — are the most collaborative and cooperative people on Earth.

You might not guess it by the way they gleefully battle each other to the (virtual) death. But even games that seem designed to stoke and inflame our competitive spirits are, in fact, quintessentially collective adventures. To play a game with someone else, even ruthlessly cutthroat games, requires extraordinarily collaborative behavior.

What’s so collaborative about playing an online game with others? Well, when gamers play together, they agree to play by the same rules and to pursue the same goal. They agree to ignore the real-world together for as long as they’re playing. Perhaps most important, gamers actively work together to make believe that the game truly matters. They conspire to give the game meaning, to help each other get emotionally caught up in the acting of playing. Games don’t just happen. Gamers come together to actively collectively bring to life the game world. They construct the game experience together. That’s why the notion that online games are somehow “anti-social” is so wrong. Any time you play a game with someone else, unless you’re just trying to spoil the experience for other players, you are actively engaged in pro-social behavior.

Because games put us on our best pro-social behavior, they create community and connect us in extremely powerful ways. This has been true since the first board games. And today, the Internet is amplifying the kinds of cooperation and collaboration that games have always required. In massively multiplayer online environments and in global game communities, multi-player collaboration is happening on new extreme scales, with much larger groups, on much longer timelines. And more and more, networked gamers are developing new “collaboration superpowers” to tackle extreme-scale problems in their favorite games.

Here’s the list of superpowers, which I originally defined as part of my research at the Institute for the Future as the most important skills and talents required for survival in the year 2018:

Sound appealing? You can become awesome at all ten of these things — IF you spend enough time playing the right kinds of games — and I’d estimate it takes at least 50 cumulative hours of dedicated gaming.

As you develop these skills by playing games, something important will happen. You’ll become a Super-Empowered Hopeful Individual. That’s someone who uses digital networks to cultivate optimism and tackle seemingly impossible problems. And gamers are turning into SEHIs faster than any other demographic on Earth.

Over the next decade, we’ll see online systems designed to work like games, but to address real-world problems. And gamers will be the people who are best poised to make meaningful contributions, because they’ll be able to draw on their collaboration superpowers.

Hard to imagine? Well, the good news is that you don’t have to imagine such a game — you can actually play a prototype of such a game right now. It’s called Superstruct:

Futurist Jamais Cascio and I recently developed Superstruct together at the Institute for the Future, and he previewed the game last month in his blogpost “Tomorrow Matters, As Much As Today.”

Well, Superstruct is currently live, with 5000 players, and YOU are invited to join us! The game will run now through November 19, 2008. So if you want to start developing your collaboration superpowers, sign up now and start your journey toward becoming a SEHI… and a gamer who will one day help save the world! It takes literally just 5 minutes to join the Superstruct community, fill out your personal survival profile, and make your first contribution to saving our future. So please — play more, and help us invent the future!