Ten years after the Game opened on the social network Junana, gamers across the planet are reforging their towns and cities, their farms and factories into a million small engines for an emergent future: a world-wide Game Nation. Some gamers are young and eager for adventure, some are older and seek serenity. Everyone who joins a grange gets a share. Sharing is the heart of the new order, that and Shine: your accomplishments and reputation. This new economy expresses a capitalism refocused on sustainable, durable consumption and on machines that anyone can build and use. As a million daisies bloom across the Earth, the rest of the world remains fascinated by their celebrity icons and the lure of fortune and fame. They can't even see the future being built by their peers in abandoned strip malls and auto dealerships. Samantha Mooney is running from her family, fleeing a life most of her friends would die for. She is running into a new future, one where she will need to forge her own Shine. Joseph Kumbar just turned eleven. The Game has big plans for this little man. Joseph's family makes a tiny living selling sandals on the streets of Mysore, India. Joseph isn't running anywhere. The Game Nation found him right where he lives. And then it turned his life around. The rest-of-the-world is not about to sit back and get blind-sided by a bunch of radical capitalists. Since they can't beat them, they have plans to destroy the Game Nation. Now it's us or them for the future of the planet.
About the Author: Bruce is an active online-community architect, and is looking to help virtual organizations build community governance and achieve their promise. He is currently active as the Program Office Manager at EarthCube. Bruce is the founder and current executive director of the New Media Studio and the New Media Research Institute in Santa Barbara. Bruce was trained as a social anthropologist and an urban cultural geographer. He is skilled in a variety of multimedia authoring tools, and completed the first multimedia dissertation at UC Santa Barbara. Through the New Media Studio and the New Media Research Institute, he is realizing the goal of bringing new tools and skills to the public to help democratize the technological advantages of the digital revolution. Bruce has a wide-ranging academic background in both quantitative and qualitative methodologies and has been active for several years in issues of digital libraries, the use of multimedia in education, and the theory of digital media. Bruce has taught at colleges and universities in Japan, and at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California and has served as the president of the Federation of Earth Science Information Partners, the chair of the DLESE Data Access Working Group, on user working group for SEDAC (Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center) at Columbia University, and as an elected member of the National Science Digital Library Policy Committee. Bruce helped create a public awareness action in Santa Barbara, lightblueline.org, which proposes to paint the seven-meter elevation contour on that city's streets, to mark the vulnerability the community faces due to human induced climate change. In 2010 he was awarded the Martha Maiden Lifetime Achievement Award from the ESIP Federation. A few years ago he published a novel, Junana, which outlines an alternative present, where the promise of educational gaming turns the world on its head as hundreds of millions of teenagers know more than their parents, teachers, and the marketplace. Bruce's work has been supported by the NSF, NASA, NIH, The Paul G. Allan Family Foundation, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and Google, Inc.