What would happen to a modern society like ours if a resource (or two) that we take for granted – and that we depend upon for survival - were to suddenly become scarce? For example, what if water or oxygen supplies could no longer support the global population? Would there be worldwide panic and chaos? Or would society somehow mould itself around the circumstances? Relatedly, what would happen if we ran out of energy sources to power our industrialised civilization? Would we voluntarily scale back production and global standards of living? Or would such a reorganisation demand state intervention?

Pax Americana is over. Challenges from Vietnam and the Balkans to the Middle East and September 11 have revealed the limits of American supremacy. Will the United States learn to fade quietly, or will U.S. conservatives resist and thereby transform a gradual decline into a rapid and dangerous fall?

The future is a series of small steps leading away from the wreckage of the past, sometimes its actors walk face forward, blind to the history played out behind their backs, other times, they walk backwards, seeing only the unfulfilled destiny of a vanished time. The promise of the tactical media of the future - the end of the spectacular media circus as everyone begins to lay their hands on cheap 'do it yourself' media technologies made possible by new forms of production and distribution - was inspired by a distinction between tactics and strategies made by Michel de Certeau in 1974.

Civilization III's success amplifies certain trajectories of our mediascape, evident since SimCity (1988) inaugurated the "God game" genre (Prensky, 2000: 139). Sony's Playstation 2 has replaced The New Yorker as the arbiter of the Gen-X/Millennials psyche (Seabrook, 2000). Alain and Frederic Le Diberder touted videogames as "the 'tenth art'" (Poole, 2000: 25). Simulations are now regularly used in interactive education (Beer, 2000: 297-298) and business training (Prensky, 2000: 146), anticipating how corporations harness simulations to accelerate strategic innovation processes (Schrage, 1999). Hollywood films and DVD packaging feature twitch-speed aesthetics and non-linear narratives. Open-ended game-play provides a laboratory that enables participants to test the geopolitical shibboleths of the post-9/11 world--Samuel P. Huntington's "clash of civilizations" hypothesis, Robert Kaplan's fears of a "coming anarchy", the "Pacific Age" and "China Century" scenarios--and to surface their hidden presumptions. Simulations also help to distinguish between core operating policies versus espoused policies that guide organizational behaviour (Georgantzas and Acar, 1995: 234).