Here are the results of the Choose Your Own Apocalypse game that was part of Josh Levin’s American Apocalypse series over at Slate.com this week. Along with the overall results, you find demographic breakdowns and popular scenario groupings. What we chose (and who “we” are) make fascinating reading.
All 144 scenarios are ranked here in order of popularity, and the Slate crew has also created a “social network” of scenario relationships which is incredibly interesting to me — for example, if you chose Gay Marriage as one of your top 5 US Killers, you may also believe that Obama as God, Cloning, Voluntary Human Extinction, Decadence (natch!) and, weirdly, Bottled Water will also be the downfalls of our society.
I loved this series, and I’d love to see more online journalism take this interactive, multimedia approach to reporting on issues in ways that help readers build a three-dimensional understanding of them. Hyperlinks are great — yay for the internets — but without a focused and professional mind behind the curtain to frame the context, organize the linked information, and create opportunities for interactive access that are both interesting and revelatory, links are just more ways to become lost or overloaded. Thanks, Josh Levin. Great stuff.
That is a great series. Thanks for pulling that all together.
I’m not surprised that none of my top five are in their top five, but 4 of mine made it into the top 16. My fifth was pretty far down. But their little summary about me surprised me a little – I’m a ‘humanitarian internationalist’ – and that I believe that everyone on earth will pledge allegiance to a world government. Well I think that would be very far in our future – maybe after the apocalypses kill most of us.
I would be very interested to see how a total cross-section of America would respond to this – not just mostly Slate readers.