Games can be used to make machines more creative, collaborative and inflexible in their thinking. When you get lots of people playing the same game, then you have that phenomenon that game developers call emergence. That same kind of surprise emergence helps us understand the future better. And because it's a game, people feel free to be wild in their thinking, to be creative, to try different things, experiment. We're not necessarily locked into behaviour reasons for other reasons. If we want real change, we can change our behaviour very fast - which opens up the possibility that we could live an other way.
Future forecaster and game designer Jane McGonigal ran a social simulation game in 2008 that had players dealing with the effects of a respiratory pandemic set to happen in the next decade. She wasn’t literally predicting the 2020 pandemic—but she got eerily close. Her game, set in 2019, featured scenarios we're now familiar with (like masking and social distancing), and participant reactions gave her a sense of what the world could—and eventually, did—look like. How did she do it? And what can we learn from this experiment to predict—and prepare for—the future ourselves? In this episode, Jane teaches us how to be futurists, and talks about the role of imagination—and gaming—in shaping a future that we’re truly excited about. Jane’s new book, Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything―Even Things That Seem Impossible Today is available now.
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