The Social Disruption of Masks

3min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

We asked people to practise wearing masks, right? So e six weeks, games, try taking a real sout. And of course, that turned out to be the number one superspreading rest all over the world,. This is where all the initial operics were happening, and people were disobeying. The biggest resistance to shut downs were from religious communities who saw it as a first amendment issue. But when you run these seners, you do get a sense for the types of social consequences that should be more front of mind.

The future grows out of the present, but it manages to consistently surprise us. How can we get better at anticipating and preparing for what the future can be like? Jane McGonigal started out as a game designer, working on the kinds of games that represent miniature worlds with their own rules. This paradigm provides a useful way of thinking about predicting the future: imagining changes in the current world, then gaming out the consequence, allowing real people to produce unexpected emergent outcomes. We talk about the lessons learned that anyone can use to better prepare their brain for the future to come.

Support Mindscape on Patreon.

Jane McGonigal received her Ph.D. in performance studies from the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently a writer and Director of Games Research and Development at the Institute for the Future. She teaches a course at Stanford on How to Think Like a Futurist. She has developed several games, including SuperBetter, a game she designed to improve health and resilience after suffering from a concussion. Her recent book is Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything–Even Things That Seem Impossible Today.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.