Happy Nice Mall

IMAGINED
Seeing The Future Is Coming and Feeling Ready for Anything – Even Things That Seems Impossible Today
by Jane McGonigal

TED Talks biggest stars often have a brief claim to fame: “the neuroscientist who discovered he’s a covert psychopath” or “the 12-year-old app developer.” But game designer and futurist Jane McGonigal, whose TED conferences have over 15 million views, is harder to describe. According to some, it’s the researcher who wants us to collectively spend 21 billion hours a week on Warcraft games developing our skills to tackle climate change and poverty. To others, she is she, the woman who suffered a brain injury and then accelerated her recovery by designing a game she called “Jane the Concussion Slayer.”

In “Imaginable,” McGonigal makes another claim to fame: the oracle. He directs simulations for his work. One such 2010 exercise had participants envision a future upended by a global respiratory pandemic, severe wildfires, and online disinformation spread by a shadowy group called “Citizen X.” While these story lines lead to eerily similar facts, McGonigal has received a number of messages from past contributors. Someone wrote “I’m not afraid”. “I’ve already gotten over the panic and anxiety when we dreamed it 10 years ago.” Hoping to show his readers the same composure, McGonigal argues that mapping near scenarios not only prepares us for them, but also prepares us for unpredictable curves.

And to simulate the future, according to McGonigal, you must analyze it in vivid detail. If the deer tick epidemic causes severe allergies around the world, do you use your EpiPen “as an armband, on your waist or on your thigh?”

To simulate the future, according to McGonigal, we must analyze it in vivid detail and guide readers with questions about how we should feel and what we would do in different scenarios. Do their methods work? It’s hard to be sure as it wasn’t a large-scale study. “Imaginable” presents neuroscientific findings, some more convincing than others. A deeper look at the limits of the approach may have helped his case. For example, she wants to empower her readers when she writes, “If you are not the hero of your own future, then you are imagining the wrong future.” But how can we do harm when we are largely imagining the future with our own eyes? When can a look ahead be a distraction? Can ambitious future thinking lead to disaster?

It can be hard to separate your opinion of the “Imaginable” from your feelings about other futuristic writers or Silicon Valley techno-utopians. It may seem counterintuitive to levitate warehouses or humans genetically engineered to survive on Mars, but for McGonigal it is not. Everything is reasonable. There comes a sense that McGonigal could stand on his own in a high-stakes discussion with military strategists, but overall he has an “Imaginable”, optimistic, conversational tone. Indeed, “What next? Do not worry. literally, do not worry” may not get along very well with those of us who have grit our teeth in the last two years..

Maybe McGonigal continues to be so cheerful because he sees games everywhere. “When does the future begin?” He writes about leading a quick game on the theme. This sounds like a question to me – an exercise at best. But maybe that’s what it’s for: A game can be anything you approach with a sense of fun. McGonigal seems to be one of the few people interested in the game’s potential to foster collective well-being rather than filling the corporate vault. Play for the game – but also to solve world problems – is an unusual self-help angle. In “Imaginable” there is no tangible reward other than the feeling of readiness itself. Which, at the moment, is certainly attractive.