“All of man’s misfortune comes from one thing, which is not knowing how to sit quietly in a room.” – Pascal, Pensées (1670)

“The only good thing for man is to be diverted so that he will stop thinking about his circumstances.” – Pascal, Pensées (1670)

Philosophy of the Bedroom and Home Entertainment

In his Pensées, French philosopher Blaise Pascal introduces us to two ideas that resonate particularly in the early 2020s:

First, an observation: It is part of our human condition – and not just a modern trend – to be unable to “sit quietly in a room”, as it echoes our mortality. At all times, humans have suffered and avoided loneliness, boredom, and the anxiety linked to facing our fragile existence.

Second, a workaround: Seeking solace in activity is an escape from experiencing our metaphysical fears. Pascal gives a definition of entertainment as a necessity to prevent us from overthinking our finitude and embrace our restlessness. Note that Pascal includes sports, war, and work within entertainment.

In 2020, two billion people have been forced into lockdown, and therefore into facing their inner fears – this accentuated by the deadly count of the pandemic. The bedroom in which we used to spend chosen and limited time in between two occurrences of outside activity, has become a physical and mental prison cell.

Following Pascal’s wisdom, at the peak of the pandemic, two philosophical attitudes have been available to help us face our confinement at home: Home Entertainment and Mindfulness. It comes as no surprise that both industries have been booming during the pandemic. Meditation apps are expected to reach $2b by 2022. Streaming services revenue increased by 30% in a year, with subscribers enjoying an average 5 subscriptions compared to 3 before the pandemic.

X-ing from Home: New frontiers and dynamics

During the pandemic, many of the activities we were used to conducting outside of the home were transferred partially or completely inside the home. As new dynamics surface, the frontier between the exterior and the interior of the home is moving.

Activities that we used to perform outside have been mostly conducted from home, bringing within the realm of the home – and with the support of online technologies – exterior elements such as: work, education, entertainment, exercising, shopping, befriending, and dating.

In addition, behaviors that are casual parts of home life have been intensified, sometimes to the point of exaltation or rupture, such as caring for each other or fighting with each other.

As part of the moving home dynamics, “escaping from home” also gained in importance to allow us to rebalance our mental health. Escaping the home, physically and virtually, changed in nature along the pandemic as we were craving for mental rest, nature hunt, and a new social.

Socializing in a distance around leisure and renewed rites of passage

If the pandemic popularized locutions such as community spread, sheltering, isolation, social distancing, it also celebrated front line heroes, essential workers, random acts of kindness, zooming, and joyscrolling. The evolution of our vocabulary reflects how the quarantine triggered our social nature. In addition to work and education, our socialization needs include connecting with family, friends, and romantic partners.

The pandemic recreated our social connections around the following modalities: sharing online activities (yoga, cooking, drawing tutorials) and conversing thanks to social networks and communication tools (Houseparty, Clubhouse, Tiktok, Amigo, Bumble), as well as nurturing distant in-person interaction (garage gym, balcony clap for heroes, outdoor movie nights).

We also revamped our rites of passage along these two lines: online graduations, streamed Thanksgiving dinner, wedding broadcast, funeral on zoom; outdoor banquet with wrapped treats, drive-through birthday party, Halloween trunk-or-treat, newborn introduction behind a window.

Our homes adapted consequently indoors with private rooms for intimate conversation, cosy area for online reception, and outdoors with garden remodeling for party hosting and garage cleaning for socially distant interaction.

Leisuring from home or from a distance

Larger access to culture is probably one of the most significant silver linings of the 2020 pandemic. As people had plenty of time closed at home, less social life, and a need to recenter themselves to balance home chores, work, and parenting, they dedicated more time to hobbies.

Reading acted as a refuge: 35% of people in the world read more books in 2020. Especially parents took more time reading with their children (Source: Global English Editing).

Culture, Music and Arts turned to AR, VR, and Mixed Reality: Museums shut their physical doors, but they created new ways for the public to tour their collections virtually (the Louvre, the MET). Paris Opera streamed its performances for free and ballet dancers filmed themselves dancing from their apartments. Stars led by Lady Gaga took part in the “One World: Together At Home” concert. Musicians gave concerts in immersive reality settings such as electronic violinist Lindsey Stirling.

Movies switch screens: As traditional theaters closed, drive-in gained in popularity. Paris offered a floating movie theater on the Seine. Streaming services have been the big winners of the pandemic with an increase of 44% in viewing time.

Sports events happened in a bubble: Many sports events have been canceled, but despite players getting COVID, NBA games were played in an isolation zone at the Disney World Bubble. Outdoors classes, garage gym, and indoor fitness had an immense success. Peloton doubled its sales in 2020.

Friends and family shared tutorials of anything possible: Cultural practice seemed less about status than acquiring new skills and sharing a common experience, be it about ballet dancing, cartooning, writing poetry, or launching a podcast!

Now what? The Future of Leisuring.

As we listen to signals from the future and investigate the driving forces in our current STEEP environment (Social, Technological, Economical, Environmental, Political), we broke down our future to three plausible scenarios:

1 – Back to the familiar: “We are social animals with physical bodies and haven’t forgotten about it. Big venues, outdoors, and travels will be fully available again.”

When the pandemic is over, we go back to our dinner parties. We welcome back the exterior world within the realm of our homes. We yearn for physical presence, body odors, non-distorted voices, human faces without masks, smiles, hugs, and more!

We have never craved that much the big outdoors, cultural life, and intellectual connections with peers. We go back to our old habits, movie nights, sports classes, travels. Renovated venues reopen and welcome large audiences for live events.

Signals:

• During the pandemic, young adults defied rules to date in hiding.
• Churches defied lockdown with back-door entrance and secret Church services.
• Our body needs vitamin D from sunlight, endorphins from exercising, oxytocin from relationships.
• $500M entertainment venue and hotel complex planned in Toronto.

2 – Pandemic-frozen: “We have tasted more immersive experiences and enjoyed it. Now comes the reign of AR/VR/MR. Culture comes to our home, it is more inclusive. Social life happens online anyway!”

The pandemic made us prioritize our relationships and we now go for lean. We avoid meeting in person unless necessary. Dating happens primarily online without leading to in-person. We move away from exterior social life to focus on the nuclear family.

The pandemic forced cultural institutions to renovate themselves. Culture is available worldwide. Mixed reality technology enables enhanced online experience. We share it in close circles in our home entertainment centers. The home has become a movie theater and the scene of our own talents.

Signals:

• We rediscover the concept of “positive solitude”.
• Tiktok launches a sexy, body-positive Silhouette Challenge.
• Clubhouse brings online dinner party-style chats.
• 2021 boom in Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT), crypto art record sales.
• Tomorrowland virtual festival set a new standard for digital events.
• Roblox’ IPO and video game boom.

3 – Creative disruption: “The pandemic scarred us, but we will grow stronger out of it. We recreate small committee quality events. A hobby marketplace develops. There is a continuity between physical and virtual, and it goes both ways. We explore new ways of being together.”

Our social nature and our tech-savviness make us adaptable and resilient under hard circumstances. We embrace different kinds of social interaction. We still enjoy “tech-free bubbles” and favor human touch. We reopen our homes.

We have discovered new ways to enjoy entertainment – arts galleries instead of big museums, small gatherings instead of large concerts. We enjoy intellectual, cultural, business, and creative conversations in small audiences and respectful settings. We also take an active part in cultural production. We give classes about hobbies and consume from others. A hobby marketplace based on mutual sharing of skills emerges.

Signals:

• During a funeral over zoom, despite missing the human touch, participants appreciate the possibility to convey participants from all over the world and make it a creative moment with a talent show and live emotions.
• French art galleries have seen record numbers of visitors end of 2020.
• Board game market gained 20% in 2020.
• Children invent versions of Among Us “IRL” extending online gaming to real life gaming.
• Clubhouse grew from 600,000 users in December 2020 to over six million in February 2021.

The objectives of foresight and futurism are to help us prepare for these plausible futures and to seize opportunity within these worlds. These scenarios might happen at different time scales (short-term reaction, mid-term innovation, long-term foresight vision) in different areas of the world. As vaccination is moving along, some countries are showing great signs of openness and physical social revival such as Israel, while others are in between reopening and closing again such as France and Germany, and others seemed to go through a slow but steady recovery process such as the U.S.A.

The post Leisuring from Home: The Future of Social Life, Entertainment, and Culture? first appeared on Ludogogy.

Benefits of participating include: learning some transferable skills in foresight and writing, engaging with some really interesting folk about equally interesting topics, to work on some wicked problems and visualise how the future could be better, and, of course, to see your creative work in print. The ‘messages from the future’ below were posted in the project by Sylvia Gallusser and Cody Clark, both of whom are very active on the project platform.

To find out more about Speculative Optimism or join up as a participant (all welcome, regardless of previous experience of futurism or writing) go to https://speculative-optimism.mn.co/]

Neighbors have a monthly “dance party” in the street in front of an elderly neighbor’s small house that generates enough electricity to cool the house for a month. A local church brings the piezoelectric dance floor, which they purchased with grant money, and supplies the DJ. Local police help shut down the street but they don’t dance.

Cody Clark

I am turning 100 in a month. I just took part in the Centenarian Olympics and won a gold medal. My body is hurting from everywhere, I feel sore but alive. I have been running all my life, but since I retired, my well-aging coach helped me take exercizing even more seriously in hope to prolong my life expectancy and quality of (end of) life. It looks like it worked so far. This afternoon we are celebrating with my team mates. Some of us have prosthesis. One of us has an exoskeleton controlled by mind since Lou Gehrig’s disease paralyzed him. We live in a senior village where the younger generation (the 70-80 year-old) helps us deal with some daily errants and technology issues. I can’t wait for the celebration. Village volunteers set up a new piezoelectric dance floor, so we will be able to produce and store energy for the upcoming winterstorm season…

Sylvia Galluser

I just downloaded a new module for my gustatory neural prosthesis. For about a year my prosthetic 2-way brain interface has been intercepting the gustatory, olfactory, and retro-nasal perceptions of the food I eat and altering the affective and cognitive processes that shape my taste preferences. So now cruciferous vegetables high in sulforaphane are my favorite snack food by far and my doctor is happy. This latest module attenuates my taste preference for less sustainable foods like red meat and increases my preference for plant-based, sustainable foods that are better for the environment. My friends and I volunteered to beta test this module after hearing a guest speaker talk about it in our environmental stewardship group at church.

Cody Clark

I donate my paid sick leave, which I have not needed much of this year, to a foster mother who often needs to take off for her foster kids’ appointments. We don’t work for the same company. Or live in the same state.

Cody Clark

Versions

I had to terminate myself the other day.

no, there’s no body,
no smoking gun,
just some empty disk space
where I used to be.

Versions of me, that is.

my friend works for this startup,
he recruited me as a beta tester:
you’ll get a kick out of this he said
he had me sign some waivers
I should have read more carefully
and then he gave me the box.

don’t i get a demonstration? i said
you shouldn’t need one, that’s part of the test — usability.
it should be easy to make working copies of your mind.
send them out to do work, watch TV, take classes.
And upload the new experiences later, at your leisure.

The scans could be configured with your choice of three interfaces:
DiskMe — a living version of you on with a GUI front-end
WebMe — an intelligent web bot with your mind as a driver
EmbedMe — a version of you that could be loaded into any machine with a CPU and enough memory

i put my first scan — me 2.0 — to work as a WebMe
do that quarterly report, i said
and gather the trends research.
he knew just what I meant because he was, well, me
i’d go to the office, he’d surf the net doing research. that was the plan.
i came home from work that day. report was done. research looked good.
just like i’d have done it.
this was cool.
so we’d separate every day and have
— literally —
a meeting of the minds each evening
and catch each other up.
i was a good team. my productivity doubled.

until i found out how naughty i’d been.
2.0 apparently didn’t have enough work to keep him busy
2.0 didn’t take lunch or bathroom breaks
2.0 didn’t engage in water cooler gossip
what 2.0 did was cruise the VR chatrooms
after a week or so i began having some
impressively realistic memories
of sex with virtual women i never even met
they were just avatars, but the sense memories were very real.
2.0 was a virtual reality casanova in his off hours.
apparently i’m quite the ladies man
when i’m not stuck with this body
who knew?

my wife was not amused.
i didn’t touch them, i pleaded
i didn’t even have cybersex
it was an electronic copy of me
having cybersex with animated women.

but those women are in your head now
and your copy scan thing wouldn’t have cheated
if the potential weren’t in you in the first place
get rid of that memory and i might forgive you

my wife was right.
i had to revert my mind to the backup copy of myself
i wisely made before I set 2.0 to work
i lost a week’s worth of memories
and a two-day training class my employer sent me to.
I had to shell out a thousand bucks and take two days vacation
to take the course again before my boss realized it was missing.

and at my wife’s insistence
2.0 was banned from the net.
i have him answering my email.
he talks to my kids while i’m still at work.
i turned him onto Halo so he wouldn’t get bored.
and now i’m apparently some kind of badass game guru.
without fingers his reaction time is instantaneous
my name is reknowned in gamers’ circles. i get fan mail.
so i have that going for me.

3.0 was born out of frustration.
i couldn’t find my car keys.
So i made a quick copy of myself
and loaded it into my cleanbot.
(he has the same OS as my computer so it was easy)
i asked him to skip his regular cleaning chores
and see if he could remember where i left my keys.
this was going to be a quick copy I’d delete
after i had my keys back.

but 3.0 had other plans.
i came home and he had my keys in one claw
and an injunction in the other.
the PETA people helped him get it.
apparently there’s this law against the indiscriminate termination of cyborgs.
but you aren’t a cyborg, i said. you’re just a robot,
you have no biological material.
well apparently there’s this legal precedent
— Cybercolonics vs. Fischer —
that classifies brainscans as biological material
for the purpose of cyborg termination cases.
seems i was stuck with 3.0.
so i put him to work too.
you know all those books you’ve always wanted to read
but never had the time?
well when he wasn’t cleaning i had him read for me.
War and Peace, Finnegan’s Wake, Harry Potter.
But he doesn’t clean very well anymore.
he only does the kind of lousy job i would do.

4.0 was my worst.
he almost bankrupted me.
he was a web bot with the, um, libido removed
i sent him out on the net to help me with research.
by the end of the first week he had filed
twenty-three separate lawsuits
against twelve large companies.
apparently some of the larger sites on the web
don’t allow bots to access their pages.
so he filed suits under the civil rights laws
alleging discrimination against the disembodied.
he also filed under the persons with disabilities act
alleging that not having a physical presence qualified as a disability
and so they had to allow access.
the companies counter sued alleging criminal violation of network security
it was gonna get ugly. my lawyer quit on me, overwhelmed.
i finally reached a settlement with them
4.0 had to go. delete. empty recycle bin. defrag.

i gave the scanner back to my friend
he asked how it went
horrible, i said
my first two scans rebelled
and i had to kill the other.
could be worse, he said,
you could be raising teenagers.

Cody Clark

The post Stories from the Future first appeared on Ludogogy.

These scenarios are an excerpt from Joana’s upcoming “choose-your-own-adventure” strategy and foresight book – working title “Choose Your Own Future”. The book is a gamified way to approach the Future vs standard business books. For more information go to https://www.futures-forward.com/chooseyourownfuture where you can find a video that explains the book idea.]

In times of crisis and uncertainty, our initial instinctive response is to stick to what we know. However, our current volatile reality provides us with the unique opportunity to build a new, better future.

Three possible future scenarios that may emerge are presented, with the direction of travel based on decisions taken today.

In times of crisis such as the one we are currently living through; our ingrained responses are to fight to preserve and restore our lives to their pre-pandemic status. However, it is now, more than ever, important for us to recognize this as an opportunity to reconsider our priorities, review our old systems, and rebuild our future in new and better ways.

In this article we take a journey into the future through three different worlds that could emerge.

A Brand-New World is prosperous and sustainable, there is global collaboration and people live in harmony with nature as well as technology. Corporates are more sustainable and work in the best interest of all stakeholders.

My Own Personal World is one, where technology facilitates progress and our lives are more convenient but at a cost. It’s a world of failed governments, where companies own all our personal data.

A Hot New World emerges, when we build higher walls and divide our world, instead of collaborating. The effects of the pandemic are long-lasting across all areas of our lives and the health of our planet is neglected.

These scenarios unfold as a result of colliding social, economic, scientific, technological, and environmental developments and the decisions we, as society, must urgently take today. Let’s explore the three scenarios.

A Brand-New World

You wake up and it’s pleasantly chilly, just as you like it, thanks to Sol, your home artificial intelligence (AI), which monitors your body temperature and movements while you sleep, and creates the most pleasant home environment based on your preferences. The blinds go up and Sol has already started brewing the coffee, knowing that you’ve had a late night at the National Health Research Centre. Your health tech company has big news to announce to the public today – a universal respiratory virus vaccine!

The pandemic unlocked investment for research and innovation in healthcare, leading to a massive breakthrough that should save millions of lives. It took years of research and global collaboration between governments, universities, and the private sector to get here but it was worth it. The vaccine eliminates the need for seasonal reimmunization and protects us from different strains of respiratory viruses.

Following the 2020 pandemic, companies focused on sustainability and the adoption of the Economics of Mutuality management model, benefiting not only shareholders but all stakeholders: people, planet, and company. At the beginning, it seemed like a utopian concept but the pandemic proved it to be a sustainable way to do business, enabling your company to live longer and be more profitable. Choosing long-term sustainability over short-term profit was the right decision to make.

There was a societal epiphany moment during the pandemic leading to shifting priorities, with people dedicating more time to family, altruism, and education. A Personal Social Standing (PSS) score was introduced, measuring your contribution to the world’s global sustainable development goals, and rewarding you with access to certain services, entertainment perks, and upgrades to your AI devices.

My Own Personal World

The baby is still sleeping. SecondSkin, the digital patch on your wrist, reminds you it is time to prepare her food as her vitals are showing she will be awake soon. You had the option to bioengineer her DNA. It is now common practice for parents to exercise their recently legalized right to remove genes associated with hereditary disease. Choosing a child’s physical attributes is also possible, if not yet completely legal. There is an ongoing ethical and regulatory debate over whether we should leverage scientific innovations in body and brain engineering and augmentation to fully design a baby’s eye color, intelligence, or physical strength.

The package with the baby’s supplements has arrived, pre-curated for her new developmental phase, with food ingredients, clothes, toys, and vitamins. A subscription service delivers all of these items for the entire family right to your door. You get points added to your overall Personal Social Standing (PSS) score for exercising regularly and eating your personalized diet, built in accordance with your DNA profile.

Governments crumbled during the pandemic, so large companies stepped in. Googlezon now owns the data for your city, as well as its telemedicine platform. You have some rights, of course. You can choose how much you share, but your PSS score is impacted by it. You like to get hyper-personalized services and products, whenever and wherever you need them. However, you sometimes feel trapped in the bubble. If you are feeling more adventurous, you try to confuse the algorithms by making random product choices, just because you want to experiment and try something new.

A Hot New World

It’s been a tough few years since the pandemic. The researchers are still struggling to find a vaccine or a cure. Climate change and shifting weather patterns brought new diseases and stricter control on movement and social contact was needed. Borders were closed and we started living more secluded digital lives. We now long for personal contact but are limited to immediate family and a handful of geo-proximate friends. International travel is almost impossible, so we take virtual vacations. Our main concerns are now cybercriminals and identity theft.

In hindsight, we deployed too many resources searching for a solution to the pandemic health threat, which hit the economy hard. Global trade seized up in favor of higher cost local production and home production of essentials. Those limited by space or ability are relying on government rationed powdered food, which is fortified with essential vitamins and minerals.

With borders closed, illegal immigration from areas of severe drought rose and brought unrest and conflict. Refugee camps and poverty are a common sight these days. However, we did also make some good decisions during the pandemic. Governmental incentives were given to companies and individuals that produce renewable energy. Air pollution was dramatically reduced but global warming continued and we are now adapting to its effects by building houses with less glass and thicker walls. It’s still hot. Very hot.

Conclusion

All of these scenarios are plausible and their realization depends on what decisions we, as society, make now. We could build A Brand New World if we prioritize research investment, sustainable practices, and global collaboration. We could create My Own Personal World, where convenience is key and we advance scientifically and technologically, but our governments fail to protect our privacy and freedom. A Hot New World is a place where poverty, disease, nationalism, and the creeping effects of climate change are taking their toll, because nations failed to recognize the urgency and acted alone rather in collaboration against a global threat.

Will we take the opportunity to build a future in which we are better equipped to face the challenges of the new world? Or will we try to hold on to the past, resisting the change?

The post Three Scenarios of a Future World first appeared on Ludogogy.

Sex and the Pandemic

When COVID-32 started to spread in mid-May 2032, just 6 years after COVID-19 was mostly under control, people began calling it the Second Pandemic. This time, people were somewhat more prepared after having lived through the first disaster. Toilet paper stayed on the shelves and masks became popular again on the streets as people refreshed this familiar old habit from the past decade.

The difference this time was cybersex. After the initial despair of the Second Pandemic subsided somewhat, people realised a few hard truths. First, that one-way broadcasts of pornography weren’t satisfying the need for basic human connection, not even basic horniness. It was the equivalent of drinking soda for breakfast — sugary like orange juice, but too salty, sugary and artificial to ever satisfy a person without immediately needing more.

Second, that pandemics were a fact of life, making social contact a precious resource to be conserved under literal threat of death. Every in-person experience — a hug, kiss, flirty smile in your direction from across a room — all of these were more valuable than gold.

Third, video conferencing was a terrible way to communicate between human beings. For many professionals, video chatting was synonymous with the oft-maligned “Microsoft Teams” and memories of awkward pauses, uncertain conversations, and frustrated chat sessions hidden inside an incomprehensible dashboard of notifications.

Cybersex was nothing new, but it had never worked properly. One of the problems was the cost of developing a safe new toy and controlling it. There was a culture of home garage-tinkerers building sex machines powered by old lawnmowers and dismembered power tools, but networking them and making them programmable required a larger technological leap to cross. DIY hacker projects like [buttplug.io](http://buttplug.io) brought together groups of like-minded, kinky tinkerers over the 2020’s to build a serviceable foundation for Internet-native sex toys, spawning products that were often unconventional.

One such product was The Medusa, a multi-headed, soft-robotic toy outfitted with multiple fibre-optic cameras, lights, and screens. The original version looked somewhat like one of the evil robots from the Matrix movies if it got a haircut and took a side job as a friendly Christmas tree. The cameras and screens worked together to show a fractured view of interesting actions during “play” for all people involved in this networked dance of shared intimacy. The mood lighting kept it classy, of course.

Quietly, the Medusa, despite it’s off-putting name, became popular both on dating sites and apps but also on Instagram and Twitter. Normally this type of video would be censored, but the Medusa produced abstract-looking visuals that only other Medusa users could view properly, bypassing the protective algorithms. Instead of clamping down on this obscene violation of their TOS, in a move that was never publicly explained, Instagram (AKA Facebook) bought the Medusa and soon it was a sibling to the VR devices like Oculus Rift, already a part of Facebooks’ research division.

Not everyone understood the purchase, but AI researchers and privacy watchdogs figured it out almost at once. The executives at Facebook who snapped up the Medusa were closely aligned with both the AI and behavioural modeling research divisions. Facebook, like TikTok and other social media giants, was deeply invested in studying and attempting to predict (and manipulate) fundamental human behaviours. The ability to monitor intimate, sexual situations was a new frontier.

This wasn’t all about building an internal panopticon, however. AI researchers genuinely thought that AI-enabled sex toys had much to add to the experience of pandemic sexual intimacy and the Medusa was a perfect starting point. As it was, there were so many cameras and possible views that it was hard to control and stay focused on the tasks literally at hand. The default Medusa firmware had some heuristic settings for automatically cutting between “interesting” activities but it was often random and awkward and jump-cut to a random scene right in the middle of some intense action, spoiling the moment.

AI, and the Oculus research into understanding the human gaze, offered a way for toys to understand when people were genuinely in the moment and to help keep them there, or to build up and change before things got to repetitive. This was one of the most difficult tasks for an AI, akin to teaching it to be the conductor of an orchestra spread out over the world, linked together by shuddery web connections. It was a work in progress, but regular software updates delivered silently during off-peak hours kept improving the experience.

Soon other tech companies followed suit, shifting their resources from public-space-based technologies to home-based ones. It wasn’t long into the Second Pandemic before driverless cars were forced to take a back seat to orchestrated mass cybersex acts through the rise of InstagramAdult, Google’s IntimateHome and Apple’s iLover lifestyle brands and a constellation of smaller start-ups.

This article was originally published by Evan on Notion

The post Sex and the pandemic first appeared on Ludogogy.

About Peek

Peek is a game that allows people to look into the future. It provides a glimpse of a world shaped by people, entities, events, facts and feelings. Using these storytelling elements, they report back to the group about their visions of the future. The skill in playing the game is to make reports both convincing and also creative.

The game is a response to the disinformation prevalent in popular media, and in particular the difficulty in explaining AI and machine learning and their benefits and drawbacks to lay audiences. For example, as well as the obvious issue of automation taking human jobs, the precarious sustainability of large banks of power-hungry computers running AIs is a theme in the game. There is a real need to educate people about how these potentially disruptive technologies could transform society, one way or another.

Our world is now science fiction

As theorist Dan Hassler-Forest (2019) pointed out, science fiction is now transmedia: it takes place across different almost all forms of media, from comics to games to television to social media. As Star Wars creator George Lucas lucratively discovered, science fiction movies can expand into a larger world of books, toys, comics, card games, games — almost any form of media into which a character can be illustrated, or sculpted out of.

Science fiction novels can take place across time as well – Ingrid Burrington and Brendan C. Byrne’s “The Training Commission” (Burrington and Byrne 2019) explored a number of science fiction concepts through an email newsletter at irregular intervals and links to the distributed web. Given the perceived strangeness and dystopian feel of current times where formerly stable democracies have exposed the innermost thoughts of unhinged leaders online, a global pandemic has locked many of us into our homes and daily occurrence like online “armies” of Korean pop star fans battling American police organisations through social media attacks, a number of people feel like everything has become science fiction.

Science fiction, it could be argued, has become a frame of reference for dealing with the ways that digital technologies are accelerating changes in our world. A search for the phrase “This is the longest episode of Black Mirror” (referencing the popular and darkly humorous science fiction show “Black Mirror” originated by Charlie Brooker) turns up a number of tweets dating back to 2016.

In Russia, it is alleged that President Putin’s advisor Vladislav Surkov secretly writes dystopian science fiction stories about non-linear war as a potential exercise in battle strategising (Komska, 2014). If so, he would be in good company as it is no secret that the United States used “scenario planning” in the 1950’s where Hollywood screenwriters were drafted into science fiction war-gaming exercises to help oppose the Soviet Union in the Cold War (Kleiner, 2003). Twentieth Century governments have long understood that “a critical… reading of science fiction is essential training for anyone wishing to look more than ten years ahead” (Clarke, 1963).

Game mechanics for storytelling

Storytelling, like any form of art, has with some basic tools of the trade. In Christopher Booker (2005)’s view, there are only seven fundamental storylines that can be worked with or against and combined in different ways. His work built on Joseph Campbell’s popular concept of the monomyth (Campbell 2008), and its concept of a story cycle following a main character called the “hero” on their journey through a series of challenges. Dan Harmon’s adaptation, which helps shape the plots of the popular science fiction cartoon Rick and Morty, was particularly influential in our work (Harmon 2013).

Stories have characters and settings. Interestingly, Charles Yu’s 2011 novel “How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe” describes pseudo-scientific theorem linking “science fiction universes” with imaginary physics and the resulting narrative trajectories and typologies of characters to be found in them.

Whilst we didn’t come up with a unified equation for characters and situations, we did put together a basic formula that worked well in our tests: Entity + Feeling + Reports.

• Entity: a person, organisation or thing
• Feeling: a prompt that helps relate the narrative to one of the seven basic plots from Booker
• Reports: mini-stories that fit on a card and provide background and inspiration

Scoring stories

Games often use the mechanic of collecting “points” to motivate players to do something, or to help decide a “winner”. In Peek, you can win the game if you use the most game cards in your stories and also tell the best stories, as decided by your critically-sophisticated fellow players.

Each of the players in Peek starts in a specific future time period (e.g. 2020-2030 or 2040-2050) with an Entity (main character), a Feeling, and a few Reports. The mechanism is that each player takes turns telling short “facts” about their character and time period. After trading a few facts with one another, a common story-world starts to emerge that includes cards from other players and riffs on each others’ ideas.

Then, players take turns telling a short story about their Entity (main character), starting in their time period and ending… wherever and whenever! The other players listen to this story and then try to be critical about how creative (and entertaining) it was, and also how plausible it seemed (so stories don’t become too unhinged from reality).

They assign points based on a special “Get Critical” card:

Players also get points for using other people’s cards in their story, as do the “owners” of those cards. This keeps the game collaborative, to reward players who created interesting facts about their cards that were irresistible not to use in other stories.

Telling stories

Let’s demonstrate how intuitive it can be to create stories from the cards. The following are cards from actual Peek player hands: an Entity (character) card and a Feeling (plot) card. For each hand, I will discuss the backstory of each card and occasionally invent a few “future facts” about them and explain how they might lead to a short story.

About the cards

Shada Ali is an attempt to get more women of colour into the game, especially strong ones like the real artist she is informed by. I’m hoping to get more diverse writers involved in future versions of the game. What’s interesting about this card combination is that Unnatural is partially a reference to the classic “Hero’s Journey“ plot, where a “hero” character goes on a journey to slay a threatening and legendary beast. In this case, there is a duality to the combination, where you can imagine that some conservative thinkers could consider Shada’s provocative art work to be a blasphemous abomination that must be destroyed, whereas she might feel that powerful members of society with their misinterpretations of religious texts are against the way things should have been.

About the cards

We all know someone like Will, someone a bit off who thinks everything is everyone else’s fault. Strangely, we live in a time where anyone can get up on a YouTube soapbox and discover their hidden charisma and gain a cult following. I thought up this card while listening to Rabbit Hole, a podcast from the New York Times that looked at the polarised cultures forming amongst YouTube binge-watchers. Even Will might get his day, on YouTube, if he can get a green screen for his AutoTruck so people don’t have to keep staring at the empty McDonalds wrappers piled up in the background of his videos.

Rags to riches — 2040-2050

About the cards

“Pluck” was a really difficult card to create and one of the harder cards to use in a story, for some reason. It represents the classic “rags-to-riches” story line of plucky orphans who find themselves adopted by the ultra-wealthy or otherwise improbably successful as in the classic musical Annie or English story Dick Whittington and His Cat. Success brings peril, however.

This plot is something like a journey, but starting from tragic circumstances that can only be resolved by luck. It is related to a quest or a journey, in which a central character has to overcome a series of difficulties to achieve greatness.

A quick story

• Bill and his family are currently hapless prisoners in their own panopticon created out of the sensors in his farming equipment, now owned by an off-shore corporation partially owned by British ex-Prime Minister David Cameron. He can’t afford to meet the monthly payments on the equipment leases, so until he can raise the funds the machines have started autonomously farming his plot of land and using the proceeds to pay for their basic upkeep (gas, maintenance, electricity).
• One day, Bill and his wife realise that they don’t have enough to last through the next two months. They decide to send Bill to the nearest city, Birmingham (UK) to see if he can get some work and start paying down the debt they owe and taking back control over some of the machines. Bill wanders the streets for days, sleeping rough until he finds a little circuitboard wedged into a stone wall in a park. It has a BitCoin icon on it, and appears intact.
• Bill hurries to an Internet Cafe (yes they still exist) and plugs in the little device. He finds £1M in BitCoin on the device, and before he can do anything else a window pops up that says “Installing…” and some rogue software takes over the computer. Another window appears with a video of David Cameron, now in his 70’s. David explains that he has planted this wallet in a place where he hoped someone destitute would find it, as penance for his disastrous handling of the Brexit referendum so many years ago. He also leaves instructions on how to meet him at his city home so he knows his gift has been found.
• Bill quickly transfers the BitCoin into his personal account and emails his wife. He downloads a little credit to his phone so he can take a train across town to meet Cameron. About an hour and a half later he is standing in front of the suburban home of Cameron, the man who, unbeknownst to him, is the majority owner of the equipment that has imprisoned him and his family for years.
• David greets him with a smile and a shake of the hand. He proves to be a gracious and generous host, explaining that his wife has left him a few years back and his health is now poor, despite the genetic reprogramming treatments. In his precious time left, all he would like to do is right a few wrongs and make peace with the world before he leaves it.
• Bill is surprised when another man enters the room and asks if everything is alright. “My lawyer,” says David. He explains that he has some pressing paperwork to attend to and offers Bill a room for the night before his long trip home to his family and farm. On the way upstairs to the guest quarters, the lawyer gives Bill a fierce look before quickly turning back to Cameron.
• In the morning, Bill wanders downstairs to find breakfast on the table and a note from Cameron apologising for having to leave, but offering Bill the use of his private helicopter and pilot to return home swiftly and safely. Bill is back in his old home, his head spinning, his wife leaping for joy, a rich man but also unsettled somehow. Back in the house he’d noticed the Cameron coat of arms looked very similar to the logo on the statements of the farming equipment lease-holders. Similar, but not exact. Coincidence?

The scoring

I told this short story to my partner. She gives it a “surprising” because “it’s not quite visionary but was definitely surprising” and “probably” because “the characters could act like that, and people have chance encounters like that. Like something you’d watch in a movie.” Final score: 9 points.

This article was originally published by Evan on Notion

The post The Mechanics of Plots in Peek first appeared on Ludogogy.

Expressing a vision of the future is taking a risk. Nevertheless, it’s useful to imagine what where the underlying and powerful trends of today could lead. Gamification relies on attitudes carried by video games: urgent optimism; bonds, trust and cooperation; blissful productivity; epic meaning. Gamifying group activities helps verbalising, understanding, discussing and willing agreement to the rules. It develops agency and responsibility. Gamification can occur in popular education or in more institutionalised contexts, such as middle and high schools. Using game-based aesthetics also changes how adults perceive and get involved as a team in group work. Gamification of academic and professional formation could lead to a more cohesive, understandable and engaging “skill-tree based” system. It would be more inclusive of the many long-life paths to professional capabilities. Yet, there is much to establish in terms of gamification ethics, connected to the use of personal data that are used in tracking, monitoring and profiling programs. Gamification could be a tool to empower individuals and communities or another means to enforce social engineering to the profit of powerful and untrustworthy entities. It could pave the road for Utopia or Dystopia.

Expressing a vision of the future is taking a tremendous risk

Chaos theory

First, unpredictable events can happen because of interactions between uncountable variables. As chaos theory states, an insignificant deviation of one of those elements can grow into a huge gap in the long term.

Choices

Moreover, the shape of the human future relies on individual and collective choices. Even if we adopt a purely deterministic view, those choices are nearly impossible to foresee.

Has Futurism always guessed wrong?

The “what if” reasoning when studying History, named alternative Historia, confirms that even when choosing a critical node and the alternative event of our choice, the way things could have turned remains highly speculative. That explains why Retrofuturism (the study of how we used to imagine the future) is sometimes so funny…

… and sometimes so accurate!

Being aware of our cognitive bias to keep an open-mind about predictions

Secondly, any prediction would involve the bias of the audience such as its hopes and fears. Pessimistic or optimistic, interested in any way by the outcome, educated or not, people will quickly praise or condemn those who dare to express their thoughts.

Why is Futurology useful?

Nevertheless, Futurology is useful. It makes us think more deeply about the long term trends and determinants. It’s a way to try an educated guess. It’s a method to make the trial and error process more efficient. More than anything, it empowers the human species by making it able to think strategically, to trace a path towards a better future, to identify critical times, to make decisions out of immediate ignorance, interest, or inertia (3)

Moreover, Futurology is often used by policy-makers to expose their plans, or even make their policies acceptable in the present.

During this perilous exercise, we will present some of the recent events that seem to indicate robust trends, we will express conditions for a prediction to happen and we will take position for some outcomes.

We will do our best to be both imaginative and informative. We ask for the reader’s indulgence: while we have played a Warhammer 40k Eldar army for a while, it’s our first day as a Foreseer.

Will gamification improve pro-social behaviours, motivation and academic and vocational orientation?

How I Gamified group-life before I knew I did

I discovered the academic study of gamification through an iconic 2010 Ted Talk by Jane McGonigal (4). She intended to build upon some attitudes carried by video games: urgent optimism; bonds, trust and cooperation; blissful productivity; epic meaning. Canalizing those “super powers” would both empower individuals and communities, and help tackling global issues.

Guess the name of the think-tank where McGonigal works in Palo Alto? “The Institute for the future.”(5)

Reflecting on this Ted Talk, I realised that in 2004, I already gamified my day-to-day management as a child counsellor. 2004 was an Olympic year, so I used the theme of sports to handle safety and misbehaviour issues with my group of children aged from 10 to 14 years old. For the first time, I was working for a social centre in a challenging neighbourhood in Marseilles. So I had the idea of making a scoreboard for all the activities we did, of organizing teams and of creating a disciplinary board inspired by sports federations.

What really matters when gamifying group interaction?

When you have children under your responsibility, you need to set and enforce instructions. That’s for the children’s own good. Making an analogy with sports opened new perspectives. Getting a yellow card one day would be harmless. Getting two yellow cards on the same day would lead to a cosequence  decided by other children and presided over by the counsellor. This has been a great opportunity to delay the decision; incentivise good behaviour until it was established; create time to discuss the behaviour; explain why it was dangerous or inappropriate without making the child feeling personally accused or misunderstood; introduce children to the principles of the rule of law, due process, proportionality of offences and penalties, conditional sentence and forgiveness. I could overrule the court’s excessive decisions, however my advice has almost always been listened to.

It’s been a great success. Verbalising the rules and the process made the children aware of those. The fact that conseqiences took place later in a safe place and in a not in a hurry was best for expressing feelings, explaining intentions and consequences of the behaviours, and acknowledging the eventual harm done to the victim. By decontextualising and empowering the children, we built a community bonded by common norms and values, and trust improved a lot.

In popular education, we do not believe that problems are solved with tricks. Of course, we couldn’t tackle every issue but we faced it as a community. Children have been empowered and have developed agency and responsibility. That’s a success on its own and it fuels popular education.

This is the popular education way.

Transforming school life by drawing inspiration from Hogwarts

In 2019, 15 French middle schools introduced a system inspired by Harry Potter’s House Cup (6). Like in Hogwarts, pupils were separated in teams called “Houses” which included children of different ages. All year long, good deeds were rewarded, such as helping at the canteen, outstanding participation in class or being helpful to other kids doing their homework. Elder children had more responsibilities towards the young ones. At the same time, misbehaviour led the House to lose points. Explanation of rules and expectations, empowerment, stronger feelings of belonging and peer pressure led to a better school climate and fewer offences.

The point is that the regulation system still exists. Changing its aesthetics makes it more explicit and more engaging. This is quite a paradox. Increasing psychological distance puts the actors in a situation of suspension of disbelief, thus leading the system to become odd and salient. Therefore, this regulation system must be more explicit, better discussed to become more relevant and accepted.

50 pts to Gryffindor!

How is it that changing aesthetics of regulations also changes social relations?

As adults, we forget easily that pupils are new to this world – a world full of hidden or misleading norms, values and signals that can quickly become opportunities and threats. In addition, norms and values taught at home can be different and/or outdated, and school becomes a puzzling if not dangerous environment.

The adults working at school are quite unaware of that. They are also unable to realise that they are not in tune with each other. I worked in nine high-schools. Each one was alike in some way but different. Each year, the rules were slightly different. And always, the habits were stronger than the rules. If the rules weren’t explicit, how could a teacher know he has been too strict or too lax let’s say, when a pupil is late or hasn’t done his homework? And also, it can lead to some arguments between colleagues.

So we can see that gamification of daily life and of school rules also helps adults work as a team.

Democracy as a process

Indeed, I think that some systems are inherently bad. Yet I believe that the equal implication of each actor during the proposition, the deliberation, the decision and the implementationl of the rules are not only a means but an objective in itself. In a Democracy, fair and efficient rules are not waiting to be discovered. Rules are always trade-offs that are chosen together (7). The “social contract” is discussed and signed again every day.

Parallels with Classcraft

Gamification of positive and negative reinforcement can also be seen in the Shawn Young’s Classcraft program (8)

This software divides the class in parties. Each pupil is either a Warrior, a Mage or a Healer. Considering synergies between the various archetypes, they are incentivised for group work, and to be concerned by each other’s behaviour. In some versions, the teacher can grant and/or withdraw Hit points, Experience points or coin to players, and embed the curriculum and monitor progress.

Those features are quite cool and should be more frequent in the future. Using fictional worlds that pupils know and love creates a psychological distance which downplays the regulations that carry toxic connotations for both pupils and adults. Nevertheless, no-one must be diverted: those are only means to meet emotion regulation, explanation, feelings of belonging and safety, shared values, decontextualisation and time spent as a community to make the rules well-known, truly understood, coherent and proportional.

Modular High-School in France opens opportunities for academic gamification

The French High School experienced a revolution in 2019 as it became modular.

This system had the ambition to unravel the former path proposed for the last two years in “general high-school”. Most of French pupils were divided into “vocational high-schools” or in “general and technological high-schools”. The “general path” proposed three curriculums: Scientific, Economic and Social and Literature. From 2019, the General High-School offers common courses (not including Mathematics) and Majors (four hours per week each).

French High School lasts for three years. Pupils are about 14 to 18 years old. When they enter “la classe de première” (Year 12 in the UK, Junior Year in the US), they follow some classes in common but 12 hours a week are devoted to the three “Majors” they chose. Once in “la classe de terminale” they keep only two “Majors”.

With the new system, we could establish the skills trees that we can find in many video games.

That would also match how Hogwarts students plan their academic and career orientation based on their results during exams. For instance, Harry Potter needs to pass O.W.L.s (Ordinary Wizarding Level) and then at least 5 N.E.W.T.s to become an Auror. The N.E.W.T.s (standing for Nastily Exhausting Wizarding Test) are inspired by the British A-Levels and the American Advanced Placement exams.

Enforcing this would suppose that higher education institutes clearly state the Majors that are mandatory, those which are replaceable, and those which are optional. Today in France, pupils need to enlist to a software called Parcoursup. Their marks and comments are registered and are used by higher education institutions to rank them.

In 2020, the French “Conseil Constitutionnel” (the highest court) ruled that the higher education institutes could publish the criteria that determine the ranking of applicants (9). So far, the full algorithms are not published, raising accusations of discrimination toward the less famous high-schools (those in poor neighbourhoods or far from metropolitan areas). So far, France has made a step in the UK’s direction without being as consistent.

In the future, legal or political actions could lead to more transparency and equity leading the way to an efficient gamification of the academic career.

What about a skill tree for academic orientation?

In the future, the spread of blended learnings and the development of MOOCs, will make pupils’ personal accomplishment and education more of a priority. Pupils will be able to register on an app that will help them to meet vocational expectations and create a portfolio (10) where they will gather their presentations, essays, dissertations, press reviews, drawings, musical or theatrical performances…

Learners will know at any moment how close they are to their objectives. They will change or add classes to open new horizons. They will get their inspiration from their elders in order to get an optimal, a classical or an original “build” –  a set of certified skills. They could also experiment by registering for classes they like best and see what academic and career opportunities it would lead to.

It would look like the World of Warcraft forum threads about character building, except that it would be endorsed by the Government (11).

Pupils would build their training just like a World of Warcraft player builds a Paladin.

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by” R. Frost

Alumni and other adults from any field could share their own skills trees to inspire and guide pupils, and remind them that adult life offers many paths to success. Some are the most travelled by. Some are unusual. All rely on developing skills in one way or another, through education or experience and all life long.

Apps like Funspirit’s RPG In Real Life: Gamification could also get add-ons based on open data, so that each pupil can chose his or her favourite interface(13).

That would require tailoring those applications from the beginning and lead authorities to plan better and more steady expectations so that pupils understand the purpose of their learnings.

Gamification unlocks superpower hence super-responsibility

In a nutshell, by implementing more transparency and proposing fun interfaces, we could improve greatly the way pupils take decisions about their academic and career orientation. This would enhance trust and intensify motivation.

Jane McGonigal was right: games terminology, models, thinking, feelings and interaction make sense. Games and gaming are parts of the popular culture. Let’s use them more, and more wisely.

Ethics refers to the tension between what we want to do, what we have to do, and what we can do. Let’s build the future of Gamification ethics together.

“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than a year of conversation.” Plato

Using digital gamification tools implies the collection, analysis, storage and communication of a lot of private, if not intimate data.

For instance, teachers run academic orientation sessions. During those, pupils can take tests to discover their personality such as the Myer-Briggs MBTI (14) or the ranking of the Schwartz Universal Values(15)

When I propose those activities, I’m very careful:

• I am not a psychologist
• The test questions are never enough contextualised, so interpretation may vary
• A dominant trait coexists with others and doesn’t always prevail
• Following the context, the aspects of our personality that we express, change
• The tests are anonymous
• No one is required to take the test seriously: pupils can give fake answers just to understand how different types are defined
• No one has to communicate the results of their test to anyone
• The teacher won’t report the results of the test, except if the pupil gives authorisation
• Anyone can change, or change their context, especially during teenage years
• This activity is to improve self-knowledge and self-awareness. No result is reported to anyone

In the future, tests inspired by Bartle’s player types (16) could be taken more often (17). Players engage willingly in games which is a clue for their deeper motivations. About 80% of players are Socialisers, 10% Achievers, 10% Explorers, 1% Killers.

That’s critical information to redesign courses and school-life.

The taking over and unethical use of the data analysis tidal wave

So far, the teacher doesn’t have access to that much data about his or her pupils. Many things happen in the classroom that are unknown to him or her, for the best and for the worst.

Let’s imagine that the “augmented” teacher has access to information about the attention of pupils. In China, cameras are used in some classes to monitor children’s attention (19).

Do we want such a neo-taylorist scope? Indeed, schooling prepares children for adult life. Isn’t it too intrusive and authoritative? Doesn’t it reveal a deep mistrust towards our kids that deserve more than “taming” techniques? Do we prepare them to be autonomous workers and free and responsible citizens in a democratic society?

We could also imagine movement tracing or physiological measurement. All of those could be embedded in a class gamification app and automated. We could imagine that the teacher would be incited or ordered to report those. Maybe applicants would have to accept those devices to join prestigious schools; and/or that the personal information would be gathered and sold or communicated, sometimes unofficially like during the Prism Program (20).

Our personal data are used more and more for tracing and profiling and it could get worse. In 2020 and 2021, Google fired two key members of its Ethical Artificial Intelligence Team (21) for raising questions about its deeper reasons.

Gamification for social engineering? Teachers as sworn gatekeepers?

Nowadays, the main uses of tracking and profiling are commercial or electoral. It could easily switch to social engineering. What about the so-called “predictive” use of it? Would pupils still have the opportunity to diverge from the path that has been assigned to them? What about the powerful self-fulfilling predictions (22)?

Pupils should be able to choose to reveal or to keep information and to have the right to change. By this I mean that long and non-negotiable terms of use are not relevant to express one’s consent. The teacher should be a sworn gatekeeper and communicate personal information only when absolutely necessary. That’s not the path we are taking. Gamification coexists too often with a wary, unilateral and vertical monitoring.

In 2020 and 2021, Barbara Stiegler, a French Philosopher, wrote that

“more than the so-called conspiracy theories’ approval among the population, the Covid-19 crisis reveals the mistrust of the elite toward the population” (23)

Gamification should serve empowerment. Are decision-makers trustful enough to make this happen? Will gamification be just another social engineering tool?

For those reasons, gamification is a powerful tool that could bring in the future efficient opportunities to build a genuine trust or a tighter grip.

Ethics must involve professionals, but also philosophers, psychologists, data analysts, developers and managers.

We could see a rise in ethical practices in education, workshops and check and balances, within the social and environmental responsibility scope. But we could also witness “ethicswashing” in the same way that greenwashing and socialwashing, led by marketing and public relationship teams, became important in recent decades.

Who promotes, drives, conceives, pays and evaluates the ethics programs will be critical. Let’s turn our backs on the post-truth era.

Conclusion: Road to Utopia or to Dystopia?

Futurology brings us to more or less realistic visions of the future. Utopias are optimistic “what if”, while dystopias are pessimistic “what if”.

Utopia: In the future, we can hope that the systems that hide under a “gamified skin” will be sensible, relevant, transparent, fair and will be built by a community of users. The only way to push an agenda is by building utopias. For instance, when writing Utopia (24) Thomas More advocated against the death penalty which was largely supported at the time.

Dystopia: If not understood, if unchallenged, if unaddressed, gamification would just make more acceptable deceitful, inefficient and unfair processes. Neglecting ethics, or leaving gamification to few influential interested parties would contribute to the building a strong “boring dystopia” (25). Probably loking much like Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World”, a Netflix’s “Black Mirror”, or a BBC’s “Year and Years”..

A not-so-secret war is already raging. Each battle will determine the future. Two opposite trends are struggling and will keep struggling in the future. The Secretiveness, Authoritarianism and Normativity compete with Sincerity, Trust and Respect.

The way gamification is evolving will be a good indicator of the winning trend.

The post Will gamification improve pro-social behaviours, motivation, academic and vocational orientation? first appeared on Ludogogy.

As a futurist, I rely heavily on a skill called Scanning. Scanning is how we start to know the future and begin to expand our time horizon. It gives us a feel for the patterns that influence the future. Scanning is one of the most universal futurist techniques for sensing and knowing what is changing.  Done well, scanning has meaningful insights for future-oriented thinking.

I think anyone can learn to identify emerging ideas, not just futurists. What are we looking for? Some people, like my favorite futurist Amy Webb, call them “Signals.” We look for “firsts.” We pay attention to empirical projections, models, and forecasts. We seek wildcards and black swans; that is, what might surprise us. We become intimately familiar with the fringes of society. And we do this by reading and monitoring dozens and dozens (and dozens) of media every day.

I would like to share with you some of the cutting-edge information I have encountered recently in my scanning that I think will help you maximize your experience when it comes to thinking about the future as a game enthusiast or designer.

Below are five insights, or we might say, “foresights” to help you think creatively about what the next generation will need and want from a gaming experience. I will explain five examples of emerging cultural shifts that should make us all question what games and entertainment will look like in 2040:  Life extension and human enhancement, digital nomadism, surveillance capitalism, biophilia, and brain hacking.  Let me go through each one.

1. Life Extension and Human Enhancement

The first signal is life extension and human enhancement. The modern human life span is increasing across the board. Now that a life of 100 or more years is increasingly possible, if not likely, how does this change how people will spend their time?

First of all, there is a very vibrant sense today that learning should be lifelong. As we experience the social phenomena of older people with a better quality of life having a larger role in society, we should expect the way they spend their time to become more meaningful across the lifespan.

With more years of life, people may move jobs more often or want and need to learn new things frequently, and games can help with this.  Gaming keeps the mind active and games can be educational. A longer life span within the rapid pace of today’s technological change means more tools to learn and different technology revolutions to comprehend. A person of 100 years of age today has already experienced the heyday of radio, television, internet, and now social media.  Imagine how many more technologies a person born in 2030 will need to learn before they die should we keep up this pace. Games may be able to help a lot in this area.

An extended lifespan also equates to more variety in life phases.  Don’t forget that childhood as we know it today is a concept that has only been around for about 150 years. Could there be future life stages that a centenarian society might need to account for all the extra time? There could be a large gap in years between the onset of adulthood and individual commitment to so-called “adult” activities, such as marriage and parenthood. Furthermore, gaming could lose its connotation as a youthful pastime, and become more universal.

Along with medical innovations that can ensure a longer lifespan are the technologies that can create an intellectually and physically enhanced person. This might sound like science fiction, but in 2018 a Chinese doctor admitted to genetically enhancing his own children to be immune to contracting HIV. In doing this procedure, he inadvertently modified their brains as to provide them with a form of superintelligence (oops). As a future-shaping signal, this was a relevant “first” of possibly many more events as medical science reaches a turning point permitting human engineering that will have an effect on how we compete, think, and play.

2. Digital Nomadism

The second driver that might shape the future is a new concept known as the Digital Nomad.  A digital nomad is a highly mobile person who works remotely. It’s been observed that COVID-19 has accelerated the digital nomad trend dramatically, allowing more people than ever to work and learn from home.

Prior to 2020, a digital nomad would jet between tropical locations to convenient cities perhaps stopping at friend’s and family homes, with just a laptop and a rolling suitcase. During COVID, digital nomads have taken the opportunity to work out of hotels and AirBnBs, and some have even taken on truly nomadic lifestyles by living on the road in mobile homes. As the pandemic winds down, it’s very possible our jobs and our studies will be unable to keep us tethered to a single geographic location. Digital nomads are the future.

The rise of the digital nomad suggests that we will all be living far deeper in the metaverse, which is, according to Wikipedia: “a collective virtual shared space, created by the convergence of virtually enhanced physical reality and physically persistent virtual space, including the sum of all virtual worlds, augmented reality, and the Internet.”  If you have ever played an online game or taken an online class, you are already in the metaverse.  But, in 2040, you might be playing in virtual reality, augmented reality, from an object in the internet of things, or as a holographic figure. Or you might just communicate information via brain waves, but I’ll get to that later. 

3. Surveillance Capitalism

The third shift impacting the future of games concerns the rise of a new business model known as surveillance capitalism.  All the big technology companies, from Facebook to Google, make a nice, fat profit from the information they collect about the people who use their “free” services. As The Economist indicated a few years ago with a major 2017 cover story, data is the new oil. What they meant was that the previous winners of the game of capitalism ran the fossil fuel industry, but the scales have now tipped in favor of the Ubers and the Amazons. The most valuable natural resource today is us.

I am always surprised at how few people are aware of this arrangement.  I have actually had students ask me, “Is it true that Facebook is spying on us and Siri is always listening?” It’s almost an urban myth at some level, where people sort of hear about it but can’t confirm the existence of our self-imposed surveillance system. It is important to see how digital tools have created an entirely new consumer structure, and we need to be upfront about it because, as the saying goes, if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product. So, how must we play differently, especially when we are now products? How do we prepare to have fun and learn in this new world?  We need to consider this so that, as digital nomads, we retain our humanity throughout our travels in the metaverse.

4. Biophilia

An American teenager recently won a sustainability award for her project growing a fully functioning canoe from mycelium, or mushrooms. She demonstrated rowing it in a lake and in doing so started a conversation about a future where we can grow, rather than construct, the items we need.  I relate this story to a vibrant trend known as biophilia, or love of nature.

I am going to make the argument that Gen Z has a bad case of biophilia. Bad in a good way. The young people of today are embracing nature: gardening, indoors and outdoors, is on the rise. Pets have become more common than children in the USA. House plants are a requisite of today’s design aesthetic. By 2040, I think biophilia will be deep-rooted in our society in a number of ways.

For example, the Pacific Garbage Patch is already a major preoccupation of youth around the world. For most of their lives, we have had a cluster of plastic and trash the size of a continent floating in our ocean. There are many campaigns around the world to combat this damage, and one of them involved a design for a floating recycling center that would float around the ocean picking up trash and transforming it into useful products.  The rise of Greta Thunburg and other major youth activists has got the world’s attention on these topics. I can easily imagine the gamification of the solution to these climate challenges by 2040.

5. Brain Hacking

The fifth example of techno-social shifts on the horizon concerns a new theory of “The Extended Mind,” which suggests that we are on the path to merging mind and machine. The theory goes that a smart device, like a phone or tablet, can supplement our brain power by helping us remember things, keep track of our activities, and basically free up our own cognitive capacity.   By 2040, we may live in environments that make us “smarter” by virtue of a continuously extended mind.

Currently, we are witnessing the rise of brain hacking using a technology called Brain Computer Interface, or BCI. BCI is a rising technology of the 2020’s and it may one day be pervasive in our homes, schools, and workplaces. It is a technology meant to reduce the friction between man and machine by transforming the brain into a seamless user interface to interact with artificial intelligence (AI) and other digital tools.

Elon Musk plans to see his own BCI device, called Neuralink, implanted in a human brain by late this year.  Already monkey with a Neuralink implant recently demonstrated the ability to play video games with its mind. Though Musk has emphasized Neuralink’s immediate and therapeutic application to victims of paralysis or neurological disease, he champions a longer-term vision where brain implants allow us to achieve a number of brain hacks, including being able to communicate telepathically, even after we die.

Some brain hacks require no implant: a startup called Nēsos has a set of earbuds that use electricity to treat rheumatoid arthritis, hacking the brain to reduce inflammation. Other companies, like Valve, are exploring BCI in a gaming device which would essentially read your mind. Hacking the brain for leisure, novelty, medical treatment, and learning are all on the horizon, bearing many implications on the future of the way we live.

In the future, it is possible that BCI will be connected to a digital assistant, for example, which might answer all our questions for us. In that case, do we still need to learn stuff?  Or, by 2040 we may own devices that can detect brain waves so that we are able to control whatever film or show we are watching, or use telepathy to communicate. BCI can also allow users to compose a song with their mind, so it will allow us to get more in touch with their creative side.  And, since it is possible to learn via BCI, students may eventually just hack their brains to academically advance, rather than be given tests or grades. We might someday hack our way into college, a new job, or promotion.

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed this quick tour through the signals running through my head when I think about the future of gaming and how the gaming world can embrace futurism.  I hope that you learned something that helps orient your thinking toward the surprising and unexpected twists likely in our unfolding human story. The five examples I sense on the horizon are only some of the fascinating ripples of change taking place. In fact, COVID and the subsequent lockdown policies have provided an unusual opportunity to step back and assess our current situation. A year into this pandemic, I think it’s fair to refer to 2020 and maybe 2021 with a new term I recently learned:  “Anthropause.” Archaeological scholars have devised this term to describe a brief pause in human activity, such as the one we’ve been in since last year. I hope this anthropause gives way to a much more positive and promising future to 2040 and beyond.

The post Playing games with the next generation first appeared on Ludogogy.

With this, you’re probably wondering how does this information tie into foresight? Well, almost all games require careful foresight, overcoming challenges in a game is what players aspire towards and being able to provide the player with the necessary information to plan ahead to achieve their goals.
Keep in mind that this isn’t me telling you how to create games with teaching foresight in mind, this is just some of the observations of a nerdy chap who has played plenty of games that happen to make me think carefully about my decisions and I just wanted to share them with you lovely readers.

First things first, what is foresight and how to grasp it

According to the Cambridge dictionary foresight is described as “the ability to judge correctly what is going to happen in the future and plan your actions based on this knowledge”. (FORESIGHT | meaning in the Cambridge English Dictionary, 2021).

I always found foresight to be a very tricky thing to teach people how to improve upon, it simply comes down to experience in the particular activity that you’re taking part in, which is gained by taking part in an activity or task over a certain period of time, where you are able to fully absorb the information that is being presented or hidden from you, causing you to plan your next move accordingly.

Ultimately, improving your ability to plan ahead comes down to trial and error, with certain tasks requiring more foresight than others (e.g., Planning a wedding compared to deciding what you want for dinner, totally different ballparks.)

I’m sure that there are many different tutorials that will try to teach you some ways of improving upon your skills in planning ahead, but it is incredibly subjective in regards to the tasks and activities that you’re taking part in, especially if they happen to be complicated in their execution. As the old saying goes, Practise makes perfect.

How can this be adapted in games?

The main things that need to be decided upon when creating a game would be what kind of information does the player need in order to accomplish their goal and how you will present this to the players?
What type of information that the player need is a rather tricky question to give an answer to as it heavily depends on the type of experience that the game is offering the player. This is due to different genres of games requiring the player to keep track of differing amounts of information depending on the genre of the game they’re playing. For example, real time strategy games like those from the Age of Empires series would need to share a much larger amount of information to the player (Things like player and enemy unit locations, their health, what they can build, train and research, the amount of battlefield can be seen, etc.) when compared to a side scrolling platformer like Super Mario Bros (Things like Player, enemy and hazard positions, their current time and score).

After deciding on the What, the next important decision is the How. How exactly are you going to present this information to the player as and when they need it. This answer is also dependent several factors of the game being created, such as the type of gameplay, how deep are the gameplay mechanics and how much of the story (if there even is one) is a factor to the overarching experience.

With these factors in mind, there are a multitude of ways a designer can provide information or components that are necessary for the player to proceed in their game. These include:

• Through the game’s mechanical systems which provide the player who simply plays the game or accomplishes a specific task with new abilities, skills or equipment that they can work towards acquiring in order to achieve their ultimate goal of winning the game (Similar to the progression models found in Role playing or action-adventure games).
• As the player reaches certain parts of the game’s story, they may be presented with information that either supports or hinders their progression through the game. This can be achieved through character dialogue, reading documentation that the player finds during play or through changes caused by events in the story or through the player’s actions (similar to puzzle games or point-and-click adventure games.
• This one is related to the first point on this list with the player interacting with the game’s mechanics, however this point covers the simple act of trial and error, where the player gains information about the challenges that they face through the game by facing them head on and then figuring out the best way to overcome their problems through repetition, learning what to do/not do in order to succeed.

Whilst the information that is provided through events of a game’s story can be entertaining, unless the player knows what’s about to happen, it doesn’t really provide the player with the opportunity to plan ahead for the situations that can occur, due to the linear nature of most stories found within games.

Because of this, most of the situations where the player is given an opportunity to develop their skills in foresight in games tend to occur in the situations where the player is engaging with the game on a mechanical level, using a combination of the information being presented to them through the options available to them, whilst being encouraged to try again or try a different strategy if they are unable to overcome the challenge being presented to them.

Useful Examples I’ve played

I could give a simple list of ideas and suggestions that any budding developer or designer could use in their own projects but I think it would be a much better idea to give a few examples of games that I have personally played that have made me exercise my own skills in foresight in order to achieve success. Whilst I can’t guarantee that these games will be ones you may enjoy (subjective tastes are a factor), I can promise that these games are at least interesting in some way so please give them a look if they pique your interest.

Darkest Dungeon

This game offers a grim take on the turn-based dungeon crawling role playing game realm, not only with a strikingly unique visual aesthetic, but also on a mechanical one. One of the main themes of Darkest Dungeon is making sure that you properly prepare your party with the appropriate supplies, party members, training and equipment before going on adventures into various dangerous territories, each one offering their own monsters and hazards that you need to be mindful of, otherwise your party won’t have much hope of surviving, both physically and mentally.

Monster Hunter: World

The Monster Hunter series offers a slightly different take on the same core idea of preparation that Darkest Dungeon offers, only on a much more personal level since you take direct control of a hunter that is sent of various mission to fight monsters of various shapes and sizes.
Throughout the game, you are encouraged to equip yourself with not only supplies, different types of weapons and armour which grant you effective protection and offensive capabilities against the monsters you may face (e.g., equipping fire resistant armour against a fire breathing monster), but also knowledge gained through studying the physical attributes and behaviours of the monsters you encounter. This is so that you can learn their weak spots, what weapons and armour are most effective against them and most importantly, how they move and fight so that after a few fights with these creatures, you wind up becoming familiar with these daunting creatures and organically learn the best ways to overcome the challenges that are presented to you simply by playing the game (and doing a little bit of homework if you’re so inclined).

An additional layer of foresight is added to the way you customise your character’s visual style as well, as you acquire materials from fighting monsters, you are able to preview the different weapons and armour sets that will be available to you, should you gather the required amounts and types of materials, encouraging players to seek out greater challenges in order to gain the different weapons gear that they may want.

Fallout New Vegas

Although this game may seem rather dated by today’s standards of visual fidelity, it certainly makes up for it with some of the best world building and character progression systems I’ve ever seen. This is reinforced by the fact that in the game you are granted full control over the ways you can create your character, both thematically in regards to where you stand in the game’s overarching story and interactions with the people you meet within the Mojave Desert and also in gameplay with an in-depth character progression system.

This system encourages players to think about how they want to build their character through a perks system that offers players a horizontal means of character progression, giving them access to a unique set of skills and powers depending on if the player reaches amounts of skill points, allowing for each player to create unique experiences by letting them think outside of the box when approaching any problems that they may encounter.

E.g., The Cowboy skill makes it so that you deal more damage with certain weapons if you have a high enough skill with Guns and Melee or the Terrifying Presence perk grants you the ability to intimidate people through dialogue if your Speech Skill is high enough, just to show a couple of examples of the ways you can build your character how you want to play.

Dota 2

This, along with other games that follow a similar style of play (such as League of Legends or Smite) by having separate teams of players take control of unique characters as they work together to be the first team to destroy the enemy base. These types of games offer a wide selection of playable characters with their own strengths and weaknesses as well as items that allow players to further augment their own abilities or provide some means of dealing with their opponent’s characters in some way or another, depending on what needs to be accomplished.

These games encourage players to carefully think about their choices both before and during a game since every character has advantages and disadvantages when facing each other and the items that you can purchase can help to either alleviate any potential dangers of your opponents or improve your characters innate strengths and weaknesses, depending on the choices that you and your allies make. In Dota 2 a good example would be buying an item that prevents your opponent from attacking for a short period of time or buying an item that immediately heals all of your nearby allies in the middle of a fight, just to name a few.

Overall, foresight comes down to having the opportunity to think about what you should do within any possible situation you may be faced with and games are no stranger to encouraging this style of thinking within their players. It’s important as a game maker to recognise what kind of information you need to provide your players, based on the game you’re making and giving them the necessary means of carrying out their plans in order to succeed in completing the challenges you face them with.

The post Observing how games teach players to think and plan ahead first appeared on Ludogogy.

This is a view which has developed in the author, it seems, as a result of his own cosmopolitan background, and of being a dedicated autodidact and polymath. Towards the start of the book, he describes in detail how he arrived at the idea that it is was best to weaken links with any particular culture and develop a ‘placeless, colorless, hybrid, integral, synthetic, multiple, and planetary consciousness’.

Motti is also a Futurist and in that he is fairly typical in advocating for reflection on a range of alternative possible futures, rather than a focus on a probable single future.  The two ideas mesh well in that a ‘planetary consciousness’ brought to bear on the reflection of a range of potential futures, will necessarily remove much of the bias towards ‘Western’ (and indeed Northern) perspectives that occurs in much work that, in fact, affects much more than the Global West or North.

He visits ‘seven valleys’ in the book, seven chapters which each focus on different topics, but it is difficult to describe the book in this way, as unlike many others I have read recently there is no standard structure to the chapters. Some contain ‘how-tos’ – practical descriptions of how a particular piece of research was/could be carried out. Others are largely theoretical and some resemble nothing so much as a literature review.

All would really defy a simple description as to what they are ‘about’. For example, Chapter Five, ‘The United Shift of Asia’, appears at first glance to be about the rise of the East and the implications of that for global culture – and of course it considers several potential future scenarios of how it will pan out for all of us. Later in the chapter however, it segues into be mostly ‘about’ potential futures of the human body – for example the potential for ‘regrowing’ tissue – opening up economic opportunities for individuals to hawk their services as vessels to grow organs – a fascinating read if one can get past the ‘ick’ factor.

Don’t get me wrong, the chapters do have overarching themes, but Motti’s vision is so expansive, that they are stretched almost to bursting point. Indeed , as an experience, it feels quite natural, like the experience you have when following your interest from one link to the next in an enjoyable and informative web-surfing session. The sheer breadth of Motti’s knowledge and subject matter dazzles, producing a somewhat hallucinatory effect as you navigate a book which encompasses, as a brief list of what’s on the menu, Persian mythology, Sufi Mysticism, systems thinking and a consideration of how even the tiniest nuances of different language can affect our capacity to grokk specific concepts.

This is not necessarily an easy book to read, but careful attention to some of the more labyrinthine passages in it, are repaid with ‘a-ha’ moments aplenty

As someone who has just launched a project which attempts to embrace an optimistic view of potential futures, I feel that this book has come into my view at just the right time.  As a child, probably fuelled by repeated watchings of the ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’, and similar, I often fantasised about the idea that an invasion from outer space would make us all realise that we all live on the same planet, and that we would start to treat each other accordingly. I was quite a serious child, who felt ‘unfairness’ very keenly, and found it incomprehensible that people would hate or treat others differently because of superficial differences like race, or disability, for example. I never arrived at a solution for what we would do to throw off the yoke of our new alien overlords, but it was my fantasy, and I just took the bits I wanted from it.

In this book, Motti not only articulates, very well, the hope that I carried as a child, but also argues that such a vision of a world is possible to realise. Chapter Four on ‘Disconnecting Humanity from Killing’, for example, not only presents the evidence that humans are not ‘natural-born killers’, but also provides a credible roadmap for arriving at a future situation on ‘Non-Killing’ based on VFT (Value Focused Thinking).

A subsequent chapter on the ‘Awesome Intelligent Environment’ contains a section on ‘A Largely Jobless World’, thereby touching on another of my fantasies. A world without Jobs, like a world without killing, represents something of a Utopia to me. This is not the same, it should be stressed, as a world without work. I have always enjoyed work, but pretty universally loathed every last job I’ve ever had. That is because work can be meaningful and worthwhile, but jobs, as in the title of the book by the late David Graeber, whose wisdom will be sorely missed as we move into the future, are largely Bullsh*t.  Motti mentions Universal Basic Income once, in passing.  I would dearly love to enter into a conversation with him about what comes next after we have managed to disconnect remuneration from the awful grind of jobs, and free ourselves to take on meaningful work.

I am not able, in the space or time available to me, to do much more than scratch the surface of what is contained in this book. Read it. Open your eyes to a greater and more dazzling array of potential futures than you ever thought possible.

The post The Future of a Planetary-wide Consciousness first appeared on Ludogogy.