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https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210528/10172346897/money-city-our-new-game-to-explore-future-money-is-now-available-to-everyone.shtml>
"As folks may know, over the past few years, the Copia Institute (the think
tank arm of Techdirt) has been building out a series of games — both of the
tabletop variety and for events (both in person and virtual). It began with an
election simulation we helped to design with some political consultants (which
got a lot of attention for bizarre reasons) and has included a number of other
projects, including making a boxed version of a CIA training game, a scenario
planning game that was used to inspire science fiction writers to write about
the future of work, an election disinformation simulation game, to a fun game
to explore a variety of future timelines by looking backwards from the future,
and a game workshop to explore the future of AI (the results of which are about
to be used in a new X-Prize competition).
We've just created a Copia Gaming page about all of our many game related
projects, and we have many more in the pipeline. We believe, quite strongly,
that games are the perfect tool for explaining the present and exploring the
future, and we use our games for both purposes. The games for explaining the
present, such as the election simulations and the CIA training game, take on
complex real world situations, that have many nuances and trade-offs, and allow
people to learn about them in a way that differs than just reading a long
article or listening to a panel. It puts players in that world, with
responsibility for making actual decisions, and with real incentives. Over and
over again we've heard from participants about how the games opened their eyes
to understanding real world events with a totally new perspective, even if they
thought they'd understood them before.
The games to explore the future are slightly different, but equally useful.
Most people are familiar with traditional scenario planning or even some
aspects of "futurism," but we've found that those processes are either boring
or fall into traditional traps that make the end result not nearly as
insightful or interesting. By adding a game element to them, we've found that,
again, it really takes people out of their own pre-set perspective, and opens
them up to many more creative possibilities, by putting them into different
roles, with different incentives, resources, and challenges.
And today we're releasing an open source toolkit for one of those "explore the
future" games we created earlier this year, called
Money City, sponsored by
Grant For The Web which we ran over three separate sessions at this year's
Mozfest (Mozilla's big annual conference)."
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
