Hello everyone and welcome to the Minescape podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll. I forget whether I've told this story before but back in the early days of the World Wide Web. So not the internet. The internet goes back further. But the idea of web browsers, right?

There were first text-based web browsers. There's one called links, L-Y-N-X, which is a pun because you clicked on a link. Eventually there were image-based web browsers. Mosaic from NCSA was everybody's favorite thing. And then ultimately, Netscape. Netscape was the real time when not only could you see images in your web browser but it was relatively fast. You didn't have to wait for 10 minutes for a page to download. And also Netscape was important because

it was commercialized. They had an initial public offering and people were very, very excited. And as an early adopter of the web, I was there. I used Netscape all the time. I was very excited. I had no money to invest. So I was not part of the big bubble in the Netscape stock prices. But I was asked by my friends who had no idea what the web was. Like what's the big deal? Why is this going to be so important? And I honestly couldn't do a very good job of explaining why it was going.

I had an intuition, had a feeling this was going to be a big deal. I would have invested in Netscape. Had there been money. But when people asked like, how are they going to make money off of that? I really couldn't answer. I did not have a good idea. Like I could point to actual web pages that existed. But they were largely along the lines of video camera pointing at a coffee maker. So you could see whether there was coffee in the coffee maker or not. And no one was impressed by that. You could order pizza. But I was not sure. I was just wondering if I could do a video camera. I was wondering if I could do a video camera pointing at a coffee maker. So you could see whether there was coffee in the coffee maker or not. And no one was impressed by that. You could order pizza.

But people knew how to order pizza by using the phone. So again, what was the point? Anyway, the point of the story is the future is hard to predict. Even if you know something specific is going to happen, the implications of whatever it is going to happen can be very, very hard to anticipate. There's so many moving parts in society and technology in the world that predicting the future can be very, very tricky. So today's guest, Jane McGonicle, started out and became well known as a game design.

And also author and has moved into being a futurist systematically predicting imagining what the future is going to be like. And you might wonder what is the connection between these two things. But if you're a game designer, I don't mean games like Solitaire or Candy Crush. I mean these massive multiplayer games where you have an avatar and there's a world you've built a world. And there are rules. They might not be the same rules as our world. But you can kind of see when you put it that way.

What the connection is between game design and futurism because when you're predicting the future, you're trying to simulate an extraordinarily complex system. And oftentimes you can't actually make the prediction yourself. You have to let people follow the rules of the game that he was going to happen. It is very often the case that things happen in these massive games where the game designers themselves did not predict it. That's exactly the kind of thing you have in the future.

You might imagine doing a simulation of the future, giving a bunch of people different parameters, different changes that society's undergone, different technological or scientific advances and asking them how they would adapt. I'm not going to give away any of the secrets here. But Jane's message is that we can become better at thinking about the future at imagining what's going to happen. We can train our brains to do it. Games are one way of doing it. But there's other ways of thinking about the future in more ways.

Anyone who's lived through the past couple of years can no doubt understand how important it is to get a better handle on what the future is going to be like. So let's go.

GameMegonical, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. Thank you. I'm very excited to be here. This is very exciting. So as I just told you before we started recording, I've been wanting to have you on the podcast for a long time to talk about games and gaming.

Now you've come up with a completely different book imaginable about futurism, thinking about the future. But I still want to start with the games if that's OK. So I do think it actually it makes sense to me how you started out as a game designer and then became more of a futurist. So maybe I'm sure that there are some heavy gamers in the audience and some not so much.

So why don't you give your sales pitch or explanation for how important gaming is to the modern world? Sure. Well, so you know my research background is studying the psychological impacts of playing video games. And when I was doing my PhD, I became kind of obsessed with

with the sense that gamers were developing skills and abilities that might have some transferable benefit to our real world problems. And I mean, I came, I came to this, you know, obsession because gamers were saying give us something real right and all these online communities and forms.

They seemed hungry for non virtual challenges to solve. And so I kind of made it my business to figure out, could we invent a new genre of games that it still feels like play, but it really taps into that unique skill set of

flexible mindset and creative thinking and collaboration and collective intelligence and this kind of unbelievable resilience that gamers have where if they can't figure something out right away, they stay with it. And you know, it just seemed like such a great skill set to apply to things like climate change and ending poverty and imagining a better world.

And that's, and that's how I kind of transitioned into becoming a game developer myself trying to experiment with different genres of games that might, might connect gamers abilities with, with real world challenges.

And one thing that you point out right there is that there is a tremendous amount of effort and intellectual exertion right now being put into the world by gamers. And I don't know whether in your mind, a gamer is someone who is just playing some console or PC game, where does it count to play solitaire on your iPhone also.

Well, I mean, does it count? I mean, you know, I spent like 20 years now studying the psychology of games and solitaire could count for something it could count for your regulating your thoughts and emotions, you're using the game to turn off, you know, depressive

animation or to stop, you know, panic attack and it's, you know, you're controlling your imagination to not have anxious thoughts. I mean, yes, I mean solitaire on your phone could count for something solitaire on your phone, especially if you've been playing it for 20 or 30 or 40 years as many people like they find a game they like and that's the only game they play.

I mean, that does not necessarily lend itself to developing collective intelligence skill set because you're playing by yourself. There's a certain, there's a certain like super power, the ability to learn new systems quickly that comes from playing games that you've never played before new interfaces, new genres, new challenges.

I mean, I always say, like, if you want the benefits and skillsets of gaming, you really do want to be trying different games and particularly ones that many other people are playing because so so much of what's interesting about gaming comes from that collective collaborative culture.

Yeah, maybe this is just worth spelling out for again, probably there's some people who just don't do this at all and maybe they have an image of games is mostly you're shooting other people or aliens or something like that, but the social aspects and not just social in the sense that you're collaborating and cooperating but there's a different kind of society that appears within the game and this is something that is a brave new world that you know many people already dived into but many people are completely shut out from.

...