On today's episode, I welcome back game designer, Jane McGonagall.

She's a best-selling author and director of game research and development at Institute

for the Future, a non-profit think tank that helps people prepare for the future.

Last week, we talked about what she calls gamefulness.

The optimistic, pragmatic attitude we have when we're engaged in the game.

But we didn't manage to get to the topic I was most eager to talk about, her work creating

games to help us prepare for and predict the future.

We are all experts on our own values, our needs, what we would likely do in a hypothetical

situation.

We can predict that better than an expert would predict.

Welcome to People I mostly admire with Steve Levitt.

So today, we dive into that and more.

And don't worry, if you haven't listened to part one of our conversation, the order doesn't

matter.

The two conversations stand alone.

So you've gotten a ton of press around some simulations you've done that mirrored future

disasters.

The best known one was a game that you ran back in 2008 involving thousands of people in

which they faced a global pandemic.

Could you just give me an example of a future game and what it would look like if I came

to one of your seminars?

Well, most of these simulations are played online.

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