It's TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hugh. Today, an episode from the TED Interview, another podcast in the TED Audio Collective.

As we look to the year ahead, I found this conversation on how we can become futurists, super illuminating for thinking bigger, far beyond New Year's resolutions.

If you want to hear more, follow the TED interview wherever you listen.

Jane McGonigal, welcome to the TED interview.

Thank you, Stephen. I'm glad to be here.

So this is a conversation largely about the future and how to think more intelligently and

creatively about it. But I wanted to start in the past, actually, which is where your book

imaginable starts, because more than a decade ago, you ran not one, but two projects with thousands of people involved

that simulated a global future pandemic involving a respiratory virus. I mean, simulations

that ended up anticipating many things that we have lived through over the last two years with COVID. So I thought we'd start

there. And maybe you could just set the stage for us and explain how these projects came about

and what their ultimate mission was. Great. So this type of future forecasting game is called

a social simulation. And it's social because it's not the kind of simulation where you put a bunch of algorithms into a machine and you crank them and see what the machine predicts what happen. You know, this many people will get sick. This many people will lose their job. This many people will die. That's not our kind of simulation. At the Institute for the Future, we say we're low on algorithms, but high on social and emotional intelligence.

We ask thousands of people what they would do and feel if they woke up in a particular future scenario.

And when I first started making these games, the first big game was in 2008 called Superstruct.

And we had just under 8,000 people spend six weeks imagining what they would do, how they would adapt, and how they would try to help

others if they were living through this respiratory pandemic. We called it respiratory distress syndrome.

And they played on a private social network. So it's like you're on Facebook, but 10 years in the

future. You're on Twitter, but 10 years in the future. You're on Twitter,

but 10 years in the future. That game was set in the year 2019. We followed up in 2010, where we

had 20,000 people this time, again, on a private social network, sharing stories about how they

would try to help others with not only a respiratory pandemic that started in China, but complicating scenarios

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