2020年1月，当冠状病毒开始在世界各地成为头条新闻时，简·麦克戈尼加尔（Jane McGonigal）的收件箱充满了硅谷高管，政府官员和非营利组织领导人的电子邮件。他们都有同样的问题：“简，你不进行呼吸道大流行的模拟吗？”
Yes, she had. All the way back in 2010.
McGonigal is a game designer. She builds simulations that help players imagine the unimaginable. And in 2010, she invited nearly 20,000 people to immerse themselves in a future world besieged by a global pandemic. “How would you change your habits?” she asked. “What social interactions would you avoid? Can you work from home?”
十年后，当Covid-19从新生的威胁转变为成熟的危机时，麦克戈尼加尔开始听取参加模拟的人们的聆听。其中一位放心地说：“我并不害怕。”“当我们10年前想象它时，我已经度过了恐慌和焦虑。”
According to the latest research in psychology and neuroscience, we can all learn to make the shift from panic to poise by training our brains to think about the unthinkable. But what does that training look like? In her new book,可以想象- 以及今天的一集The Next Big Ideapodcast—McGonigal shares evidence-based techniques you can use to see the future coming. Listen to the full episode below, or read a few key highlights. Andfollow host Rufus Griscom on LinkedInfor behind-the-scenes looks into the show.
Jane McGonigal如何从游戏设计师到未来的预报员
Rufus Griscom：Your path from studying and designing video games to working as a futurist—some would see that as counterintuitive. I think you see this as a logical progression. Why does that sequencing make sense?
Jane McGonigal:What first really fascinated me about the gaming community was this trend that I was observing in gamers: They were developing real skills, real abilities, collective intelligence, and collective imagination that they wanted to apply in a bigger context—maybe help solve some real-world challenges.
这was back in 2001 when I was starting my PhD work. And I thought, This is amazing! It would be really good for humanity if we could channel these new skills that are coming out of online gaming into real-world problem-solving. But at that time, there were not a lot of games to play that actually connected this community with real-world challenges.
在研究了六年之后，写了关于这个话题的论文，我直接进入了，我将成为一个可以帮助游戏玩家将这些优势运用到现实世界中环境中的游戏的人。而且我在工作中工作的背景试图预期难以预测的未来，或将集体想象力应用于从广泛的观点（我们看到游戏世界的方式相同的方式）中看到未来的情况 - 以便我们可以发现异常风险或意外机会。这就是我15年来一直在做的事情。
预测共同。。。早在2010年
这mission to take our interest in gaming and collective imagining exercises and use them to help us better understand possible future outcomes—you and your team have been engaged in this for a while, and you have an astoundingly impressive track record at anticipating possible future outcomes. Can you share some of the details of what you all have done?
2020 was a really strange year to be a future forecaster, in that I had an experience of living through a very difficult future that we had been forecasting for a decade or more. My work at the Institute for the Future involved creating these social simulations way back in 2008, 2010, where we were inviting thousands of people to spend weeks in a private social network. It would look like Twitter, Facebook, or Discord, but everything being posted and shared was about a hypothetical future.
未来主义者喜欢前进10年，因为这为我们提供了足够的心理距离来创造性地思考。而且，如果我们想象10年来可能不会发生的问题，它给了我们足够的时间为他们做准备或防止它们。因此，我们正在研究2019年和2020年；那时，我们的模拟居中，我们将如何生存并适应从中国开始的呼吸道大流行，这也因级联危机而复杂化？我专门研究的一件事是弄清楚不同的危机和破坏是如何相交的。因此，我们不仅从公共卫生的角度或流行病学的角度看待它。当我们遭受供应链破坏时，当存在有关流行的供应链破坏时，我们还在思考如何生存和适应，因为有历史性的野火和由于气候变化而引起的极端热浪，因此存在错误的信息和阴谋论。这就是我们在2020年所生活的。
是什么让我有点疯了一会儿，让我想写这本书可以想象，是通过“难以想象的”一词来描述大流行及其后果，这是新闻故事和头条新闻的令人难以置信的扩散。但它wasn’t难以想象。我们只是没有大量的人想象它。我们的一个模拟之一中有20,000人，另一个人有8,000人。我的目标是拥有20million- 我认为这确实可以帮助我们为未来做准备。
为什么您应该思考未来十年
McGonigal:当我们给自己这些漫长而豪华的期限时，我们会感到时间丰富。当我们感到时间丰富时，我们会想：“我一直都有！我可以做我想做的。我可以做对我重要的事情。”
When we have urgent deadlines or too many tasks on our to-do list for today, we feel time poor, time deprived—and then we just don’t use our time because even though we still have the same amount of time, it feels scarce.
Another thing that researchers have found is that when we imagine 10 years out, we tend to think about things that are more relevant to our most important values—the kinds of goals that would help us live a life that we would consider really authentic, really true to our dreams or what we find meaningful and purposeful.
I give people this challenge. It’s not, Where would you like to be in 10 years or what would you like to be different? The challenge is to try to vividly imagine waking up on a specific day. So, pick a day of the week; is it a Monday? Is it a Saturday? A Sunday? You imagine yourself waking up, and you try to picture every detail. Where are you? Are you in the same room that you woke up in today, or is it a different room? Where is it? Is there somebody with you? Is it a person? Is it a pet? Is it a different person or pet than you might wake up with today? And then imagine what mood you are in. What mood would you like to wake up in? What would put you in that mood? What might be on your calendar for that day that would put you in that mood?
然后我告诉人们，将其放在您的日历上。If you’ve just imagined yourself doing this amazing thing that makes you feel a certain way, go ahead and open up your Google or Apple calendar—they do go 10, 20, 30, 40 years in the future—and put it on your calendar. Even better, invite somebody. Invite a loved one.
它可以激发一些关于我们真正的希望和梦想的非常有趣的对话。到达那里需要什么？因为我们已经给自己十年了，所以它使我们能够梦想更大，并享受这种时间宽敞的感觉，以真正做出一些改变或探索我们今天不可能消除的可能性。
每个人都应该考虑的未来情况
Griscom：您认为我们的听众应该考虑其他未来的情况吗？
Things to pay attention to: government-mandated internet shutdowns is a huge future force that is spreading globally. If you’re not aware of this phenomenon and not potentially prepared to live through weeks or months of the government turning off the internet, that’s something to think about.
另一个是气候迁移。我们必须愿意考虑我们居住的风险。我们是否处于气候安全的气候气氛中，可能会欢迎其他正在从气候安全地区迁移的人？如果是这样，我们应该准备看到更高的生活密度，以对被强行流离失所的人欢迎。我们在情感上为此做好了准备吗？我们已经为此做好了准备吗？还要考虑一下我们需要的途径。我认识的每个认真的未来主义者都在考虑这一点 - 国家内部和跨境的人类运动的道理。我们如何在经济，社会，精神，心理上支持人们？我们怎么能回家？ That’s a problem space that warrants so much imagination and innovation and creativity. If I could get all of the smartest minds on the planet to work on something, it would be thinking about movement. That is the biggest future scenario that would benefit from our imagination, and also our innovation.
这文章最初出现在Next Big Idea Club杂志并经许可转载。