 Slava Koslov
Senior Consultant Strategic Futures
The number of companies that develop and apply serious games in their work has grown exponentially during last years. Many companies use game-like virtual environments to train their employees (look at the Sun's Virtual Workplace or IBM's Innov8), or to encourage their customers and partners to learn about very complex products (see a wide range of games developed by Cisco for that purpose). Hospitals and medical companies are also developing virtual worlds (or use the existing ones, such as Second Life) where they create future medical environments and procedures, helping people to better understand and consent with them.
These new types of games can also be used as tools to actively explore opportunities for new, mobile applications. Take for example, ‘Treemagotchi’. Recently launched in the Netherlands, it enables people to grow their own 'virtual trees' in a small iPhone widget. Responsible actions and good deeds are judged by peers and the tree is watered accordingly. The more sustainable and environmentally conscious your actions, the more your virtual tree will thrive and grow. This simple and entertaining initiative has meant that as well as allowing tens of thousands of people to interact in a new way, they are also learning more about living responsibly and are changing their behavior accordingly.
At the same time, Alex Steffen, from WorldChanging, suggests bigger initiatives are necessary by opening special 'Experimentation Zones', city-size places where people can simulate new economic and social rules, and quickly probe new solutions and new forms of behavior. "We need places where people can quickly experiment with this blank-canvas mentality", says Alex.
Serious games can also provide the capacity to play with possible futures, opening another interesting area of application - namely, to explore the futures themselves. In 2008 the Institute of the Future (Palo Alto, CA) launched a very interesting on-line game called Superstruct, allegedly the 'world's first massively multiplayer forecasting game'. In Superstruct the players collectively created new ideas and solutions that would help postpone (and ultimately avoid) the 'inevitable end' of the world in 2042. The game united thousands of participants in a global brainstorm about possible futures of our civilization and our planet. Interestingly enough, many of the apparently futuristic in-game solutions have lead to very practical actions already in place today.
But serious games do not have to be digital. Last year, Philips Design developed a small, all-analogue board-based game called Spark to support the Philips Consumer Lifestyle innovation process. The game is played for 30-45 minutes during ideation workshops, to help generate more ‘sparks', insightful ideas that can trigger development of new solutions.
Another recent example is a ‘Building Futures’ game developed by Philips Design for Design Initiatief, a new Dutch organization helping businesses collaborate and co-create new future-proof solutions. In this game, different teams construct possible futures in an interactive and competitive way, using ideas as building bricks for their projects. Importantly, people not only 'imagine' new futures, but are also able to 'live' and 'work' in them - preparing and transforming themselves for new emerging realities.
Games, and immersive playful environments in general, can be powerful agents not only to imagine possible futures, but also to actively explore and interact with them. In game-like environments we can both generate new ideas and future scenarios, building preferable futures, while at the same time testing their robustness and resilience.
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