Randy Lubin is an award-winning foresight games designer. In this episode, he describes how be brings these two disciplines together, and gives advice for other games-curious futures practitioners looking to bring games into their practice.

Interviewed by: Amanda Reeves

Transcript

Amanda Reeves:

Where does foresight and game design overlap? Can blending games with foresight create higher leverage and more scalable interventions? How can games act as a vehicle for exploring different interventions and help us to understand the perspective of different actors within a scenario?

I'm Amanda Reeves, and I'm your host for FuturePod today.

Randy Lubin: Anyone can design a game 'cause game design is essentially experience design. So if you've planned a workshop, planned a party, or held a meeting, you've engaged in elements of experience design and you could take everything you've learned by planning anything and pull it through to games.

Amanda Reeves: That's today's guest Randy Lubin, an award-winning foresight games designer. I sat down with Randy back in January 2023 to learn more about how he brings these two disciplines together, and how other games-curious futures practitioners can learn to bring games into their own practice.

Randy, welcome to FuturePod.

Randy Lubin: Thank you so much. I'm thrilled to be on the show.

Amanda Reeves: It's great to have you here. So for our audience who might not have come across you before, what's the Randy Lubin story? How did you find your way to the futures and foresight community?

Randy Lubin: So I am a foresight game designer and I got here through a very unexpected path. I didn't start my career in anything specifically foresight related. My background's in early stage tech startups, and I've been on the leadership team of a number of startups in the future of work and manufacturing and video chat space.

And really loved just the speed and iteration of playing with the future from that angle of discovering the future by creating it. And along the way I also got really into game design just as a hobby. Mostly storytelling games, really lightweight, like, let's create a world together, let's tell stories together. And then my tech world and my game design world ended up colliding about six years ago now when I joined up with some friends to create a game about election uncertainty and how technology and new coalitions might reshape elections. It was specifically focused on the 2020 US election, but this was way back in 2017, I think. And we designed this mega game. So a game, it was like 40 to 50 players running around doing lots of different activities, lots of different mechanics, and it was not only a lot of fun to design and a lot of fun to run and see in practice, but it really opened my mind to the possibility of applying games for exploring the future and and generating insights. And about a half year after we ran this first game, there ended up being a whole press cycle around it, partly because the New Yorker wrote this expose, but got all the details wrong. But once we got the real details out there, we started getting like, oh, it was, it was this whole bizarre thing that is a good story for another time, but the ultimate outcome of it was that we ended up getting inbound interest of like, Hey, can you make a serious game on topic X or for our organization to explore topic Y?

And so over the past six years more and more my time has been dedicated to creating games that help explore the future and explain complex issues. And now I'm doing it full-time. And I've been super fortunate. I've been able to have fantastic collaborators and clients. I've worked with United Nations on election uncertainty and fragile democracies.

I've worked with the World Economic Forum on the future of AI and positive economic futures, and Mozilla also on misinformation around elections and dark patterns of using tech and elections. Elections and technology are like the two main throughlines. Most of these games - games is such a broad category.

These are games that are typically in person, especially pre pandemic. Since Covid, a lot of the games have been either over video chat or more recently we just started to play around with browser-based games. So last year released a game called Startup Trail where you explore the intersection of technology, policy and startups by playing browser-based, kind of choose your own adventure plus more mechanics layered on top.

So you guide your startup from inception through to potential exit or failure, and grapple with gnarly policy dilemmas. It's just like hard choice after hard choice, so that was our first digital browser-based game.

I'll probably say us throughout, but I have a variety of collaborators. My main vehicle is Leveraged Play, which is a consultancy of one, but I very frequently team up with Mike Masnick of Techdirt and also Leigh Beadon over at Techdirt, Techdirt being probably the best news site for the intersection of policy and technology and law and governance and all that.

And so Mike's really into games and a policy expert, one of the best in the world. And so we just keep teaming up on a lot of these like tech plus policy, future policy stuff.

Amanda Reeves: I'm hearing that this started as a facilitated-style process of quite an immersive game where it's people together and now you're moving to browser-based stuff. Like, what's that transition being like? What's taken you along that path?

Randy Lubin: Yeah, yeah. It's been interesting. So I am not a formally trained coder, but I love coding. I find programming to be this super empowering thing. I'm just like, keep going from idea in my head to interactive thing on the screen. And one of the questions I always return to, in life in general but especially in in my work practice, whatever it happens to be at the time is how do I have higher leverage impact, higher scalable impact? In the Foresight Games space, sometimes that's about getting in the room with a small number of people who are perfectly positioned to affect change and then giving them tools to do so to maybe explore the future through games or, or through something else. And sometimes it's about, a browser based thing can scale up really well.

You don't need a facilitator in the room. We've had tens of thousands of folks play through Startup Trail. So when the opportunity came up to do a browser-based game we were really excited to both explore that game design space. Cause I, I'm traditionally a more analog game designer, but I love video games.

And we were excited about the opportunity to reach that many more people. And so that game in particular the, the goal behind it was really to on the policy side of the space to be thinking more about the tech world, the tech and tech folks, to think more about technology and journalists to get a more nuanced take on a lot of the tech policy issues.

And on that count, it was like a huge success! And we designed a share your score at the end of the game that looked kind of like Wordle, because Wordle was extremely hot at the moment. And it had like some minor virality on Twitter and we saw journalists and top tech leaders and folks who are staffers in Congress all playing and sharing.

And so that was, that was really cool and very validating.

Amanda Reeves: Unreal! I love this idea that games was something that you were doing as a hobby on the side. It's a thing that you loved for you, and then it's sort of wiggled its way into your work. Tell me about that moment where you started bringing that in as part of the way you work.

Randy Lubin: I'm trying to think of like the specific jump point. I mean, that initial game where it was the machine learning president election game was really just for fun. I wasn't like, this is gonna be a career or even a source of, of any income at all. And then, by a handful of months later when we started getting inbound interest, it was just so obvious that like, yeah, this makes sense.

Let's, let's do it. And then having the consumer games, like silly fun games side of my life just meant that I had access to this wonderful pattern library of mechanics and frames and structure. So I could be like, oh, well, why don't we do a remix of this LARP idea or this tabletop RPG idea and bring that into play.

And also because so much of my earlier career was spent thinking around technology and what are the second order effects of technology? What new opportunities and problems are emerging because of changing technology capabilities as well as changing social trends, that I felt like that very much set me up.

That like this, this merger of the games and the technology and foresight all just, all just felt right.

Amanda Reeves: I feel like there's some parallels and also some differences in the way that you work compared to more traditional foresight models. What are some of the methods and approaches that you bring to your practice?

Randy Lubin: So I can talk about this sort of in two frames. One is what are the tools I bring to the table in terms of the games themselves. And then separately is like, how do you go about designing a game like this? And so on the game side, there's actually, as we've already talked about, there's a wide swath of games.

So how I go about browser-based games can be very different than a smaller LARP versus a mega game. But a typical thing is you know, I have the pattern library, and from a process perspective, I'll use a stage gate approach. And so stage gate means that you break the design process into a series of stages and you start with a ton of ideas at the beginning and between each stage of the gate where only a subset of the ideas come through.

So in practice, what this looks like is coming up with a bunch of fragment pitches at the very beginning and usually doing this along with the client, if there is a client or whomever the other collaborators are. And so the fragments might be just some like very high level ideas about a mechanic or a key moment or some content that might be included, and definitely, definitely thinking about what are the goals and always, always pulling back of like, okay, this, this game is being used in a broader context. We are probably interested in either generating some insights and realizations for the players, as well as having outputs from the game that flow into some broader foresight or strategic decision making process.

And so with all that in mind, coming up with a bunch of these idea fragments and then the next stage in the stage gate process might be, okay, let's remix a bunch of these together into different one sentence pitches, and then the next stage might be, okay, let's take some of those, maybe there's a dozen one sentence pitches. Let's take four or five of them and turn them into like paragraph pitches. And even at that stage, we might have like one browser-based game idea and one 50 person mega game idea. But the idea is that we just keep remixing from each stage and then enhancing and zooming in and, and coming with more ideas.

And I, it's so lovely, because on, on a few fronts because one, for people that haven't played as many games or don't have as much context into what game design and foresight games might look like. It's really great because they can still see a bunch of the ideas that are being thrown out there.

And even though they might not have played some of the game types, they might go, ah, I see, I see what you're doing there and I can remix it with this other idea here. And so it's great for getting a ton out there on the table. And then even as you keep winnowing down, there's lots of opportunities to go back to previous stages and keep pulling in cool ideas from there.

So it's, it's super fun, it's super productive. And then the paragraph pitches end up turning into maybe one or two or three full page outlines of here's what this game's gonna look like from beginning to end. And then the next stages are often play storming, play testing, and then the final game.

So, play storming, being if play testing is, you know, we have the rules and we're gonna play it out together to see what works and what breaks, place storming is we might not have the rules, we're just gonna talk through what it's like to play. And maybe one of us will be in the role of potential player or different potential players, and one might be facilitator.

But the idea is that whenever we come to a space where we don't know how it might work, we kind of just ideate and play through it or talk through how it might work. And that's also really helpful for, like, from a player perspective, what do you wanna do here? What are you trying to do? And what affordances might we wanna bake into the game to make sure that you can do that thing?

And so I, I personally, I think the most fun part. There's so many fun parts, but I love the play storming part because it's just like this immediate rubber hits the road. What does this look like in play? And also that's just like so many cool ideas and cool moments come out of that. There's an analog I have in the consumer game world, oftentimes I will run a play test of something or play storm where the rules are very inchoate, like not particularly baked, but I have a lot in my head.

And then I'll run it and I'll see what strong players do with it, and then I'll be like, oof, that was great. Now how do I build in scaffolding and support so that less strong players can tell as compelling stories, reach as rich moments. That's how I think about things on the process side.

And then on the specific tools side, we've talked about browser-based games a bit. The in-person games can split into a bunch of categories. One thing we keep coming back to and we've seen to be highly effective in generating certain types of insights are what we call intervention games.

So intervention games take a few different forms, but the core structure of it is that people are assigned to different teams, factions that they're role-playing as a particular organization or set of individuals with a very specific goal or agenda.

And that the game is played in rounds and every round they're brainstorming the best or maybe a couple of the best interventions that their faction's gonna do to advance their agenda. There's a different school, this is kind of convergent evolution with a school of design that's come out of, I think that mostly used in the State Department and by the government in the US and elsewhere called matrix games, which is also very focused on like what is the biggest action or intervention.

So very similar school there. What's really great is it really focuses it, and depending on the goals of the activity, we'll ask things of like, okay, come up with two interventions, but one has to be fairly safe, but highly impactful, hopefully. And the other is the sort of wild card. Like it might not succeed, but if it does, it's gonna completely change everything. So for example, at one of our election threat cast games, we, we really wanted to have both of those so that we could try and get a little more exploration to the space of like, okay, what are the wild card things that we might see?

And then in that case it's like, you know, how might people be using technology to manipulate elections so that we can defend against it and have early warning systems, that type of thing. So we've done a handful of different types of those intervention games, and sometimes the mechanics behind it are extremely light.

It's just like very narrative and we're talking through it. And sometimes it's pages of spreadsheets that form a complex model, and it's all about just like what, what supports the type of decision making and play and insights.

Amanda Reeves: As you're talking, like I keep thinking about some of the more formal processes, sort of workshop formats I've found to be really impactful and enjoyable for facilitators and participants is those ones where people get to play as someone else in that space.

and even when it's not formally described as a game, I think there's something really interesting that happens when you give people permission to step outside of who they are and their own identity and step in as either another group that they're aware of or even just you know, a conceptual group that you know might not, may or may not exist.

So I'm interested because you're sort of pushing that envelope a little bit further into play. What do you. What do you see as being like the real strength of that play-based approach or that game-based approach in your work?

Randy Lubin: So before I even answer that, let me like double, double yes, that role-playing thing is so powerful and it is, it is so incredible. And whether it's called or game or not, I think one of the things you and I have talked about previously is that like games - games are such a broad space and touch on so many patterns.

There's a short spiel I have where it's like any, anyone can, can design a game cause game design is essentially experience design. So if you've planned a workshop, planned a party, or held a meeting, like you've, you've engaged in elements of experience design and you could take everything you've learned by planning anything and pull it through to games.

And roleplaying in particular is really wonderful. And I also see like a broad spectrum between, oh, it's clearly a workshop and it's clearly a game. And so I think a lot of the, the getting into somebody else's headspace is very much one of those patterns. Things that make it maybe more game-like are could, could be how well defined those characters are, how you're scaffolded in making decisions.

Do you have a goal as that character or are you just sort of imagining as that character? But I don't, I don't like to have the strict definition of what's a game cause it's all these patterns are also helpful and can inform each other. So I don't, I think that partly answers your question.

So when I think about games and type types of games and the ways that they can be applied to the patterns that could be applied, role playing is one big cluster of it. And role playing can help with a couple things. It could help with getting empathy and intuition for people who are very different from you. So they're sort of like what you were talking about. I think that could be very powerful in your own right. And I think sort of separately it's getting intuition for why different individuals, actors, organizations, might make the decisions they do.

And I think as soon as you put somebody into a game or playful mindset where they're trying to accomplish a goal, often, oftentimes what I see is as long as somebody has a goal and a little bit of structure and reasoning around who they are and what they, what, why they want what they want, as well as what assets they have and maybe what initial directions they might head out on to trying to accomplish those goals. It's people will just go off to the races, they'll start running and they'll very quickly get an intuition for what works, what doesn't. Why might somebody take an action? That they, yeah, that even before they start doing a little role playing might seem a bit orthogonal to like, Why they, you know, their mental model for different organizations and why they act the way they do.

But as soon as you see those incentives laid out and you see the mechanics, it things tend to click. So games just tend to be so good for building intuition around those complex systems and again, actors with very different incentives.

Amanda Reeves: Absolutely. And getting that sense of what's the internal logic that is creating the behaviors that we're seeing. So, you know, often people get quite frustrated in systems where, you know, I don't understand , those others, those guys over there, like they are frustrating for whatever reason. And as soon as you give people an opportunity to go, okay, well what would it be like to be in that space?

Suddenly it can really click. Oh, now I understand what's driving that behavior and it makes sense. I might not like it, I might not agree with it, but I get how we're both contributing to this. One thing I did wanna ask was, you obviously work around foresight games, but you work around games that you don't consider to be foresight games as well. What's different in the way that you approach a quote unquote foresight game compared to a non foresight game?

Randy Lubin: So I think with, from a process standpoint, I'd say actually not that much cuz in both cases, , I'll have a specific goal in mind and a specific kind of archetype of player in mind, and that informs everything through the design process. I think where things start to get very different is that, you know, the, the goals might be purely just have fun or in, you know, help tell a certain time of story on the consumer side.

While the goals on the foresight side are generate whatever outputs or insights. But that being said, so many of the patterns translate in incredibly well, and I think in both cases, one of the things I, I. I keep coming back to, again, it's like how do we really support the players in making the decisions, the playful decisions that that are gonna best support the type of game and outcomes that I want.

And, and a lot of that's in terms of how do you provide the right onboarding and workshopping at the beginning and debrief at the end, which is, you know, how do people are probably used to hearing those terms around the more serious and foresight games, or just foresight workshops, but not on the consumer side.

But actually the indie part of the, the storytelling game scene that I'm part of cares deeply about workshops and, and debriefing, especially when dealing with more serious and fraught topics. Again, even on the, the consumer side. So I think there's a lot of, a lot that translates back and forth there.

I, I think the other interesting things, , and you might, you may have had this experience as well, where on this, on the Foresight game side, we can't always call it a game. We've had clients where they're like, okay, we love this. We love the games work you're doing. We want you to design us a game, but you cannot use the word game.

You're gonna scare off our, our internal clients or, or whomever. And it's like, okay, okay, that's fine. We, we don't care what we call it. We're, this is gonna be highly interactive. We're gonna explore the future together. It's gonna be great

Amanda Reeves: We're gonna have a very serious experience. It's a very serious process where we are going to be playing, but we're not gonna call it playing . We're just going to be thinking about it in different ways. Yeah, it's really, it's so interesting. There's that in some spaces is that real aversion to, well, we can't do games and we, even if we do, Introduce games, it's, they have to be serious games or they have to be business appropriate games.

And it's such an interesting thing, the relationship and judgements we have around play, despite the fact that it's a really liberating. And it's a, it's almost another form of intelligence and creativity. And if we're looking in complex, creative emergent spaces, we need to bring that sense of that play and ways to engage with that.

Randy Lubin: Yeah, a hundred percent with you. And I'm a heartened. I think this is all changing. I think that as a as the current generation of folks who are in like senior leadership roles in organizations. The way they think about and talk about games and tools is changing rapidly because this is a generation that grew up playing games, playing video games, playing board games.

So I, I think that it's gonna become a lot more acceptable. And I, my my hope is that over the next few years we see some very public wins being celebrated from organizations that, that had amazing insights and, and actionable next steps taken because they, they incorporated games into their process.

And I think as soon as some very big, reputable organizations do that, it'll be seen as a lot safer of a thing for somebody to suggest, Hey, maybe we bring in games as a way to accomplish our goals.

Building on that idea of what is changing Randy, what's capturing your attention and what's changing around you? What are you seeing that's making your ears prick up?

Randy Lubin: So I'll, I'll answer that in two ways. First, the sort of professional ways and the other's just like as Randy Lubin, citizen, you know, Randy Lubin, human of the World. So on the, on the industry side, I think, as we were just sort of just talking about games are a more and more acceptable thing that can be deployed as part of serious work.

And that's, that's really heartening. And hopefully we just see more cool case studies and more people saying, oh, cool. Not only like might I be interested in commissioning a game, but I feel empowered to make a game myself. And a key part of that I think is seeing easy things that are templated, that are remixable.

So I, one of the things I've seen especially over the past 10 years in the indie consumer game space is the rise of games that are, that invite themselves, the designer invites the audience to say, take this, remix it for yourself. And maybe it's Permissively licensed under Creative Commons, where it's like you don't even, you can even reshare it or sell it too.

I, most famously, I think Lasers and Feelings is like a, a very simple one page storytelling game that has since been remade into pretty much, X and Y template. So I mean, I, I made a silly one called Hackers and Hustlers, which is a startup farce. But like, there's pretty much you name a genre and somebody's made a lasers and feelings hack, and that's a, it's a super easy way to get into game design because you're taking something and remixing it rather than trying to create something from scratch.

So I think on the foresight game side, we'll see something similar as we start getting these easy game templates that suddenly somebody can go cool rather than like having to scrounge for budget or get approval for someone to, you know, have a big foresight games engagement, I'm just gonna take and remix this thing and try it out with my team.

And I think that will be very cool for helping to, to spread and grow the, the Foresight Games field overall. To answer your question from the more, like Randy Lubin, what am I seeing and am I, am I interested in, I think the, I mean, at this moment in January, 2023, AI is, I think everyone is looking at AI right now and being like, okay, what does this enable right now?

With Chat GPT being, you know, what, what first blew, blew people's minds or, you know, or most recently, I should say. And personally. I think it's gonna be really interesting. I think it's gonna be like, like all things more and less disruptive than people currently think. But we, I have no idea of predicting how or where .

I've mostly just played around with it as like, fun dinner party, kind of like, oh, gimme a prompt. Like, let's, let's see what it generates. But I think we're starting to also play with it in some of our, let's generate a bunch of content or ideas for content within different games. So right now I'm collaborating with the folks at Techdirt to create a game around trust and safety and content moderation and how fraught that can be at scale.

And so one of the things that we're gonna need for this is a ton of different dilemmas, content moderation dilemmas. And one of the ways that we're, we're, we're making sure we have good coverage and come up with ideas and just like use this sort of creative sparing partner is we can go to Chat GPT and be like give me 10 different content, moderation, dilemmas on whatever topic, and then we'll, you'll edit it and, you know, shape that.

But it's like it's a good way of not having a blank canvas immediately having something that we can start playing with and tweaking.

Amanda Reeves: Like those templated remix games. If you start with something, it can be really helpful as a kickoff.

Randy Lubin: Exactly. Exactly, exactly. So anyway, I think that the AI stuff is super cool and also scary and also confusing and also everything. So I, I don't know. Yeah, I absolutely love that. Another category that I'm just looking at and oh, is one that I keep orbiting back to and have been like for the last decade or more.

But I haven't done anything personally in yet, which is the like sort of future of Decentralized democracy and decision making, and I think there's tons of awesome folks that are theorizing and experimenting in this space. I really like the Metagov community. They have a really great speaker series of like, capturing interesting different experiments happening, whether it's more for like what we normally think of as democracy, where it's like in, in politics related to nation states from like a local to national or even supernational level, or if it's more, okay, how do we govern communities, even if it's relatively informal communities or like a Discord group.

And so I, I think that there's all sorts of cool questions and exploration there. I think that tech enabled participatory democracy is, has the potential to be super revolutionizing and bring all sorts of really good things to, to bear and really empower people and empower communities. And so that's one of those like perennial things.

I keep circling back to you and I feel like we're at a really good time to see a bunch of that in practice. So I'm excited to see what emerges there.

Amanda Reeves: Unreal.

Randy Lubin: I mean, on the AI front I could see creating games that allow people to explore what the implications of that AI of like the next generations of AI might be. That could be really interesting. Like I, it could be really fun to have a game where you are, whether you're playing sort of as yourself or as your organization or just an industry or the world, and jumping forward in time as some of these different AI modalities get more and more powerful. And just looking at what does a day in the life look like as someone who is collaborating with one of these AIs. You know, what parts of your life are empowered? What are disruptive? What feels threatened? And potentially doing so with actually using Chat GPT or some other AI to actually co-create those moments and experiences.

Having, having the, the AI whether Chat GPT or something else as, as player of the game too. ,

I think there's there's probably some really cool applied like get, get some visceral sense of what that's like and generate some interesting ideas at the same time.

Amanda Reeves: Oh, I love that. I love that idea of using Chat GPT or, you know, the AI flavor of the day as a collaborator in not just creating, but playing those games. And I think you've just given me an idea for for one of the games I'm designing actually with with Story Synth.

I came across you through your work on Story Synth which I think is really neat. Do you wanna tell the audience a little about that?

Randy Lubin: Yeah, so Story Synth is a free web platform for creating consumer oriented, but could be for any purpose collaborative storytelling games. And I created Story Synth early in the pandemic. When I, I mean, I thrive off of running play tests and being like, oh, what can I bring to my, my favorite players to see what they do with it?

And with the pandemic, I wasn't doing any of that. And so I created Story Synth as a super, super simple way of going from idea to playable, shareable game. And the way it works is you add all of your game content into a Google sheet. There are, at this point, there's a maybe eight to 10 different formats that you can use, plus tons of customization and extensions, but all very lightweight storytelling games.

So you, you add all your content in the Google sheet, you drop the sheet link into Story Synth, and it just compiles it into a game that you can then put on the, you know, share with the world. People can create their own sessions if you're in a session with somebody else. You see the same things at the same time.

So there's like a, a very lightweight multiplayer capability. And my, my goal is again, make it really easy to go for an idea to playable game to get you race to that first play test. And then it's in that first play test or play storm that you learned so much. Let's take out all that friction and.

So I launched this back in 2020. And since then I've just kept adding more features and more formats and been building a community around it. And again, I really wanna empower, especially first time game designers to, to just quickly get their ideas out there and start playing with it.

And I was super fortunate to be able to get a big grant from a organization called Grant for the Web. And we were able to give out 30,000 US dollars to game designers from marginalized backgrounds and marginalized identities. And so there's, there's tons of folks who are designing games on Story Synth, tons of free games that you can find by going to storysynth.org and uh, we have a Discord community as well.

I highly encouraged anyone who's a little bit curious about game design, just like. Yeah, give it a try with Story Synth, and again, there's lots to remix. So there, you know, one of the main, main inspirations for Story Synth was a game called For the Queen by Alex Roberts which is this very simple but very elegant, very sharply designed game that is all about just, you know, answering prompts, very pointed prompts.

And that, that has since been remixed by a bunch of other folks under the broader umbrella of descended from the queen games. So that was the first format in Story Synth was this like, very quick prompt driven storytelling. And and it is probably the best gateway for somebody who's looking to do a little bit of storytelling game design.

And there haven't been too many games in the platform that are foresight focused, but I would love to see more.

Amanda Reeves: So I'm, I'm working on one in there. But you're absolutely right, and we're talking about that idea of remixing as a really nice way to be able to do it and reducing that friction between having an idea and then starting to have a prototype that you can actually, you know, do that playstorming and, you know, find the ways to break it in.

It's, I found it to be just such a quick and easy way to start playing with something as you are, you know, to build the plane as you are, as you're flying it. It's brilliant.

Randy, when you meet someone, maybe at a dinner party uh, who doesn't necessarily understand who you are and what it is you do, how do you explain what it is that you do?

Randy Lubin: Yeah, it's super tricky because there's so many different components to it. But oftentimes I'll say I design foresight games. Games that are used by organizations to help explore the future. And then I'll usually give a couple examples. So I'll say, you know, it might be, you know, we recently worked with the UN to explore fraught election situations and you know, it was about, different people taking on different roles and asking very pointed questions and having to answer them from that perspective of that role cuz you know, be taking on a role can really generate lots of insights and generate, generate understanding about complex systems.

So I'll kind of have an answer like that or I'll give a couple different examples, but it's tough cause you have to explain like, you know, what is the foresight part of it and what is the, what is the games part of it. I think depending on the person, they might glom onto one part of that more than the other.

And yeah,

Amanda Reeves: Do you find the people sort of, you know, grok one or the other more easily? Like, which is the part that you tend to have more difficulty working with?

Randy Lubin: Huh. I think I, a lot of this is just the bias of the circles I run and I think people tend to get the foresight part of like, oh yeah, things are changing really quickly. Institutions need to think about the future and different possible features. Cool. Like people get that pretty easily in my space. The game side people, there's a handful of like, false paths that people will start down that I'll need to like pull them back.

They're like, oh, so you're like developing AAA video games? I'm like, no, no, no, no. Not really doing any video games. Occasionally some like browser-based t-shirt adventure stuff, but, but no, no, no, no. Or the other path is people go like, oh, it's gamification. And I'll be like, no, probably not, the way you're thinking about it, where, you know, I think gamification was this interesting. I mean, it, I, I think of, I haven't heard, I haven't really heard the term used elsewhere, but I think of it as like games washing of things that get called games that are not really games. Gamification really these days, most people who are talking about it talk about like points and badges and leaderboards, but like, not deeply game mechanics, just like the, the trappings of games to try and do some like operant conditioning to get people to behave the way you want.

And that's not at all the kind of game design that I think about or talk about. So usually if, if I see people going down those paths, I'm just, , I just start giving positive examples of the type of thing I'm talking about, and that usually grounds people. And most people have, you know, come across a choose your own adventure or heard about tabletop role playing or, or larp or, or something like that.

Or, you know, depending on the person, I'll, I'll use like the military war games as a reference. It's just like about trying to hook onto the thing that they've, they're most likely to have encountered that gets them in the right, in the right ballpark.

Amanda Reeves: As soon as you mentioned choose your own adventure games like that took me back. I feel like, at least for me, in the time that I grew up in the culture I was part of, like choose your Own Adventure Stories is such a hook that people understand that and they understand that as a storytelling mechanism. You talk about choose your own adventure stories, and I'm like, oh, I get that. I get that. It's a storytelling thing. I get, it's about my choices and what directions I wanna go in.

What are some of the games that people sort of understand?

Randy Lubin: Like what are the, what are the common reference points? What are the touchstones? And so yeah, choose your, choose your adventure is totally a good touchstone. Depending on where people are coming from. Sometimes it's like Dungeons and Dragons, which is like, if they've heard of any role playing game, it's probably Dungeons and Dragons, then I need to immediately start walking back and say but it's a lot more simple than that. And there's, you know, and some of it might be planned, some might not be, you know, and sometimes it's just about like workshops. You know, some people who haven't really engaged with games at all, but have done a lot of like, creative brainstorming and workshops. I'll be like, oh yeah, it's, it's very similar to that workshop feel, but usually you're just more in character or you're trying to accomplish a goal in character and that that's sort of a safe jumping off point for people.

Amanda Reeves: Yeah, unreal.

what advice do you have for people just getting started with designing games?

Randy Lubin: We've already talked about this a lot in terms of like the reap value of remix, but and we talked about using tools like Story Synth or there are other amazing platforms out there for quickly prototyping. I mean, if, if you're comfortable, I mean, a bunch of our games we first designed in Google Slides and Google Slides is really great for getting real-time multiplayer as people are co-editing the slide together. So we've had games. Teams in a different slide, or each team has their own slide deck and that totally works. Like there's like, I think one bit of advice is like, don't let the tools get in your way. Like you don't need to learn fancy game design tools and applications in order to get started.

You can, you can prototype with something like Google Slides or like index cards in person and just be scrappy with it. You know, look to things to remix. So I mean, it is, there's nothing wrong with saying, Hey, I love this game. I'm gonna just tweak one thing about it or tweak the setting or tweak the goal.

That's a wonderful way to get started. I love play storming and play testing before things are fully baked and doing so with, with friends that you trust who are somewhat up to speed and understand your goals. So that like it's a safe environment to just like do this experiment quickly, get feedback. Like, like so many other things it benefits so much from rapid iteration. So the, the quicker that feedback looping go from idea to reality to reworked idea to reality the better for sure. And then the other great thing is like find yourself a good community of practice of people who are also interested in foresight games. This could be your colleagues, there could be people around the world.

Quick call to action: there's a Foresight Games Discord and it's a really awesome community of folks who are just starting to play with foresight games, some as coming at things from a game designer standpoint, some from being in foresight organizations and some folks who are just in not traditional foresight organizations who just wanna start bringing these practices in and they, they're curious about games, they're curious about foresight.

So it's a really warm, welcoming community. You can go to foresight.games, and then I'll give you a link to the email list and to the discord and. Another great place to get started. But yeah, bring a community, finding a community of practice of like, like-minded folks who can, who can keep iterating and growing on, and the, the design path together is really lovely.

Amanda Reeves: I think that's such an important point. Like Foresight games it's sort of a niche within a niche. It's quite, it's very specific. And there, there's some very particular skillsets around that. And one of the things I've really enjoyed about the way that you are approaching building that community is that it's very much, it's very open and inviting, and it includes people who have a variety of different backgrounds and different perspectives.

There's this sense that don't need to be an expert in foresight and in games. And actually some of the really lovely things that I've seen in the this community is what happens when people with a deep understanding of foresight and a deep understanding of game start to share that information and build yeah, some shared language around it.

Randy Lubin: Yeah, my, I'm, I'm glad that's been your experience. I definitely want to be super welcoming and inclusive and yeah, I mean, I think the, the fact that it's also just a field that is very, Very new and emerging means that like anyone can become, be on the cutting edge and contributing like patterns and insights like immediately.

Immediately. And, and I'll echo what I said earlier, like if you've ever organized a meeting, if you've ever organized a conference, if you ever planned a party, you can design a game. Like this is a thing that anyone can do. And like harkening back to like, people as kids, everyone as kids makes up their own games.

Like this is a, there's something innate to human play and that like everybody is capable of, of creating these kind of shared experiences in games. And so it's just something that we need to, to reactivate in ourselves as adults if it's something that we lost touch with.

Amanda Reeves: Unreal. What's your hope for this space?

Randy Lubin: The things I'm most excited about to see emerging, I so one harkens back to something that we talked about a little earlier, which is I'd just love to see more case studies of organizations that were deeply impacted by running foresight games. I think that will normalize this in the world as a tool to use among other foresight and strategic practices.

And so, so I think just having a healthy body of case studies is great. I think having pattern libraries and remixable games, so not just the remixable games that we talked about, but also the like pattern library of here are all the different game design patterns and foresight patterns that we might pull together in not just like a simple remix of an existing thing, but like great gimme all the parts off the shelves and as building blocks to build something new and know what works when and where.

in the Foresight Games Discord we're, we're, we we're working toward that by creating a, a, a, a basic pattern library that hopefully allows somebody to come in and be like, okay, I've played some games but not a lot, and I have this specific problem that I'm trying to deploy a foresight game for, to very quickly go, ah, I see, okay, maybe I take these mechanics from over here and this structure from over there, and that is really aligned with what I wanna do.

Even if maybe I haven't experienced this firsthand. I now have a sense of how I might construct that and test that, and deploy it.

Amanda Reeves: And for our listeners who might not be familiar with game design and sort of this idea of a pattern library, can you explain a little more about what that means for you?

Randy Lubin: Yeah. My first exposure to it, I think it's where it's coined, was from Christopher Alexander and comes from the architecture world or maybe slightly broader than architecture in that the, there's this amazing tome called A Pattern Library where it looks at like basically from a mega region down to the, like city and suburbs view down to like individual blocks and neighborhoods and down to room houses and rooms, and just like fractally digging in, what are different patterns that contribute to making healthy, vibrant society? and and it really great, like, again, like it goes all the way down to like how, you know, structures within rooms and how rooms connect to each other. But again, you can zoom all the way out and look at how like agricultural spaces play into industrial spaces. And it's just really helpful for thinking about everything from like urban planning to architecture design and, and more civil engineering and since the idea of pattern library has been replicated in other places too. I know in the engineering world there's lots of like, oh, so you wanna develop an app? Here's a bunch of patterns to use for how to work with data, how to work with you, you, you name it. And so, Here I'm thinking about breaking pattern library into a few different categories.

One is specifically game design and mechanics. So here's a long list of different mechanics that you can pull in for a bunch of different goals. Cause again, some, you know, sometimes it's about world building. Sometimes it's about role-playing. Sometimes it's about, you know, deeply engaging with a complex system and understanding what are the second order effects.

So it's like different patterns might be relevant to different situations. Likewise, if you're designing something for, you know, a 30 to 60 minute experience, it's gonna be very different than like an all day game. And then you know, so then, so there's a whole category there then about structure. It's like, okay, how might you, forgetting about the specific mechanics, like how might you structure things so that people are really well prepared to engage and you're helping to pull out the best ideas from them and, or, or generate the best insights.

And then sort of third category of potential patterns is deployment. So it's like, okay, based on what type of goal you have at a higher level, what types of games, what, what types of combinations of, of the previous two categories might be effective. The whole thing is very early on, but I think this type of like list of, of patterns, list of building blocks could be such a powerful resource for folks who are just starting to dip their toe in.

Especially since I think for a long time, people who are doing foresight game design are not foresight game designers. They don't think of themselves as such. They're either, you know, foresight folks who are dipping their toe into game design or maybe game design folks who are doing a little bit of foresight work or just people in organizations who are, have, have to deal with uncertainty but don't consider themselves any of the above. But again, if they can, you know, if they're empowered to quickly, quickly build, quickly remix, then hopefully they'll get better outcomes for themselves and for their organizations and for the world.

Amanda Reeves: That's unreal.

Randy Lubin: This is a, this is a wonderful chat. Thank you for being such an excellent host.

Amanda Reeves: it's been fantastic. Thank you so much for joining me today, Randy. It's such pleasure to peek behind the curtain and uh, learn a bit more about your practice and how you're bringing these two really interesting and related worlds together. And can't wait to see what comes out of your space next.

Randy Lubin: Ah, thanks so much. This has been a pleasure for me to, to be on the podcast. And for you listeners out there, if you're at all intrigued by anything we talked about check all the links and whatnot. But I'd love to see you in our communities, like in the Foresight Games community, in the Story Synth community.

Just, you know, dip your toe in and start making something, start playing something. I hope to see you there.

Amanda Reeves: I hope you enjoy today's conversation just as much as I did. FuturePod is a not-for-profit venture. We exist through the generosity of our supporters. If you'd like to support the pod, please check out our Patreon link on the website. I'm Amanda Reeves. Thanks so much for joining me today.

EP 176: Exploring the Future Through Games - Randy Lubin

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