Notes on a Journalism Futures Storytelling Game

I quite like the work of Randy Rubin who has been designing a couple of really interesting story driven games for workshops.

Recently he blogged about a game called „Imagining Health Futures“ which he co-designed. In short: It guides a group of people through a set of scenarios in which every player designs a character and has to tell a story of how this character overcomes a number of challenges.

This got my head tingling. I‘ve been thinking a lot about how we (as in media/journalists/etc.) can develop alternative future visions without losing ourselves in the dominant tech narratives of techno-fixes and automation apocalypses.

Such a game should do the following:

• Forcing participants to think about the future at ground-level
• Focus more on the future mundane or the shitty futures
• Be fun and weird
• Not lose itself in tech ex machina stories.

Future Games

There are some interesting games out there that revolve around simulating and exploring different futures. I‘ve collected a couple on are.na.

Are.na