News/Research

Shira Abramovich Reviews Imaginable

02 Mar, 2022

Shira Abramovich Reviews Imaginable

Shira Abramovich reviews Jane McGonigal's new book, Imaginable on Reboot!

From the review: "I’m an anxious person in general, and living through many paradigm-shifting crises at once obviously hasn’t helped. So reading Jane McGonigal’s Imaginable, a book all about imagining and preparing for the future, was a novel experience – not only because it led me to think about futures both personal and collective, but also because it made me realize how much I could gain by doing so in a critical and creative way."

Imaginable draws on McGonigal’s decades of experience as a professional forecaster of futures as well as a game designer, roles which she merges to create future simulation games. The book arose out of her reflections on a particular simulation she ran in 2010 for the World Bank about the year 2020, which correctly predicted a severe respiratory pandemic with the possibility of long-term symptoms, widespread conspiracy theory campaigns, and wildfires across the US. This set of predictions seems uncanny, but McGonigal emphasizes that it all came from a set of techniques she uses to ask big questions and consider the possibility of immense, paradigm-shifting change. Whether you like it or not, everything can and will change, even those things we take for granted – and imagining these changes can actually make us far more resilient in the ways we think about both the present and the future. Participants in McGonigal’s 2010 simulation reported much lower feelings of stress and shock to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic than those in their immediate circles, and acted far more quickly to respond. In this way, imagining radical futures can give us more agency over the present, as McGonigal’s anecdotes highlight again and again.

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