Our Future Is Somewhere Here
_work-in-progress
_editorial
// version 1.0 // 16-10-2024
_Introduction
Our Future Is Somewhere Here is a serious and fun conversation artist game for people who are interested in exploring potential future scenarios and are open to asking themselves questions about the relation between past, present, and future.
Our future is one of the things that excite, worry, and bother everyone in some way. Yet, little do we realise how much we have a role in shaping it. If it’s not with what we design and create about it, it’s with what we choose to consume, buy, and support. And with the way we perceive our present - either in an active or a passive role. All of our actions or non-actions do shape the future. What we already know and what we are able to imagine are the limits of our future design. I wonder, how aware are we of these facts?
With this game, I invite you to co-create a possible future with your co-players. During the game, you take rounds in collecting building blocks of future scenario elements by referring to a statement you find on your way.
Our Future Is Somewhere Here explores the levels and complexity of influences that are out there. They are divided into 9 categories which you will be able to explore while you play the game: family, friends, government, big tech, culture, etc. Each statement you go through asks you to either agree or disagree with it, and following your choice, you receive a building block for the future scenario you are co-creating with the rest of the players. After a few rounds, you all reveal the future you designed as a group and assess it. There are also so-called info cards which contain a valuable resource, inspiration or story connected to the categories of influence.
Will you leave with more questions than answers after playing the game?
_Goals of the game
With this game, I aim to bring awareness about how our past and present influence the future and especially our role in it. As human beings part of an extremely complex system, we often feel powerless and underestimate our role as individuals and as a community in shaping the future. In reality, our actions and non-actions actually matter - we are always part of a social system and as such, we influence the other parts of the same system.
I am also excited to create a space for connection. I would like to invite the players to be open to new discoveries during this game - about themselves and the others. This game is a facilitated conversation opener, be mindful of the others and give space for everyone to express and contribute. It is a collective game, not a game about competition.
This game also aims to bring an understanding of how designing a potential future could look like.
_Context This game is created by a human who grew up in a post-communist society in Southeastern Europe, and trained in the Cyrillic alphabet. During her teenage years, she was influenced by video games and English-speaking movies - this is how she learnt English. She has spent most of her conscious time working in an international environment with people mainly from Eastern and Western Europe. In this game, I have shared lots of my personal experience and social research over the last 20 years. Thus, of course, the statements, their answering paths, info cards and speculative scenarios are influenced and biased by my own experience and imagination. While playing the game, please, be open to accepting someone else’s life experience and conclusions, keeping in mind it might not align with yours. Which is totally ok.
_Methods
for designing the relation between statements and outcomes for the building blocks:
+ speculative fiction
+ exploration of possible worlds
+ path dependency
+ counterfactual reasoning
+ simplification (sometimes extreme)
+ exaggeration (for dramatic effects)