Serious Games: Jack Park wins “Breakthroughs to Cures”
Foresight Engine: Breakthroughs to Cures from Foresight Engine on Vimeo.
One of our team, Jack Park, just won Breakthroughs to Cures, a serious game run by the Institute for the Future, to explore the future of medical research. In the opening movie, the US President of 2020 sets the scene for an urgent medical crisis now facing the country, and invites input on how to transform the way in which research is conducted in order to find a cure as fast ass possible.
What makes this interesting is that the game is played by playing “cards” which correspond to conversational moves. With high production values, the game is powered by the Foresight Engine from the Institute for the Future:
“IFTF’s Foresight Engine drives engaged forecasting. It creates a fast flow of micro-forecasts from hundreds or thousands of participants in just a day or two. It’s all about focused insights and innovation—the discovery of social wisdom and outlier ideas.”
Clearly, this resonates closely with our interest in sensemaking in complexity, particularly given the conversational dimension which echoes our focus on scaffolding more reflective discourse through appropriate visual and computational affordances.
In his blog, Jack reflects on the strategy that he adopted in playing the game, and on the nature of the game more broadly. Jack is now exploring the development of gaming engines that intersect even more closely with our work on topic and argument mapping…
Congratulations to Jack! An online thinker that matters.