119. Using Games to Design our Futures with Randy Lubin, part 1

“I think games are excellent at building intuition for complex systems, and if you're trying to think through the future, trying to get a grasp of the system dynamics and second order effects and points of leverage are all super helpful.”
--Randy Lubin


In this episode of How To Write the Future podcast, host Beth Barany interviews game designer and entrepreneur, Randy Lubin. They discuss how games can be used as powerful tools for shaping the future and how world building games help you write stories.

ABOUT RANDY LUBIN

Randy Lubin is a game designer and entrepreneur. He makes foresight games that help organizations explore the future via his studio Leveraged Play. He also makes lighter consumer storytelling games through Diegetic Games.

Website: https://randylubin.com/

X: https://twitter.com/randylubin

LI: https://www.linkedin.com/in/randylubin/

Foresight games studio: https://leveragedplay.com/ Consumer storytelling games: https://diegeticgames.com/ Blog post on integrating foresight games into creative writing:

https://blog.randylubin.com/foresight-workshop-games-creative-writing


RESOURCES

Randy Lubin’s game: Premise: Setting, Character, Plot: https://randylubin.itch.io/premise-setting-character-plot

Dialect by Thorny Games: https://thornygames.com/pages/dialect

You're Gonna Need a Bigger Story: https://www.superstory.works/ourbooks

School of International Futures (SOIF): https://soif.org.uk/retreat/soif-summer-foresight-retreat/

Association of Professional Futurists latest COMPASS magazine: https://www.apf.org/apf-resources/compass

Get your free World Building Workbook for Fiction Writers: https://writersfunzone.com/blog/world-building-resources/

Henrietta The Dragon Slayer, A short film (We’re in post-production and fundraising!) https://author.bethbarany.com/henrietta-short-film/

• SHOW PRODUCTION BY Beth Barany
• CO-PRODUCTION AN SHOW NOTES by Kerry-Ann McDade

c. 2024 BETH BARANY

https://bethbarany.com/

--
CONNECT
Contact Beth: https://writersfunzone.com/blog/podcast/#tve-jump-185b4422580
Email: beth@bethbarany.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bethbarany/

CREDITS
EDITED WITH DESCRIPT: https://get.descript.com/0clwwvlf6e3j
MUSIC: Uppbeat.io
DISTRIBUTED BY BUZZSPROUT: https://www.buzzsprout.com/?referrer_id=1994465

Transcript

BETH BARANY: 0:00

Hey everyone. Welcome back to How To Write the Future Podcast. I'm your host, Beth Barany. I am a creativity coach for writers, science fiction and fantasy writer, writing teacher, and filmmaker. Woo-hoo. More about that later. Just a little shout out before I get started with our interview, I want to share that I met Randy in an online networking, gathering hosted by the School of International Futures. Both of us have, are connected to that organization. And then I also found out while I was talking with Randy that his organization has won an award for one of its games. And, they were awarded that award from the Association of Professional Futurists, APF. And I'm also associated with them and have written for their quarterly magazine Compass. So it's so fun that Randy and I know each other through SOIF, School of International Futures. And then we're also both connected via Association of Professional Futurists. So a plug for networking. Alright on to the rest of the show. This podcast is for science fiction and fantasy writers who want to write positive, optimistic futures because I believe that what we put into our stories actually influences humanity. And I also know this podcast is for anyone who cares about the future. And so I'm very excited to have a special guest with me today. a futurist, a game designer. And someone also in the San Francisco Bay Area. So welcome, Randy. So glad that you're here.

RANDY LUBIN: 1:33

Thanks so much for having me on the show.

BETH BARANY: 1:35

So cool. So I'm gonna introduce you. I'm gonna read your bio to everybody and then we'll dive into your fabulous questions. So, introducing Randy. Randy Lubin is a game designer and entrepreneur. He makes foresight games that help organizations explore the future via his studio, Leveraged Play. He also makes lighter consumer storytelling games via Diegetic Games. Did I say that right?

RANDY LUBIN: 2:00

That's right.

BETH BARANY: 2:01

Awesome. Great. so cool. We have a group of questions here, but I would love if you could tell our audience what is foresight?

RANDY LUBIN: 2:09

Yeah. So foresight is a very broadly, is a field about exploring possible futures. And there's a lot of different tools, kits and approaches, but it's really about exploring what are different possible features and what might the implications of that be on our current plans and aspirations as individuals or as organizations.

BETH BARANY: 2:26

Perfect. I love it. I think that's really helpful. I'm excited to dive in and I just have to say I love, love your focus on games and play. It's a big part of how I work and as a writer and also how I help writers. So tell us how can games help us explore the future?

RANDY LUBIN: 2:45

I think there's a number of ways that are all very exciting, but suited to different specific goals around exploring the future. So I think games are excellent at building intuition for complex systems, and if you're trying to think through the future, trying to get a grasp of the system dynamics and second order effects and points of leverage are all super helpful, especially as you-. Since most things you might try and accomplish when it comes to the future or ways you might wanna shape the future are gonna have knock-on effects. And so having that full picture, that rich picture is very helpful, whether you're making plans for an organization or doing world building for a book or a film. And so I think when you're in a game where there's some game state and some game mechanics and players are making decisions and then those decisions are having con consequences, that's really great for having a quick feedback loop for the player to start building intuition around that complex system. I take action A. I see immediate effect B, and knock on effects: X, Y, and Z. And so I think that's one, one class of how games can be really helpful. I think there's another that's about building empathy, for situations that you're not likely to be in or people that are very different from you. And games are so good at casting people into roles and then living out those roles, making hard choices in those roles that you can really come out of an experience, at least having a bit better of an experience than what you, a sense then when you went in about what might be going on in the mind of those people. What might their incentives be? How might that feel?

BETH BARANY: 4:07

I love that. And with games, I just think about some of the games I played as a kid: Risk, the board game Risk, and how all of a sudden you're not a person, you're a country and you have objectives that you've never experienced before. I remember playing that game and it is a war game, but feeling like the intensity of that and the bigness of that, I had never put myself in the position of thinking of myself as a territory or a country, or a region. So that's just one, one idea for my own childhood. Can you get a little more specific? If you are working with a organization, what kind of games are you presenting to them to play?

RANDY LUBIN: 4:45

There's a couple different sort of spectrum on which I can talk about that. So in terms of the type of game, just to get it real grounded for a second, it could be anything from something that's done as an exercise in a workshop, in person, or over zoom. In person, you might have people running around wheeling and dealing or maybe brainstorming. Some of the games are a little bit more of a writer's room vibe. On the other end of the spectrum, we have digital games that we've made that are playable in a browser. And or can be played as a group where you're discussing what to do next or just single player. And so my personal practice and work have really spanned a whole spectrum, but even the in-person games, there's many different types. As I said, there's negotiation games, which we run games with 50 people who are broken down into 14 different teams trying to- all trying to shape the future to their, their stated aims and goals. And then we've also done very, much more intimate games, trying to understand complexities and nuances around a topic like the future of trust and safety and content moderation. And that might just be a small group of three to five people trying to make some very hard decisions together.

BETH BARANY: 5:45

Wow. And what's the difference in framing something as a game versus let's do this exercise? what's special about that in your opinion?

RANDY LUBIN: 5:54

Yeah, so first off, it's very much a spectrum. And the way I think about it is when I start an engagement with clients, I bring a whole toolkit of game, gameful approaches, and different, takeaways and affordances from games. And sometimes where we end up based on the goals and objectives of the client, we end up something that looks very legibly like a game. And sometimes it's a workshop that's been informed by good practices from a game. so that being said, it's really all about exploring, working from what the client needs outta the project and coming backward. Yeah. So some clients come in and they go, we love games. We wanna do something really playful because we know that's gonna elicit the thing that we want from our participants. Whether they're internal to the organization or external stakeholders, we want something playful.'cause that's gonna get- There might be a few benefits to it. One, it might mean that folks are willing to drop some of their preconceptions and biases, especially if we're casting them in a role that isn't their normal day job. That's something that we've used before with experts where sometimes experts come in, they go, oh, we know exactly how this is gonna play out. And then we put them in a game, we put'em in a slightly different role than their normal role. and we've dramatically expanded the possibility space of now suddenly what they're willing to entertain in terms of possible futures. Separately, framing things as a game can make it much more approachable for folks who may not typically be engaged as like a expert on the subject matter, but by putting them in a player role, and your character role in the game and just saying: Hey, here's your objectives. Here's some of the leverage you can pull to accomplish those objectives. Go. They're much more empowered to share their thoughts and opinions. And so we did one engagement where we're looking at the future, potential futures around an upcoming election in a government situation where it was a fragile democracy. It was like a one party state situation, and we were trying to see how much space and what were the threats and opportunities to expand civic space a little bit. So we had two groups of players play it. We had a group that were civil servants and we had a group that were youths, local youths. And by, by framing a little bit as a game, we were hoping that people were gonna be a little more comfortable, a little more at ease and playing it. And also happy to to share their thoughts and be a maybe a little more provocative in what they were gonna say. So that's one example. But it's funny. There's certain engagements where we go in and say, we love the idea of having a game. We cannot use the word game. It's gonna scare off our executives or our stakeholders or whatever. And we're like, oh, hey, no problem. This is a, this is an exercise, it's a workshop. We, we won't use the G word. We won't call it a game.

BETH BARANY: 8:04

Yeah, I was curious about that. and I love how you're saying how by, by in some instances as framing it as a game, people are willing to take more risks, willing to step into perspectives that are unfamiliar and also willing to share their opinions. and that's so cool. I really love that. Let's dive into something that's probably more applicable to our audience about how can we use games to build out a setting, especially some kind of futuristic one or set in some version of the future. But of course, it can be used to create fantastical settings as well. Yeah, how can we use games for that?

RANDY LUBIN: 8:41

So, there are myriad ways to use games. If there's one big takeaway from this part of our conversation, it's just that pick games that you're familiar with, pick games you're excited about, and just start applying them to your world. There's some that I can specifically recommend. There's a whole family of storytelling games called World Building Games. One of the first storytelling games I ever played was a game called Microscope by Ben Robbins. And in that one, there's a fairly simple procedure, but rich procedure for fractally building out a world through its timeline. And so you start knowing the beginning of a timeline and the end of a timeline, you can fill in the big, high level, like what are the errors of this timeline? And take turns doing that. But you can also go deeper. You say, okay, within this era, what are some of the key events? And even play out scenes within those events. So there's a whole families of, game design out there, of world building games that I highly recommend looking into. I've designed some myself, and I've used some with Sci-fi writing workshops actually, where we play the game in the first half of the workshop. And then we all go off and write short stories in the second half. That game is Premise, which it's available online. Maybe there'll be a link in the show notes. There's also free copies for anyone who, for whom paying would be a hardship. Don't feel bad about grabbing free copies. There's unlimited free copies'cause it's the internet.

BETH BARANY: 9:46

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. We'll, we'll definitely include that in our show notes. And, so I love this. What you're talking about- like a fractal. Yeah. So is that meaning. You picked like the big signposts or the big milestones in a timeline of a story world and then you fill in the, in-between parts, is that what

RANDY LUBIN: 10:04

Exactly. So microscope in that game in particular, yeah. You are zooming in and zooming out and and each round, you rotate who gets to pick the theme for that round. And then no matter what you're doing, you can engage with things on those themes. And those could be within a narrow time period or jumping across time periods. it's really just a great way of quickly, really quickly generating a ton of interesting content and ideas that are all bouncing off of each other. I just to throw out a couple more. There's another world building game I love, called Dialect by Thorny Games, which is a game about generating language. It's really about how languages grow and die through the ones of community. So you're creating a bunch of new words and phrases and seeing how they're used by a community that's changing and evolving.

BETH BARANY: 10:44

I love that. We'll definitely have to include a link to that as well. I know when I work on my stories, I'm intuitively pulling words from other languages that I'm familiar with, that I've had exposure with. I speak French, so I'll pull from French. or I've been to North Africa, so in one of my stories I pulled customs and clothing and words. and then I'm also pulling folklore from all the bank of folklore that I've been reading since I was a child and exposure to in the world. and then I help my clients. I help them like access their interests and their modalities and the things. And I just ask them to come up with words, come up with rituals, come up with the system of education, whatever's relevant to their story. so this is really great and I would love to be able to have access to these games too, for my clients because they're, and students and everybody, because it's already how creatives are thinking. But these gives us some rubrics, some processes.

RANDY LUBIN: 11:42

Totally. Much, much more approachable than having a blank canvas, right? Saying: okay, cool. We're gonna start with thinking about timeline or thinking about language and using that as one of the trailheads for building and exploring a world. I think super, super powerful. And I'll also throw out there for folks who are excited or into more traditional types of storytelling games of the Dungeons and Dragons type, you can totally use that too to build it out. I've heard of many authors using that as part of their practice. I believe The Expanse, books and the TV show, started as a role playing game. I think. both George R. R. Martin and Patrick Rothfuss are both on the record of saying that they've played with ideas that have become books or short stories'cause they started out at something at the table. Or they'll bring something to the table as game runners and see how the players react and incorporate that back in. So there's just so many rich ways of involving games in a writing practice.

BETH BARANY: 12:28

Hey everyone. Thanks for listening to my interview with Randy Lubin. Please Like and Subscribe to wherever you listen and get this podcast. And also please share this with someone you think would really be excited to hear it. In the show notes are links to all the games that Randy and I discussed, as well as a link for you to sign up for our World Building Workbook for Fiction Writers that I have for listeners of this podcast. Also I mentioned in this interview the film I'm making. So there's a link in the show notes also, where you can find out more about the state of my film that is based on my heroine, and her friends based on my trilogy, Henrietta The Dragon Slayer. So check that out if you're curious. All right. That's all, everyone. That's it for this week Write long and prosper.