Looking forward to the APF (Assn of Professional Futurists) annual Gathering “Play” from May 2-4 in Orlando. The theme is the future of Simulation and Gaming. I’m particularly excited about it because I feel it’s been a weak area of my practice/knowledge base. It has been a bit puzzling that simulation and gaming has not been a bigger part of foresight to date. There are certainly some practitioners and groups who are doing this work – in fact the Institute for the Future’s online game Superstruct won the APF’s 2009 Most Important Futures Work top award. My sense of simulation and gaming back when I was a student entering the field twentyish years ago was that it was poised to talk off “once the software got better,” and it was assumed it would get better. My own experience over the years is that simulation and gaming was getting better, but….not quite there, or at least not compelling enough to add to my personal tool kit. Perhaps it’s because it requires a more significant time investment to become effective with it, and thus a choice is needed on whether one wants to specialize in it?
The notion of what’s in one’s personal tool kit is particularly timely for me given that I am teaching the Professional Seminar Course this semester at the Houston Futures program. This is typically the last course students take before they embark into (or back into) the real world. So we try to get them prepared by reviewing the state of the field, the asking them to review their personal skill set (and maybe adding a few things), and then pulling together what they’ve learned into various aspects of a personal professional plan (we use another APF award-winning work here, Verne Wheelright’s It’s Your Future book). We encourage the students to think about what’s in their tool kit – ideally what are they good at and what they like doing. It’s challenging to be a master of all tools, so choices have to be made. For me, simulation and gaming has buried at the back of the tool kit. Perhaps on May 5th, it may move to the front? Andy Hines
