From Territorial to Temporal Ambitions: The Politics of Time and Imagination in Massive Multiplayer Online Forecasting Games

Abstract

In 2010, the online forecasting game Urgent Evoke, produced by Jane McGonigal, former Director of Gaming at the Institute for the Future and the World Bank Institute, elicited praise by gaming critics as a model for “serious gaming.” The game promised to show how players could think about long-term solutions to urgent social problems like hunger, poverty, conflict, and climate change using the African continent as its test bed. Players imagined future temporal outcomes through remixing media. In a qualitative analysis of actual game play during the real-time introduction of the game for teaching organizational communication, Evoke became a platform for student inquiry for questioning its underlying design as an expansion of territorial and temporal conquest. Evoke served as a springboard for building a literacy of critical time among students in accessing stakeholder power to determine the future. Students challenged, created, and followed the cultural capital of promissory visions in circulation. The curriculum design for using serious and forecasting games like Evoke must account for the conceptual development of what Sarah Sharma calls critical time or chronopolitics, a hidden politics of time that shapes our approaches to cultures, organizations, and innovation. By placing spatial and temporal dynamics center stage, we investigated how serious games produce a chronopolitics of time differentiating among people by class and ethnicity. Alternative Reality Games offer the potential for building a literacy of critical forecasting time to understand the practices for anticipating the future as temporal networks of power, different and uneven.