Global Futures: The Game Anna Tsing and Elizabeth Pollman

Why is Thai food so spicy? (The Portuguese brought chili peppers to South east Asia from Brazil.) How did inexperienced British planters start a booming rice economy on the Carolina coast without the help ofAsian farmers? (They enslaved West African rice farmers, who remade the landscape for rice production.)! How did Arab and Chinese tools help sixteenth-century Europeans aim their guns? (The concept of triangulation was introduced by combining European versions of the Arab astrolabe and the Chinese compass into a surveying plane table with which target distances could be measured.)2 Unexpected connections can make new things come into being. New technologies, new economies, new identities and political visions: futures of all sorts are forged in the contingencies of strange connections. At a time when our future seems foreclosed in the narrow channels ofcorporate expansion, on the one hand, and clashing state and popular terrorisms, on the other, we might look for our best hopes (as well as our inchoate terrors) in the possibilities of something different. There are futures about which we have never even dreamed. "Global Futures" is a game that develops our ideas of the productivity-for better or worse-of contingency. It's also a chance to tell a good story and amuse your friends. You are free to make the world a better place, hatch a nefarious scheme, or narrate a true story. Your imagination opens up the possibilities of contingent connections. Contingency surrounds us, but we ignore its power to shape the future. For more than a millennium, Europeans have tended to imagine the future as the fulfillment ofprophecy. Since the Enlightenment, the most powerful future-making stories have told ofthe fulfillment ofprinciples of progress and rationality. The driving force oftechnology will transform society. The ideal of democracy will be progressively encoded in law. Education will

enlighten the next generation. In dialogue with such storytelling, anti progress prophecy has developed equally formulaic tropes for encapsulat ing time. The national genius of a chosen people will blossom. Human nature will reestablish historic gender roles and racial hierarchies. The essence of ancient civilizations will rise again to vie and clash. There is no room for contingent connections in any of these predictions. As the second millennium drew to a close, secular prophecy reached a fever pitch in the storyofglobalization. According to that story, the world is entering a global era without political or economic rifts. Nation-states and cultures are incr.easingly irrelevant. Aglobal menu ofconsumer desires and entrepreneurial standards frames identity and sets individual and collective goals. Like most charismatic storytelling, there is something that touches us here. Much has been happening since the end of the Cold War. We are witness to the global expansion ofa few giant corporations, the great flows ofpeople from one continent to another, the forging oftransnational stan dards for economics and politics, and the development of widely spread audiences for once parochial forms ofpopular culture. Yet the twenty-first century so far has shown that globalization cannot be regarded as a fore gone conclusion. Global capitalism is not as seamless and successful as its promoters made it sound. The leapfrogging financial crises of the turn of the century have not disappeared. "Antiglobalization" politics have sprung up, deflating policymakers' hopes for a smooth transition to corporate em pire. New wars and skirmishes make tall tales of an era without pol~tics less believable. Nor do these disruptions of the dream appear to be part of a more complex evolutionary plan. But what about contingency and inter connection? Speculation on the Thai bhatt ricocheted to crash not just the Thai economy but then Indonesia, Korea, Japan. The unlikely alliance of "turtles and teamsters," the environmental activists and labor unions who shut down World Trade Organization negotiations in Seattle in 1999, made it impossible for global economic planners to imagine serene and cele brated public meetings. And since September II, 2001, airplanes are no longer just transportation vehicles but also potential missiles. Before each of these events, their combination of elements would have seemed un promising as historical agents. Now they are making the future. Are you tired ofstale and dangerous predictions? It's time to appreciate contingent connections. In this game, you imagine a global future that might develop from the possibilities of what we call a "coalescence" - the historical force that arises from a transformative coming together of disparate groups, insti tutions, or things. You tell the story of this coalescence, and ifyour fellow

players accept the story, it makes history: it becomes a part of the world of the game. Your goal is to develop a set of coalescences that fulfills a preas signed mission - and changes the world. Whoever tells the best story while completing the mission wins. The game shows off a way of thinking, but it's also meant to be playable and fun. What do we mean by coalescence? Acoalescence is a historical force that derives from an unexpected connection. 3 The connection transforms the parties involved - thus creating the new historical force. The parties might be groups, institutions, ideas, identities, things, or beings. Chili peppers and Thai cuisine; African rice producers and the Carolina coast; astrolabes, compasses, and plane tables: each ofthese was transformed in the process of connection. Each "coalescence" made new futures possible. In the game, you tell the story of an imagined coalescence. This coales cence must involve a coming together of two or more elements that trans form each other. To say that a cat and a goldfinch are both animals is not to posit a coalescence; nor is it a coalescence to imagine a pet store that sells both. But if you posit a cat-feeding fad that requires that cats eat nothing but goldfinches to give the cats a sleeker coat, while goldfinches become seriously endangered because of the program, this is a coalescence. Both cats and goldfinches are changed in the encounter. As the example sug gests, coalescences in this sense do not require intentional cooperation between the parties. They do not need to promote each party's interests. They can seriously damage collaborators-and the world. Nonhumans as well as humans participate. Your job as a player is to imagine how such an encounter might change the world. (That's what we mean by "historical force": something that might change the world.) How to Play At the start of the game, each player receives a mission card that defines his or her objective for forming a global future. For example, you might be asked to "create a revolution," "corrupt a nation's government," "use a natural resource to create havoc," or "revitalize an ancient philosophy." Players then take turns using jUture-making cards (as spelled out hereafter, these are icons of historical agency) to develop their missions. During his or her turn, a player describes a coalescence. In each subsequent round, the player's coalescence must grow and change with the addition of new future-making cards. After players have earned the required number of future-making cards, each player has a chance to tell his or her final narra tive. Players evaluate each other's narratives by assigning points on a I to 5

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scale based on the quality of coalescences imagined and articulated, the degree to which the narrative accomplishes its mission, and the cohesive ness and connectedness ofthe narrative in the collectively imagined world. The player with the most points wins. The forty-nine future-making cards provided with this game are icons. They represent the world through stereotypes and symbols. They do not represent the complexity of historical agency and consciousness. Play with them as icons. Use them as an ideology about X (rain forests, biotech nology, France, pacifism, patriotism) rather than as the real thing. Some cards can be interpreted to refer to a historical legacy: cards with religious icons, cards picturing historical figures, cards with heavy symbolic loads. (A card with Einstein's picture might be interpreted as the scientific tradi tion; a card with Mickey Mouse might be interpreted as U.S. popular cul ture.) Most of the cards are ambiguous. It is up to you to interpret them and use them in a creative way. Feel free to use them literally or to stretch and refigure them - and to add them together in eccentric ways. Once a coalescence is suggested and accepted, every player's narrative must accept it as a part of the game. This means that subsequent sce narios must be plausible in relation to these past narratives, or else the new story must change past parameters. Each player's narrative does not have to address or include other players' narratives. However, narratives that in clude other players' coalescences can add to the fun of the players sharing in a global future.

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Distribute one ofthe eighteen mission cards to each player. Players should not show their mission cards to other players. One player takes the role of dealer and shuffles the future-making cards. The player to the left of the dealer takes the first turn, which starts by the dealer giving the player three future-making cards, laid face up on the table. The player chooses two cards for his or her coalescence. The player then gives a short expla nation ofwhat the cards represent in his or her narrative. The story should articulate a connection that changes each ofthe elements to produce a new historical force. Is the story an acceptable coalescence? The other players may offer ideas for improvement before they decide whether or not to ac cept this coalescence. Ifaccepted, the coalescence becomes part ofthe col lectively imagined world of the game. It is now the next player's turn. The unused future-making card (from the original three dealt) is passed to this next player; the dealer adds two more, for a total of three. This next player chooses two from these three cards and repeats the process of telling the
Global Futures: The Game I 117

story of coalescence, hearing the evaluation ofthe other players, and pass ing one unused card to the next player. After each player has had one turn, move on to the next round.

Notes on Strategy: Forging Connections

The following suggestions are meant to help you understand what we have in mind as a coalescence: A card showing Hollywood's letters (interpreted as the U.S. film in dustry) and a card showing theTaj Mahal (interpreted as India) could be articulated together in the Bollywood film industry. A card showing a teapot and a card showing the tropical rain forest might be articulated in the story of a conservation project involving the development of a rain forest herbal tea. A card showing a Yanamami boy could be articulated to the rain for est herbal tea combination to tell a story of an indigenous market ing initiative to sell herbal teas. You could articulate the whole thing with Bollywood to create a song-and-dance musical about the im portance of indigenous knowledge in forging twenty-first-century businesses. In coming up with stories that connect cards, players should balance cre ativity and real knowledge ofthe world. Use the cards to expand what poli tics and culture might mean. You might solve real problems (peace in the Middle East, police brutality in Los Angeles) or make up new conundrums for the world. Meanwhile the game asks you to think beyond what you hear as news. What new historical forces might come into being? What else might develop for life on earth- or beyond? However, the game is less fun if the stories disintegrate into wild fantasies where everything is possible. Your stories should be plausible, although not necessarily real. Players must satisfY each other in telling the stories that establish a con nection between cards. In judging the worth ofanother's story, each player should ask him- or herself: "Does the story make a connection that trans forms both parties?" "Does this transformation create a new kind of his torical force?" It is not enough to establish that the agent represented on one card has met the agent on the other card. If you have a card with the Eiffel Tower and another with the Great Wall of China, it is not enough to imagine a travel agency that brings people to both places. Instead think of some way that each transfigures the other. French Maoism? A joint com mission on historical preservation? An illegal arms sales scandal? As you play, you'll see the need for new future-making cards. Making new cards adds variety to the game and widens the spectrum of play for the entire group. Sources for new cards could include pictures from news papers and magazines or drawings made by the players. Players could also simply write down a few words representing their card idea on an equal

Rounds 2 and 3
In rounds 2 and 3, players continue taking turns narrating coalescences. However, instead of being offered three cards and choosing two, each player is offered two cards and chooses one. (The first player uses the last unused card from round I, plus one dealt from the pack; unused cards from each turn are passed to subsequent players.) In round 2, each player gains a third future-making card, which must be incorporated into his or her narrative, forming a coalescencewith the two cards earned in the first round. In round 3, each player gains a fourth future-making card; it must be worked into the story with the other three cards already earned. In each case, the new card must change the future-making prospects of the whole combination. Don't just add an element; rework the significance of the package. Players again judge the acceptability of each coalescence accord ing to whether all the elements are transformed in forming a new histori cal force.

Round 4
This is the final round. To add a challenge, each player is dealt one more future-making card. There is no choice of cards in this round. (The last unused card from round 3 is returned to the bottom of the dealer's deck) Each player must include this fifth future-making card into his or her final narrative and reveal his or her mission card. After the first person takes a turn in this round, the other players rate this player's narrative on a scale of I to 5 (the highest rating). Players should base the scores on the quality of coalescences narrated, the degree to which this narrative accomplishes its mission, and the cohesiveness and connectedness of the narrative in the collectively imagined world. Players write down the name ofthe player and the score on a piece of paper and fold the paper like a secret ballot to be counted after all players have taken their final turns and are evaluated. Players do not rate their own narratives. When the round is over, unfold the papers and total each player's points. The player with the most points wins. If playing with five or more players, skip round 3 and move directly to round 4. Each player will have a total of four instead of five future making cards.

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Global Futures: The Game I 119

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size piece ofpaper. New mission cards can also expand the game or make it more relevant for a particular audience or direction of play.

Beyond the Pleasures of WinninB

The game is intended to amuse and stimulate a variety of audiences - but of course in different ways. The graduate students we've played with use it to debate theories of culture and globalization, as well as to invent sin ister plots to destroy civilization. Our biochemist friends experimented with eerily plausible, as well as hysterically funny, biotechnologies. One twelve-year-old used the game as a vehicle for outrageous stories. Sober faculty colleagues imagined how it might be useful in classes, workshops, or teach-ins. One could use the game to open discussions of world his tory, or social movements, or globalization, as well as antiglobalization. Furthermore, there is no reason to limit the game to these issues. To cus tomize the game, one merely adds new mission and future-making cards with appropriate topics. Coalescence forges the force of all kinds offuture making, in the realms of theory, technology, society, and more. "Global Futures" is less particularly addressed to the rhetoric of the future and more to the process of making actual, alternative futures. The game requires us to think about our conceptualization oftime and change. At its most obvious, the game shows what is wrong with theories that re quire that things don't change-for example, because they hilve eternal essences as natural objects or cultural codes. It also argues against theories of change that bind time as the rungs of an evolutionary ladder. This in cludes theories that left-leaning intellectuals are proud to call progressive (supportive trellises of flowering liberalism; critical charts of intensifYing capitalism), as well as those that have been exposed as repressive (coercive international development; civilizational paternalism; free-market bully ing). These frameworks all require us to accept that we will enter the future in lock-step progress; our only alternative is to be "left behind." They tell us that we already know what historical forces will propel us toward our common fate. These historical forces are, ofcourse, the ones we recognize in the present: the forms of human and nonhuman possibility imagined within current discussions of politics and culture. Everything interesting about future making has been omitted from these theories of progress. Moreover, these omissions are biased by the geo political structure of our theories of time. Current imperial arrangements are reproduced in these theories of the future: Today's world centers con tinue to lead the globe into the future; today's "backward" margins con tinue to trail after. It is "common sense" to imagine the future by looking
I Anna Tsing and Elizabeth Pollman

over the shoulders of cosmopolitan elites in New York and Los Angeles; the view from rural villages in Africa or Asia is, of course, behind. Why do we continue to confuse world power and world time? There is something wrong with this commonsense idea of time and change, which forecloses the future and the past-'- and closes our imaginations. Political cultures de pend on directing and disciplining our sense of time and change. As long as we imagine the future along the set trajectories of today's categories, we will find ourselves treading in the ruts they have set out for us. Instead, the game looks for the alternative trajectories that rniBht spring up. We turn to contingent connections to disengage our stories of the future from current geopolitics and knowledge hierarchies. We would like people in the world to have other ways to imagine the future as well as the past. The game offers some tools for reimagining the forces of change. Are the rules of the game themselves a theory of future making? Only in the sense that we have responded to the contingent encounters of each time we played the game. Everyone has a different idea of how the game should be played. We have shifted the rules ofplay at least a little after every encounter, and we hope you will too. This places the game somewhere be tween a "finite" game and an "infinite" game. In a finite game, the pleasure is to do one's best to win the particular round; in an infinite game, such as art or scholarship, the pleasures involve pushing forward the state of play indefinitely into the future. 4 If scholarship has a role in our global future, it must revitalize the ways it can be fun in both senses.

Notes
Many friends have helped us develop this game. Susan Harding and the "His tories of the Future" seminar inspired the game, and we owe the participants in that seminar for their generosity and good humor in playing and discussing it. Daniel Rosenberg offered many suggestions. Many graduate students in the departments of anthropology at the University ofCalifornia, Santa Cruz, and at Harvard University gave the game their attention and sense ofplay. The stu dents ofthe 2001 "Graduate Core Course" (ucsc) and 2002 "Reading Theory through Ethnography" (Harvard) thoughtfully played and commented. We owe long historic debts to Joanie McCollom and Tim Choy. Friends, family, and colleagues also helped out. Thanks to Jean-Paul Labrosse for his ideas about future-making cards. Thanks too to Ky Lowenhaupt, Daniel Sullivan, and Jesse Sullivan for an especially helpful round ofplay. We are also grateful for the ideas that inform the three questions that begin the game instructions. For the first we owe Michael Herzfeld; for the second Paulla Ebron; the third we owe to Daniel Sullivan. Carney, Black Rice.

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Burke, Connections, 27, 122, 259-60. Tim Choy suggested the term "coalescence" to describe the global-local pro cess of forming new historical agents. Our conceptualization of coalescence is informed by Laclau and Moffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, and Grossberg and Hall, "On Postmodernism and Articulation." Each ofthese scholars theo rizes the "articulations" that give rise to social movements. Judith Butler's The Psychic Life of Power and Bruno Latour's Aramis. or the Love of Technology variously show us how "translation" and contingency form identities and objects, re spectively. These scholars, and others, have turned attention to the continual making of new social forces. Susan Harding and Daniel Rosenberg suggested this point to us.

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