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STUDENT: I'm Matt Susskind.

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And for this game, we are a
team of eight people working

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on forecast-based financing,
which is a technique using

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forecasts in order
to make decisions

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about what to do in response
to incoming disasters.

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Currently, a lot
of techniques are

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we're going to build long-term
protection for cities

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in terms of dams or
disaster preparedness.

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Or, after disaster happens,
we will react to the disaster.

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But there's not a lot of
work done in terms of we

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see that there is a
50% chance of disaster

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within the next week.

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Let's start mobilizing
to prepare for that.

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And part of the
reason for that is

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because if the
disaster doesn't happen

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you end up wasting money.

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But if you actually
do an analysis,

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you'll realize that the
money that you waste

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is actually way less
expensive than trying

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to make up for your lack of
preparedness after the fact.

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So Paolo had come in from the
Red Cross Red Crescent Climate

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Center.

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And he pitched a couple
of different concepts

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that they wanted
games around in order

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to educate either members
of the Red Cross or people

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out in the world who
they wanted to show

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these different ideas to.

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And so what he showed us was
actually just a PowerPoint

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with a couple of different
slides, where on each slide

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was a different concept.

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Ours was forecast-based
financing.

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But then, there were also
ones like cholera, or Ebola,

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or preparing for heat
waves, things like that.

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And so he gave us a
quick pitch of this

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is what the concept is, this
is who we want to educate

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with this, and these are
some of the characteristics

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that we think are
really important.

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And we actually weren't
assigned to any topics.

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He put those topics
up on the board

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and let teams form
around them, depending

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on what you're interested in.

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And so beyond just
the idea of this

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is forecast-based financing,
and this is how it works

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and who we want to teach it to,
we got no further instructions.

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Paolo did come in
throughout the class

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to teach us a little
bit more about who

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we would be talking to,
or to work over the ideas

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that we had been exploring.

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But on the whole, we just
got the general topic,

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and came up with the
game ideas on our own.

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One of our biggest
challenges was

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with forecast-based financing,
it's an understandable topic,

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but it's sort of abstract.

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And it doesn't quite
lend itself to a game.

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It's very easy to
come up with we're

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going to take
forecast-based financing

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and hide it as a game.

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But that's not a
fun game to play.

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So a lot of our
challenge is figuring out

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how are we going to work?

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How are we going
to create a game

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around forecast-based financing
that explains the ideas that we

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want, that teaches
people something new,

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and is a game that
we're actually proud of?

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Another compounding factor
was that originally our target

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audience was policymakers, which
was a very difficult audience,

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because they don't generally
play games, which meant that we

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were starting with
trying to teach them

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everything from scratch.

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Whereas when you're
creating for somebody

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who has experience
with video games,

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you can take a lot of
things for granted--

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that they're going to
know how to drag and drop

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things in order
to change things,

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or what the various design
ideas you're using actually

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mean to them.

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So that was a big
challenge for us,

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was designing for
this new consumer.

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And we also had a lot
of design challenges

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with getting the forecast-based
financing game to work.

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And the way that we
approached it at first

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was by creating a whole bunch
of different prototypes of lot

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of different types of games,
and trying them out with people,

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seeing what they understood,
what they liked about them,

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what didn't work, what they
learned from them, which

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was really good in terms of
exploring different ideas

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and learning more
about the subject area.

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But it created a new
difficulty in that

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we were all over the
place for the first couple

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weeks of the project.

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We got to the
point about halfway

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through-- we had about eight
weeks to do this project,

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I think, and halfway
through, we still

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didn't end up with
our final idea yet.

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Instead, we were exploring
all these different ideas,

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and pulling in various parts of
them in order to make our game.

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And then, we realized that our
game lacked a coherent vision.

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We had been working on
a couple prototypes.

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We didn't like any of them.

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It didn't feel like players
had a connection to them,

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both in terms of what was
happening in the game,

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but also a mental
connection of I

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understand exactly
what's happening here.

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So we decided to take
everything we had learned

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and some of the
systems we had built,

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and package them
into a new UI, which

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was this side view of the rising
water, which everybody just

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understood intuitively.

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You see a village.

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You see someone standing there.

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You see the water
rising toward it.

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And it doesn't
matter who you are.

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You understand that this is
something that's in danger.

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And you're going to
need to do something

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about the rising waters.

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And once we hit on that idea,
everything became much easier.

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Of course, there were still
ideas we had to explain,

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concepts we had to
design into the game

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in an understandable way.

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But for the most part, the
game was actually there.

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The mechanics themselves
didn't change very much

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between the prototype we
had before and this idea

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of the rising waters.

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But just packaging
it in a new design

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changed the game, the
feel of it, completely.

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So I had game design
experience beforehand.

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So I like game design a lot.

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I was hoping to
work more on that.

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But also to get some
interesting games made.

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I think I did get some of that.

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But probably the thing
I learned the most

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that I didn't expect
coming in was just how

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to work with a team.

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We're all busy MIT students.

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And so we would have weeks
where all of a sudden, everybody

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would have a test.

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And we had no time
to do anything else.

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And so it was a
lot of learning how

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to work with people
who are extremely busy

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and who have a lot
on their plate.

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And so it's really easy
for things to slip,

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for things to get forgotten,
fall through the cracks.

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So it taught me a lot about
project management, basically,

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and solving problems
as a team, and learning

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how to get everybody-- I don't
want to say herding cats,

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because it's not like
people didn't care.

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But it's just that
we were so busy.

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It taught me how to work
with these busy people

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to get to where we need to be.