What Pandemic Simulation Did Kelly McGonigal Join?

Kelly McGonigal remembers joining her identical twin for a respiratory pandemic simulation she places around 2008. The twin designs alternate reality games to help predict the future and help people adapt to it. When the 2020 pandemic arrived, earlier role play had already shown which gatherings would get people in trouble for contagion.

The twin is a game designer. World Without Oil had people all over the world living as if there was an oil shortage, growing their own food and changing daily life. She is one of the inventors of games where you enter a simulation. In the respiratory pandemic simulation, players mapped the behavior that would spread illness. Church and weddings came up, the gatherings people most want to hold, and the role play had already marked church and weddings as challenging.

The twin is a futurist who wants to fix the world, change the world, and imagine alternate realities 30 years out. The sisters are identical twins whose minds still work differently. The present-moment focus asks what is happening now and how to make now a little better.