LocationsA collaborative storytelling game for community inclusion
Futures Served
December 2, 2025
Rehearsing the future through play: making foresight tangible for communities and policymakers.
How can people of all walks of life, but especially those in leadership positions, be better prepared to make decisions they’ve never faced before?
How can we help people think about the future five, ten or 20 years from now and make it tangible and real for them in the present?
How can futures-thinking be made more accessible and inviting for people of different backgrounds in a country of immense diversity, such as Brazil?
Those were some of the questions that lead to the development of Futures Served, a bespoke game that is part of the annex to the Brazil Signals Spotlight 2025, developed in partnership between the government of Brazil, the UNDP Brazil Country Office, and the UNDP Strategy & Futures team.
To ignite conversations about Brazil’s future, the UNDP Strategy & Futures Team designed a tool that allows people to rehearse the future together within the context of a long-time tradition, the Brazilian lunch. Futures Served is more than a game - it’s a collaborative storytelling tool designed to bridge community voices and policy innovation.
The Context
In 2025, UNDP Brazil and the Ministry of Management and Innovation in Public Services joined UNDP Strategy & Futures team in developing the first localized Signals Spotlight, looking at signals of change and challenges specific to Brazil in the next 10 years.
The process in developing the Spotlight involved interviewing and workshopping with people across five regions of Brazil, from community leaders and young activists to members of government and subject matter experts on 16 themes identified in the project's scope.
It became clear to the team that those conversations shouldn't end with the research process, but should evolve as the Spotlight was made accessible to a broader audience (in other words, the document is just the start of a long-term process of building awareness and understanding about futures-thinking throughout Brazil).
This led to the creation of additional content compiled in the Annex of the Brazil Signals Spotlight: a toolkit with activities that explore the themes in different settings and different profiles in Brazil's society, and a role-playing game, that invite the reader to step into other people's shoes and respond to challenges they may not have considered previously. Futures Served is not just a game – it's a foresight tool that helps make complex dilemmas more tangible, whether you’re a policy maker, a community leader, such as the pastor of a faith community or a city council member, or a schoolteacher who would like to challenge their students to consider the future as they study the past.
The Process
Futures Served was informed by the actual content of the Spotlight, which challenges the reader to consider the 16 themes explored in the document using the metaphor of a Brazilian lunch.
Bases on these themes, four scenarios were created from the identified signals of change and drivers, during workshops with members of Brazil's government. Those scenarios paint the futures of Brazilian lunch in 2035, in four different archetypes: Baseline, Collapse, Transformation and New Equilibrium. Those scenarios take us from a gourmet version of Rice and Beans or a collapse of food production to diverse community buffets and highly nutritional, customized, and cost-effective human feed. Game participants are invited to explore these four scenarios while playing Futures Served.
In developing the game, the UNDP Strategy & Future team sought to make futures thinking more playful, while delivering on the real goals of making it more accessible, and democratic. Embedding personas into the gameplay adds an extra dimension to the game in that players need to respond to challenges based on their character, which allows the building of a collective story where questions lead to dilemmas and consequences. In addition to being entertained, players exercise skills such as practicing decision-making, with all of it’s uncertainties, trade-offs, and negotiation.
The game in action
The modular nature of the game also allows for co-creation. While initially designed to complement the Brazil Signals Spotlight, it caught attention of Futures Fellow Ingrid Furtado, who led the foresight initiative in the UNDP Honduras Country Office in 2025.
When Futures Served was applied at the Honduras CO, in October 2025, the game served as a relevant tool, enabling the team to actively explore nuances of future scenarios they had developed over the previous months.
From Food to Education
As it was originally designed for Brazil, the game was adapted to reflect the foresight research already underway in Honduras, focused on The Future of Education in the country.
Using the personas created during earlier scenario-planning sessions, participants stepped into the roles of characters such as Eduardo, a student leader; Don José, a traditional Honduran father; and Pastora Ana, a local religious leader, among other personas. By responding to challenges “in character,” the team was able to build empathy and uncover new insights about potential implications on the preferred future scenario.
The quick round of the game helped colleagues in the Honduras country office consider different perspectives, make more informed decisions (even though in a play setting), and be exposed to potential blind spots. The participants, who had previously worked with the same personas during scenario planning, noted that the game revealed new challenges, possible interactions, and negotiations that might come into play should the project be carried out in Honduras. It also supported them in evaluating important trade-offs.
Futures Served proved that a simple game mechanic can unlock deeper reflection about governance, equity, sustainability, and collective agency.
Futures Served arrived at the perfect moment, coinciding with the final phase of the Honduras foresight initiative and functioning as a hands-on experiential futures exercise. Because participants were already familiar with seeing the education topic in their country office- through the lenses of foresight-, the game allowed them to engage with the scenarios more tangibly. It proved to be a fun, simple, scalable, and highly reflective toolIngrid Furtado, UNDP Futures Fellows and foresight strategist
What’s next
The experience in Honduras is just an example of the impact this game can have in futures thinking, but also a testimony on the scalability of the tool. With solid foresight research already in place, a Country Office could rapidly adapt the existing context and scenarios into playability, exercising some decision making and role playing that is futures-oriented.
With the expectation of launching of the Brazil Signals Spotlight in the near future, Futures Served will be accessible for Brazilians to play through the Spotlight’s Annex. The design of the game makes it possible to play the game in schools, in decision-making settings or innovation labs, bridging policy thinking with community experience, while expanding upon the futures thinking that is inherent to the Spotlight.
Want to try it for yourself?
Download and play it here
If you are interested in adapting for another country or community, speak to the UNDP Strategy & Futures team. Futures Served can be a tool in the foresight process, adaptable to the scenarios and the futures context that are already being worked on, in different contexts.
Futures Served is an example of play as a method for inclusive foresight and policy innovation, making complex dilemmas tangible and inviting.
Authour: Mariana Soares da Costa, 2025 UNDP Future Fellow