The Mammoth prophecies: a role-playing game on controversies around a socio-technical innovation and its effects on students’ capacities to think about the future

European Journal of Futures Research

Table 1 Game groups

Group name	Short name	Final number of students	Comment
1. National governments in Europe: Russia	Russia	5
2. National governments in Europe: close neighbors	Neighboring Countries	2	Initially 3 students, 1 dropout in Nov 2021
3. National governments in Europe: Countries farther away from North-West Russia	Countries Farther Away	3
4. The European Commission and the EU Parliament	EC and EU Parliament	3
5. Companies: HELIOS	HELIOS	3
6. Companies: other market actors	Other Market Actors	2
7. Civil society organizations: animal rights	CSOs Animal Rights	6
8. Civil society organizations: the environment	CSOs Environment	4	Initially 5 students, 1 dropout in Nov 2021
9. Civil society organizations: research ethics		0	Canceled; initially 1 student, relocated to EC and EU Parliament
10. Media, both high-quality outlets, incl. investigative journalism and yellow-press outlets	Media	5
11. Umpires^a	Game leaders	3	2 students plus 1 teacher
	Total participants	36	(incl. 1 teacher)

^aThe name of group #11, Umpires, was taken from writings on the use of political gaming at the RAND Corporation in the late 1950s (Goldhamer, 1955; Davison, 1958; Goldhamer and Speier, 1959; see Dayé, 2020, pp. 77–128 for a summary of these efforts). Apparently, this label was chosen back then to emphasize the non-steering role of the umpires, whose task was mainly to check the plausibility of the moves submitted by the game groups. Also, the RAND games usually established a Committee on Nature, a subgroup of the umpires whose members had the possibility to introduce events that in contrast to all other elements of a new game state, did not follow from the groups’ moves. Since no such separate committee was created in the Mammoth game, the more generic term game leaders came to be used over the course of the game. The game leader group consisted of the teacher and two students