Simulating Work and Economic Challenges
How do you get teens to understand the tensions and struggles they will experience when they eventually enter the workplace?
How do we help them see the interconnected complexity of creating systemic change?
These are powerful and important concepts to learn to help someone be a wise and effective leader in society.
The National Youth Council got our help to design a game-like experience to help 16-year-olds learn about Singapore, the Global Economy, and the concepts above as part of their Our Singapore Leaders Programme (OSLP).
They wanted students to learn about the importance of 21st Century Competencies, along with a better sense of our economy and workforce challenges.
Collapse, the Game
We custom-designed a simulation game called Collapse that helped students learn these complex concepts and issues experientially.
We set the game in a fictional, future setting where Singapore (Lionese in this case) is in poor shape. Setting things in an unrealistic environment allows students to detach from reality and be less bogged down by their knowledge of current affairs.
This was important as topics like Universal Basic Income (UBI), Tax policies, ESG, Net Zero, are real-world concepts that often get the layperson to be confused and tuned out. By setting ourselves in a fictional environment, we can let go of such topics and describe the core tension in plain English.
Central Idea
The core tension in the game comes from trying to balance the trade-offs between these 4 major themes: Social Cohesion, well-being, Environment, and Economy. The way to win is essentially to try and achieve a positive outcome/score for each of these themes.
Each one of these themes is a focus area of our country, as we grow concerned about the state of each of them in our present day. Students chose to focus on one of these 4 themes as they played the game.
Challenge Cards
As students play each round of the game, they draw new challenges related to the theme they are working on. These new challenges help them gain exposure to the types of challenges we face in society.
In the example above, the core economic challenge of shortage of talent is the crux of the issue, and students learn to see that developing talent vs importing talent are possible solutions. At the same time, each solution comes with different ‘gains’. Developing talent is costly but effective, whereas importing talent is a cheaper but less socially cohesive option.
Resource Cards
To embark on each solution, students use various resource cards that they will draw over the course of the game. They are essentially deploying talents/professions to participate in executing the solutions to each challenge.
This eventually worked out as one of the key learning points, that jobs and professions are essentially the inputs/ingredients we use to solve problems and address needs in society.
Gameplay experience
Trying to achieve a balance of outcomes in the game, and grappling between a competitive and collaborative spirit was a key experience that we induced in the design of the game.
We saw students behaving just as corporate workers and civil servants do, often working in silos, not realising that they could collaborate for more effective outcomes.
I didn’t reach out to other groups because I thought we could handle things ourselves. — Student Reflection
Because our game allowed subconscious habits and behaviours to emerge, we were able to highlight powerful reflection points focused on these ideas:
- A habit of working independently instead of collaboratively
- The idea of having to manage trade-offs as they balance various socioeconomic challenges like improving the economy, social cohesion, mental-wellbeing, and environmental sustainability
- The positive and negative externalities that came from pursuing their own initiative and goals, centred on their own theme
- Any natural leadership that emerged as groups had to make decisions in each round of the game
All in all, students and facilitators had fun in this experience, viscerally understanding the challenges of making systemic societal change, as well as challenges in policy making that create complex follow-on effects.
We are still sharpening up the simulation and game experience, and will be running this with more institutions in the coming months, helping students learn more about the Singapore and Global economy in a hands-on, experiential way.
Feel free to drop me a message if you’d like to find out more, or experience a demo!
