3. Olympic gaming: A cybernetic lens on mega-events
This is part 3 of a series of 6 essays looking at how games and interactive models can be used to grapple with some of the challenges facing different sectors.
This series is particularly intended for practitioners in these sectors interested in new tools to address complex problems and to bring together people for rich conversations.
It’s also for any artists or game designers interested in applying their skills to real-world scenarios.
You can read the other essays here.
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It’s one of the most finely-tuned scenes in Australian comedy. Two of the coordinating members of the 2000 Sydney Olympics (played by John Clarke and Bryan Dawe) confront a building contractor weeks before the opening of the Games.
JOHN: Mr Wilson, have you measured the hundred metres track?
MR WILSON: Yes, of course.
JOHN: How long is it?
MR WILSON: It’s a hundred metres track.
JOHN: I know what it is, Mr Wilson, I’m asking you how long it is.
MR WILSON: It’s about a hundred metres.
JOHN: How long should it be, Mr Wilson?
Discovering that your 100 metres track is 6 metres too short is just one of the million things that can go wrong for the organisers of a massive event like the Olympics.
An event on the scale of the Olympics is sometimes called a mega-event. Other examples include large-scale sporting events like the football World Cup, the annual Hajj to Mecca, and Carnival in Rio de Janeiro.
These are canonical examples of large-scale complex systems, made up of smaller sub-systems. Although they have been designed and planned by humans, they are so complex that they require a form of control involving constant attention, steering and adjusting.
This is where experiential models such as systems games can be valuable. As ‘flight simulators for decision-makers’, these interactive models can allow organisers to preemptively imagine different kinds of shocks, to test alternative strategies and to view the system from different perspectives.
More broadly, games are more about an experience where decision makers can learn and practice the skills and reflexes of creating, managing, regulating, steering (etc) complex systems comprising people, technology and environment. And because they’re fun, they are experiences where people often feel comfortable to learn through failure.
Boho has some experience in this space. Our 2014 game Best Festival Ever models a large-scale music festival, a classic instance of a mega-event. The game looks at the festival through the lens of a number of systems common to all mega-events:
- Biophysical — the land, water and atmospheric systems within which the event takes place, including ecology, animal and plant life, and weather systems.
- Buildings — the construction and design of the facilities for the event, from the venue itself to peripheral buildings like hotels, campsites, media centres, kitchens, roads and public transport hubs.
- Infrastructure — power and energy grids, transport networks, food / water supply chains and waste management.
- Community — the social, economic and political systems that emerge when hundreds of thousands of people interact. What are the rules (implicit and explicit) that govern peoples’ interactions? How are these rules enforced and what happens if they break down?
In Best Festival Ever, these systems each become smaller games within the larger game, which tracks the journey of the event from the earliest plans to the final day. These small systems each interact over the course of the game.
More recently, in conversation with the School of Cybernetics at the Australian National University, Boho has been exploring other examples of mega-events — in particular, the Olympic Games.
Cybernetics
Cybernetics is a way of looking at the world that includes thinking about the feedbacks between biological, technical, ecological and human systems.
The word ‘cybernetics’ was invented by computer scientist Norbert Wiener in 1946. According to School of Cybernetics director Genevieve Bell, concepts from cybernetics include:
- always considering interactions between technology, people, and ecology within a system.
- the idea of feedback, where a system output also becomes a system input, and
- the importance of subjecting the world you are making to critical inquiry.
Boho has an ongoing collaboration with the School of Cybernetics (we run Best Festival Ever as a regular primer on systems thinking as part of their Masters program, and we’re collaboratively developing a cybernetics walking tour for the National Gallery of Australia). In 2020, we began work on a series of new games for SoC exploring artificial intelligence, data and ethics.
One immediate example we began discussing was the Olympic Games.
The Olympic system
Each Olympic Games has a unique, and ambitious, agenda. For the Paris 2024 Games, for example, organisers are aiming not only to create a successful international sporting event, but to ‘leverage sport to stem climate change’. Paris 2024 president Tony Estanguet said, ‘This is one of the main objectives that Paris 2024 has set itself: to offer a new model for the Games that rises to the climate challenge.’
Climate is central to the work of both Boho and the School of Cybernetics. Working with the School of Cybernetics, we began to examine the upcoming Olympics through the lens of cybernetics.
This immediately presented us with a new key sub-system we didn’t explore in Best Festival Ever:
- Technology — Technology is embedded in every aspect of the Olympics, from construction to transport to security to the media. How are these tools created, tested and implemented? Who owns and manages the data created by these tools?
One additional element of the Olympics makes it especially appealing to us as game designers — it’s called the Olympic Games for a reason. The sporting events within the Olympics offer the opportunity to create countless mini-games within the larger game — imagine a micro-game based on the javelin throw, the high dive or indoor climbing, just for starters.
The Wild Temptations of Olympic Village
In 2020, Boho (led by Rachel Roberts) developed a small game to illustrate some of these interconnecting systems — particularly around data and privacy.
In The Wild Temptations of Olympic Village, players take on the role of Marty McWaterpolo, the coach of the Olympic womens’ water polo team.
Your players have been fitted with smartwatches that monitor their location, blood pressure, heart rate, blood-sugar levels, and so on. This data is your playing interface.
In the lead up to a key game with a rival country, you must make a series of decisions as issues with the water polo team emerge. If a player’s heartrate spikes after midnight, are they having a bad dream, or are they out partying? Should you make your players’ data available to a health food consortium to gain more sponsorship money?
These choices affect your team’s performance in their upcoming match, and whether or not they trust you as their coach in the long term. The decisions also raise questions about biometric surveillance and the limits of what this data can teach us.
The Olympics in a changing climate
In 2022, I got the chance to extend this work further when I was commissioned by Chatham House London to create a series of games for their Second Century conference.
Chatham House wanted these games to provoke conversation around the emerging challenges facing policy-makers — in particular, questions around mitigation and adaptation in the face of escalating climate impacts.
Once again, the Olympics provided a useful lens through which to frame these issues. In Queensland Medals, players take on the role of Queensland State Premier in the lead up to the 2032 Brisbane Olympics.
Brisbane is exposed to natural hazards — storms, heatwaves, floods — which will become more extreme in the decade to come. In the game, players must negotiate the challenges of staging an event in an era of climate shocks:
- Should the city build sea walls to protect it from floods, or should it focus on natural climate solutions such as planting mangroves?
- How can the Olympics mitigate the carbon footprint of thousands of athletes travelling from all over the world?
- Should the state deploy technologies such as Marine Cloud Brightening to protect the remnants of the Great Barrier Reef from bleaching?
- As mosquito-borne viruses travel southwards from the tropics with shifting temperatures, how can Brisbane avoid becoming the ground zero of a new epidemic?
The Olympics becomes a useful starting point to frame and focus these questions around climate mitigation, adaptation and geoengineering.
When we talk about a single sporting event over the space of a month, it crystallises these big abstract challenges into a coherent narrative. The mega-event scenario gives us a way into conversations that are otherwise so large that they’re hard to pin down.
Next steps
These initial prototypes are the first steps towards a larger game based on the Olympics and other large sporting events. We’re looking ahead to Paris 2024, the 2026 Commonwealth Games in Victoria, Australia, and the 2032 Olympics in Brisbane — just for starters.
This game will bring together all these subsystems in a single game. Players would explore the Olympics from different perspectives, making decisions and playing games in each system, which then interconnect with one another.
The game narrative might follow a group of characters through the system, using their experiences as an illustration of how the whole system behaves. Characters may include:
- An aspiring athlete
- A member of the Olympic organising committee
- A sports fan visiting the host city to attend their favourite events.
This game (or games) would be intended for people working on mega-events like the Olympics, but more broadly, would be useful for anyone grappling with complexity.
The cybernetics lens is a useful one for all of us to adopt — as a critical way to ask questions of our world and to be more intentional about how we interact with it.
