7. Don’t play games, make games: Interactivity in complex systems
One of the main tools I use in modelling complex systems is to turn them into games.
Games are systems models. A game give you a sense of how different parts of a whole are connected — pull a lever over here and see the consequences over there. Place a token here and see the other players’ responses.
When Boho or Coney are given a complex system to model and turn into a game,the first place we start is by looking for the key systems dynamics. Are there trade-offs, feedback loops, thresholds? Are there places where a game theory analysis might be useful? Places where different ‘agents’ in the system interact, and where their choices depend on what other agents do?
When we’ve identified the key dynamics that we want to unpack in the model, we look for a game mechanism that can illustrate that dynamic. Both Boho and Coney have extensive libraries of games we’ve made in the past which capture different aspects of complex systems, and which we can draw on when making something new. Need to talk about feedback loops? Borrow the Trucks game from Best Festival Ever. Need to unpack how initial decisions constrain later choices? Look at the Worldbuilding game from Get The Kids And Run.
Of course, none of these games will work without being thoughtfully modified. Every system is unique, and every model is designed for a different group of users to engage with.
Some of the mechanisms that Boho use include:
- Common resource purchasing
- Building / constructing
- Race game
- Tableau building
- Action / point allowance
- Resource allocation
- Variable player powers
- Push your luck (expected threshold)
- Voting
- Partnerships
- Hidden goals
- Lateral thinking puzzles
- Programming actions / programming moves
- Set collection
- Auctions
- Betting games
- Area enclosure
- Simultaneous action selection
- Hidden information
- Scavenger hunts
- Memory games
- Co-operation / coordination
- Secret unit deployments
- Route / network building
- Pick up and deliver
- Trading
- Time as a resource
- Role playing
In 2019, Coney worked with the Wellcome Trust to create Temperature Check, a game about planetary health. Our focus was the intesection between climate change and human health — how certain strategies for dealing with climate change have ‘co-benefits’ for public health — and what barriers prevent us from taking those actions.
Temperature Check used the mechanism of a common pool resource game: a multi-player Prisoner’s Dilemma. Working in teams as the local councils of different districts in a city, players had to decide whether to share resources with other districts or to go it alone. This mechanism allowed us to illustrate some of the trade-offs between short term and long-term planning, and the difficulties faced by policy-makers in government systems.
Boho was tasked by Earth Observatory Singapore to create a suite of games exploring risk, and the challenges facing decision-makers in the lead up to potential disasters like volcanoes and typhoons.
Busy Mayors was one of these games. Players take on the role of mayors of two nearby towns, both facing reelection in the same week as a typhoon threatens to hit their stretch of coastline.
The system dynamic here is the trade-off between information and the ability to act.
The mechanism in Busy Mayors is resource allocation — and the resource is time. Players can only carry out a certain number of tasks in the week, and their priorities shift as the risk of the typhoon increases or decreases.
The depiction of risk in Busy Mayors is one of my favourite David Shaw mechanisms. Each day, players draw a set of stones out of a bag. There are five black stones and one white stone. If they draw a black stone, the storm stays on track to hit the town it’s currently headed towards. If they draw the white stone, the storm changes track and starts heading towards the other town.
Skilltesters vs decision-makers
Over time, every group of collaborators begins to develop their own unique language, a shorthand of useful references and phrases. Among Boho, we use the terms ‘decision-makers’ and ‘skilltesters’ to distinguish between two types of game.
Decision-makers are games where players make active decisions about strategy — decisions about allocating resources or negotiating with other players. These are the games that involve planning and prediction. An auction, for example, is a decision-maker — you make decisions about how much to bid, and you adjust those decisions based on new information.
Skilltesters, on the other hand, are playful tasks, usually with a win/lose outcome. These are much simpler games with a clear goal — for example, balance this marble on the back of your hand for 30 seconds without dropping it, or throw a ball into this bowl with your eyes closed.
Our games will frequently use a mix of both kinds of game. We use decision-makers to simulate parts of the systems where key choices are being made. We use skilltesters to simulate random processes, where a model might use a random number. Carefully mixing the two elements allows us to create an experience with just the right balance of fun and thinking.
Run A Bank is an example of this mix. The game was designed for people working in the finance sector, to illustrate the impacts of climate change on financial institutions.
Players take on the management of a small bank with an annual turnover of around £500 million. The game begins with a series of climate shocks that impact the bank and its investments. Starting with storm surges that take out the bank’s back end services, the crisis spreads to affect the bank’s day to day operation and its investments.
Players are faced with three key challenges: dealing with the immediate operational impacts of the crisis, managing the public response to the disaster, and shifting the bank’s investment portfolio. At the same time, they are faced with numerous small but immediate problems.
Run A Bank requires players to prioritise different tasks, to assess whether problems are urgent or important or both, and to work together to address them. The game illustrates the way climate change affects different types of risk: operational risk, regulatory risk, reputational risk, and so on.
The core of the game are two key ‘decision-maker’ tasks. Layered on top of them are a series of small ‘skill-tester’ tasks that demand quick responses and coordinated action. This is my favourite kind of systems game — a combination of thoughtful strategy with quick playful group tasks.
Wicked Problems
A good game captures something about the system it’s depicting — it engages the players on a poetic level as one as an intellectual one.
One of my favourite systems games, though, works by being nothing like the system it’s illustrating.
Anne-Marie Grisogono created this activity to illustrate Wicked Problem theory. This is a term invented to describe complex, diabolical problems such as climate change or inequality. Some of the characteristics of a wicked problem are:
- There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem.
- Every wicked problem is essentially unique.
- Every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem.
- There is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem.
- Every solution to a wicked problem is a “one-shot operation”; because there is no opportunity to learn by trial and error, every attempt counts significantly.
- The social planner has no right to be wrong (i.e., planners are liable for the consequences of the actions they generate).
Anne-Marie’s participants were given a jigsaw puzzle to complete. When they finished the puzzle, Anne-Marie asked them to reflect the strategies they used, and why it was that those strategies worked. What was it about the jigsaw puzzle that made it amenable to these approaches? Participants said things like:
- We knew what the final goal looked like — we had the picture on the box
- Every piece is part of the solution
- You know when you’ve got something right (the pieces fit together)
- The pieces don’t change
- The puzzle exists in only two dimensions
- We all know the rules of the game
- Every step contributes to the solution — there are no backwards steps
- There’s only one way for it all to fit together
Finally, Anne-Marie asked participants to compare this to real-world problems. When we’re talking about the complex problems we face in the world (wealth inequality, climate change, epidemics, you name it) none of these conditions hold true. But we frequently go about trying to solve these complex, fiendishly difficult real-world problems as if they were jigsaw puzzles.
Interactivity with large numbers of participants
The choice of a game depends on the context it’s being presented in. A game for individual players on phones will obviously be very different to a game for a group around a table.
One rule of thumb I use is that the more players, the fewer decisions per player. A game for five players can be much more responsive and flexible than a game for 50. That doesn’t mean that games for small groups are better — but it’s useful to bear in mind, when thinking about an interactive experience, interactivity tends to go down with large numbers of participants.
This creates challenges, but also interesting opportunities. My 2020 interactive work Break Into The Aquarium looks at rewilding and the future of ecology. Aquarium is designed for up to 300 audience at a time, in a conference or theatre setting. At those numbers, giving every audience member a means to interact tends to be both slow and a little meaningless. Making choices by majority vote is not the most interesting way to navigate an interactive game.
The approach in Aquarium is to give random audience members decision-making power. At certain moments, the narrative pauses, and a single audience member is asked to choose between different options. Will the starcrossed lovers get together or split up? Will the aquarium heist succeed or will the thieves get caught?
More satisfying than votes are threshold decisions, where a certain number of audience members are required in order to satisfy a condition. When I presented Break Into The Aquarium at Nesta’s Future of Storytelling event at the Barbican Theatre last year, the audience decided whether or not to release a set of animals into the room. It only needed 10 audience members (out of 90) to vote ‘yes’ for me to go ahead. Sure enough, 10 people voted yes, and we released the animals into the room. (I’ll keep it a secret what those animals were…)
In Sipat Lawin’s Battalia Royale (Manila, 2012), there was a vote midway through the show as to whether the show should continue or finish early. If 30 or more people (out of an audience of 350) voted to end the show, then the performance would finish then and there, halfway through. I’ve rarely seen a more tense moment than when 27 out of 350 people stood up to end the work, and the other 323 vocally tried to change their minds.
Debrief
The game itself is always only the first step. In everything we make, the real insights and value comes in the debriefs and discussions that follow. That reflective space is where people make connections, draw comparisons, and start to feed the experience of the game back into their own practice.
For that reason, we build games with that reflection space in mind. Often we’ll be working with scientists, researchers or experts in their field, and so when we’ve finished facilitating the game, we hand over to the experts to talk with participants and unpack the experience.
When developing a new game with a partner, we often start by imagining that debrief. We ask, ‘What conversations do you want players to be having after this game?’ — and we build backwards from there.
This is to say that a game — or any other kind of experiential model — needs to be embedded in a context where discussion and reflection can happen. Otherwise it’s a little like practicing throwing darts with your eyes closed — the feedback that you need is missing.
Make Games
‘If you want to learn about systems, don’t play games — make games.’
— Paolo Pedercini
If games are, effectively, systems models, then one of the most effective ways to learn about modelling is to learn how to make games.
To make a game based on a system, you need to map that system. You need to create a systems model which captures connections and dynamics. How are the different parts of the system connected? What is the shape of their relationship?
You need to consider the system from the perspective of various stakeholders — what do different groups need from the system, and how do they go about getting it? Then and only then can you build a working game.
One of the most satisfying things we do at Boho and Coney is to run game design workshops to introduce people to this practice. We start with some of the core principles of game design, and some simple exercises, then gradually work towards helping them make a quick and dirty prototype of a game based on their own system — whether a business, a community or an ecology.
Reimagining your system as a game can be a circuit-breaker to help you reflect on how it functions. It’s a useful way to thinking through where change might be needed, and what interventions are possible.
It’s also a fundamentally playful way to engage with our cultures, environments and institutions. That mindset of play and experimentation is a profoundly useful tool for us in reimagining our world for drastically changing times.
1. We live in systems: Becoming aware of what surrounds us
The disasters were designed by us — cuckoo clocks vs ants nests — the humility of systems thinking — seeing deep patterns — my practice as a writer, theatre artist and game designer, tools & techniques for thinking about the world
2. How to make a model: The art of systems modelling
What is a model? — maps on napkins vs satellite images — as simple as possible but no simpler — Best Festival Ever: modelling a disaster
3. A snapshot of everything: Tools for systems mapping
Mapping a Swedish forest — thousand year old oak trees — resilience assessments — a walk through the woods — Democratic Nature —
4. The future doesn’t exist: Scenarios and prediction
Why bother trying to predict the future? — the practice of creating scenarios — there are four possible futures — CrimeForce: LoveTeam
5. Narrative in systems: How to tell stories about complexity
Are theatre shows systems models? — underdog narratives & police procedurals — perspectives on an Indonesian rainforest in 95 Years or Less
6. Creating an experience: What design and dramaturgy teach us about worldbuilding
Theatre as rehearsal for revolution — dramaturgy & design thinking — tactility in Get The Kids and Run — collective experiences in Gobyerno
7. Don’t play games, make games: Interactivity in complex systems
Games are systems — game theory in Temperature Check — calculating risk in Busy Mayors — skilltesters vs decision-makers in Run A Bank
8. Lessons learned
Final thoughts — steering 9 billion people through a century of climate and global change — working with time instead of against it -
