Working with System Dynamics
Fullerton’s chapter on System Dynamics was very helpful when thinking about our own game for this project. The system we’re modeling is hiring practices and the complexities of bias and roles that play into each decision.
In general, it is a cooperative game in which the players work together to form a team of 5 new hires by going through a resume and interview round for groups of candidates. The players’ roles are people involved in the hiring decisions: recruiters, hiring managers, team leads, HR, board members, etc. Each role comes with its own goal within hiring that reflects real life motivations, but each player is also given ‘bias’ cards. The main objects in the game are the players, candidates, and biases which become properties of the players as they are handed out.
The goal of the game is to show how bias can influence hiring and how clashing motivations can make working as a team difficult even with the same broader goal of making the company succeed. Each round, a certain number (we’re thinking 3) of candidates will be revealed to the players with certain information shown depending on the round (no photos, behavior info for resume). The players must work together to come to a majority vote on each hiring decision to form the team of 5 before the clock (an hourglass) runs out. However, bias and goals influence their choices and show how powerful these two elements can be in the process.
Thinking about the loops involved in the game, each round involves a personal loop and a team loop for decision making. An interesting aspect of our game that expands the possibility space is that bias cards include details from the players’ lives (ex: you must vote to hire any applicant who went to the same college as you), so each gameplay will be different. Players’ unconscious biases will also come into play, though hopefully through explicit biases shown, they will be more aware of what biases influence their personal decisions. You must play one bias card each time you extend an offer, which essentially gets rid of that bias and what we’re thinking now is that you would pick up a new bias card. That way, players won’t lose interest and will deal with new interesting obstacles. The relationships between the player and their goals/biases and then the player within the ‘hiring team’ should provide interesting results, and we’ll have to wait to play test to see what patterns emerge.
