Commissioning Games for Systems Change: A Field Guide
A new framework for developing impactful games
Summary
Organisations across sectors are facing complex challenges, delivering projects with shrinking resources while navigating rapid technological, social and ecosystems change. Project managers need innovative tools to help make sense of the systems they’re part of, devise new strategies, and bring together stakeholders around difficult issues.
One increasingly popular tool to address these challenges is games and interactive simulations. Games are being used to support and enable systems change across fields such as Disaster Risk Management, sustainable finance, health research, data and AI safety, and many others.
Unfortunately, most games developed by organisations to address systemic challenges fail to meet their goals. This is not due to the quality of the games themselves, but because the organisation lacks effective tools for working with game designers or contextualising game products. The result is wasted resources and missed opportunities.
This guide breaks down the existing model of collaboration between organisations and game designers, and identifies the key issues that cause game projects to fail. With this in mind, the guide offers an alternative model for commissioning games for systems change, in which:
A game designer is embedded as part of a project team to develop targeted game interventions for specific contexts, iteratively over a longterm process.
The guide breaks this new model down step by step, offering concrete tips and case studies to better plan and deliver innovative game activities for organisations of all sizes.
About Me
I’m a playwright and game designer from Ngunnawal country, Australia, now based in London. I have 20 years of experience creating games for organisations such as the World Bank, the United Nations, the Stockholm Resilience Centre, University College London and the Earth Observatory Singapore.
I create games for systems change in fields such as disaster risk management, sustainable finance, climate adaptation, data and AI, and health research. I run a regular workshop on Systems Thinking and Game Design with the Centre for Applied Simulation and Training (CAST) at the Singapore Civil Service College.
This guide draws on two decades of field experience designing and facilitating games across diverse organizations and country contexts. As organisations navigate increasingly unpredictable challenges - and as game-based approaches proliferate across sectors - this feels like the right moment to share my experience and reflect on what works and what doesn’t.
This guide was developed with the generous insights of Shawn Chua, Carina Ferreira, Kyle Foo, Jack Lloyd, Kevin Low and Ben Yeoh, and drawing on my work with Boho Interactive, Coney and Melanie Frances.
INDEX
PART 1
We live in systems
Games for systems change
An increasingly popular tool
A broken model
A missing structural framework
A better approach
What is a game?
A powerful tool, not a silver bullet
What AI can (and can’t) do
An alternative model
CASE STUDY: Seismic Resilience in Romania
PART 2
Three Principles
1. Embed game design capacity within your team
- Find opportunities for games to support your existing activities
- Use your team’s existing skills
- Engage game designers with broad skillsets
CASE STUDY: Building Resilience in Nepal
2. Create small-scale game interventions for specific contexts
- Define the purpose of your game intervention
- Design games as one-shot experiences
- As simple as possible (but no simpler)
- Use a minimalist aesthetic
- Encourage quick games and longer reflections
CASE STUDY: A Week in the Bush
3. Work iteratively over a long-term process
- Commit real resources to convening game participants
- Combine modular games into larger experiences
- Build a community around your games
CASE STUDY: Get The Kids And Run
Conclusion
Post-script
PART 1
We live in systems
We are embedded in systems. Climate systems, economic systems, political systems, social systems, ecosystems. Transport networks, food production systems and energy grids provide the backbone of our day-to-day lives. Our minds are shaped by education and cultural systems. All of them influencing and interacting with each other in complex, rapidly changing ways.
These systems are too vast and complex for any single person to understand - and yet we must understand them, because we face shocks and crises at every scale. Climate and global change accelerate these challenges. Technological and social shifts create new and compounding risks.
In every sector, people need new ways to make sense of and intervene in the systems they are part of.
The head of a sustainable finance NGO trying to work with stakeholders across the financial sector to align incentives towards net zero investing.
A Disaster Risk Management specialist trying to communicate the complexities of climate risk to government and business stakeholders.
A government official trying to develop policy safeguards for the rapidly changing landscape of data and AI.
A community leader trying to build consensus around a new infrastructure project that will affect the whole region.
Each of these people is facing complex challenges with no off-the-shelf solution. Whether developing new policies, increasing community understanding of risks and threats, or bringing stakeholders together to negotiate complex issues, they are seeking innovative tools to help them navigate these systems challenges.
An increasingly visible tool here is games.
Games for systems change
Games are the foundational artform of the 21st century. The commercial games industry is worth $180 billion USD annually (as of 2025), and roughly two billion people were active players in the last 12 months, whether video games, boardgames, tabletop RPGs or card games.
The vast majority of games, whether commercial or independent, are designed with a focus on pure entertainment. But a small subset of games exist with a goal to support or facilitate real world change. We can gather these games under the loose heading of ‘games for systems change’.
Games for systems change are a powerful tool for people working in complex systems. A well executed game can:
Make visible key dynamics within a system
Explore scenarios and potential outcomes in safe environments - games as flight simulators for decision-making
Facilitate conversation and negotiation between stakeholders around difficult topics
Train better decision-making skills, help people understand risk, anticipate second-order consequences of policies...
Bring diverse groups together around an unfamiliar subject, giving them shared language and examples to draw on.
Help introduce strangers (icebreakers) or facilitate deeper collaboration among colleagues.
An increasingly popular tool
In the worlds of international development, finance, policy and healthcare, the use of games as innovative communications tools has escalated.
The market for ‘serious games’ focused on training and education grew to more than $13 billion USD in 2024. In one sector, the UNDRR website includes a repository of more than 600 games and innovative training activities developed for Disaster Risk Management projects.
Anecdotally, in my own work, I have seen a major uptick in the last decade in the number and variety of organisations exploring games to address their needs. More collaborations between organisations and game designers are undertaken every year.
The problem is that most of these games are failures.
A broken model
Here’s a typical model for how a game is developed for a systems challenge:
A project leader gets excited about the power of games. They engage a game design firm to produce a game about their system.
The team negotiates a brief with the game designers and provides them with some research material. The designers go away for weeks or months to develop a game based on this material.
In the meantime, circumstances change. Mission priorities shift, new stakeholders enter the picture, budgets wobble. The game brief looks less and less relevant as the weeks pass.
Eventually, the game designers come back to playtest their prototype with the project team. The game isn’t quite what the project team had in mind, but it’s too late to radically change it. Instead, the designers make some minor tweaks, and finalise the design elements in time for the deadline.
The final delivery date arrives. The team assembles a group of stakeholders to play the finished game. The experience is interesting and provocative, but it doesn’t quite achieve the transformative impact that was envisioned.
The budget is now exhausted. There are no resources to significantly rework the game to address the discoveries that have emerged throughout the process. Instead, the game is packaged up as it is and the game designers depart the project.
At this point, the game product is orphaned. The project team don’t have the capacity nor the skills to deliver the game. Convening new groups of players requires time and resources that aren’t available. Instead, the game sits on a shelf or as a link on a website, unused and eventually forgotten.
An expensive and time consuming exercise for an uncertain and ambiguous result.
A missing structural framework
I’ve seen this scenario play out on numerous occasions. I’ve seen many organisations get excited about the power of games to help illuminate issues or facilitate systems change, and then grow disillusioned when the results were more expensive and less impactful than they’d imagined. A disappointing outcome for all concerned.
The issue, I’d argue, is not necessarily the games themselves. Yes, there are games that fall short of the brief, and game designers that promise more than they can deliver. Games are creative products, and there is always a risk of failure when commissioning creative works.
But I think many - perhaps most - of the failures I’m describing did not fail because of the quality of the games. What failed was the context for these games.
A better approach
I believe there is a better approach to commissioning and developing games for systems change, one that:
Maximises value for money
Increases impact, and
Works more flexibly to adapt to changing project circumstances.
This approach moves away from the existing model of commissioning game design firms to create one-off games as a single large-scale product.
Instead, this approach focuses on embedding game design capacity within project teams, developing small-scale game interventions for specific contexts, and working iteratively over a longer timescale.
In the following guide, I’ll unpack this approach in detail and outline a practical toolkit for curating and delivering effective games for systems change.
Although we’ll discuss some broad game design principles, this guide is not intended as a toolkit for game designers. Instead, this toolkit is for curators, producers, project managers and anyone interested in how to effectively deploy games to address challenges in your sector.
What is a game?
Before we explore this alternative approach for developing games, we need to articulate what games are and what they can do.
A game is a structured type of play. Usually a game will feature rules, goals, some kind of feedback - and hopefully, some degree of fun.
There are many different formats of game: board games, video games, online games, card games and many more. They can be played solo or with other players, either competitively or cooperatively.
The games we’re interested in here share the goal of creating or supporting some sort of impact in the real world: whether illuminating a problem, helping craft solutions, or training useful skills.
Games are a varied and flexible tool. But it’s critical to note that a game cannot do everything.
A powerful tool, not a silver bullet
In my experience, I’ve seen people in the policy space default to two extremes when it comes to games:
a. Games are trivial, silly, not serious or for adults.
b. Games are all-purpose instruments of powerful transformational change.
The first attitude misses the rich potential for games to deliver real impact. What goes unstated in this attitude is that if you aren’t using games, you are relying on other, more traditional communications tools.
The second attitude overstates the power of games. Ironically, this undermines games in a different way. By hyping games as an all-purpose DRM solution, these people miss the critical step of identifying when and how a game should be used, and run the risk of deploying them when they are not appropriate.
In short: games are not a silver bullet, but rather one of a suite of communications tools and tactics available to a project team.
As with any tool, the challenge is to deploy it in the most effective way possible. For games, that means ensuring that the game context is appropriate.
What AI can (and can’t) do
Generative AI has emerged as a valuable tool for some kinds of game design projects. Used thoughtfully, AI can provide significant extra capacity to game design teams.
AI can help create assets to flesh out a fictional scenario: news reports, sample characters, dialogue, images and video. Producing this kind of textural material was traditionally a barrier for small design teams. To be able to create this material in near-real time offers new opportunities for world-building and narrative immersion in games for systems change.
At the same time, AI cannot create the rich game systems on which this worldbuilding sits. Modelling a real world scenario, devising interactive mechanisms, and adapting those mechanisms to illuminate your organisation’s system in new ways: at this point, these tasks require human design expertise.
Equally, AI cannot facilitate a gathering of participants in a live interactive simulation. And ultimately, AI cannot replace the players, whose interactions with the game system create the emergent richness of the experience.
An alternative model
The existing model for working with games is: a game design firm commissioned to produce one large-scale game product.
This approach sometimes yields results, but it is subject to many risks, such as:
Circumstances change and the original game brief no longer applicable;
Stakeholders or team members are unsure about using games;
The game produced by the game designers does not meet your expectations;
There are no resources to support the game’s ongoing life.
To address these issues, this guide proposes an alternative model, in which:
A game designer is embedded as part of a project team to develop targeted game interventions for specific contexts, iteratively over a longterm process.
For many people with experience in commissioning or producing games for systems change, this is a counterintuitive approach. To concretise it, I’ll share an example of a project I was involved with that followed this model.
CASE STUDY: Seismic Resilience in Romania
Romania is one of the most earthquake-vulnerable countries in the world. Following the devastating Bucharest earthquake in 1977, the country has implemented some basic seismic risk measures, but faces many barriers in addressing earthquake risk concerns at scale.
From 2021-23, the World Bank provided technical assistance to the Romanian government to improve seismic resilience in Romania.
Led by project manager Carina Ferreira, the World Bank team brought together construction engineers, Disaster Risk Management (DRM) experts, risk communicators and policy experts. The project involved consultations with government ministries, local governments, NGOs, academics, home-owners associations and community groups. The goal was to develop a country-wide seismic risk reduction plan.
I was brought into the team as a game designer. However, rather than producing a single game, I was engaged as a core team member, attending regular team meetings and integrated into the team’s expertise.
My brief was to develop a series of games for different groups over the 18 month lifespan of the project, including:
A game about prioritising retrofitting for members of home-owners associations;
A solo game illustrating the key groups involved in post-disaster recovery;
A game about the barriers preventing coordination between government ministries.
All these games were simple, stripped back activities without detailed graphics or props. Each was designed for a specific group or event. When the team confirmed a meeting with a particular group of NGOs and public officials, or an opportunity came up to brief a national minister, I was able to quickly develop game activities to support these events.
Each game built on the learnings from the games before. As the team became more attuned to the specific issues and barriers facing our stakeholders in addressing seismic risk, the games were able to become increasingly attuned to these issues.
The result was a successful program that engaged stakeholders at all levels of Romania’s government. The games brokered critical conversations and led to key resolutions around sticking points in the negotiations. As a result of these projects, Romania successfully committed to a new National Seismic Risk Reduction Strategy starting in 2023.
PART 2
Three Principles
So how do we put this model into practice? How can we reliably implement game projects to create systems change?
The next part of this guide is a set of tools and techniques for achieving better game results for your project or organisation.
These tools are organised around three central principles.
1. Embed game design capacity within your team
2. Create small-scale game interventions for specific contexts
3. Work iteratively over a long-term process
We’ll look at each principle in turn, exploring its implications and then discussing specific ideas for implementing it within the messy reality of chaotic projects and limited budgets.
The result is a framework for delivering consistent impactful games that spark meaningful conversation and drive real change.
1. EMBED GAME DESIGN CAPACITY WITHIN YOUR TEAM
The first (and perhaps most controversial) of the principles is this: game designers should not be hired as one-off contractors to create and deliver a game. Instead, the focus should be on bringing game design as a skill into your team.
The truth is, you don’t need ‘a game’. What you need is the capacity to create and facilitate games. With this capacity, you can quickly and flexibly respond to opportunities and use interactivity as a core part of your activities.
Without this capacity, even owning a bespoke game that was created for you by a game design firm is not much use. You’ll struggle to facilitate it, and you’re unable to adapt or update it for new contexts.
This is not to say that you need a full-time game designer on staff. A designer can be engaged in a fractional role, or as an external consultant in an ongoing capacity. They could be brought in for a short intense onboarding period to learn your business, then engaged in a more intermittent satellite capacity.
The specifics of how the designer is contracted are not critical. What is important is that they are not simply given a brief and some research material, then sent away to develop the game. Instead, they attend regular team meetings and are integrated with other team members.
For the purposes of this strategy, regularity is more important than intensity. Engaging a game designer for one day a week or fortnight (or even one day a month) over many months is more productive than a single brief engagement.
Alternatively, you could imagine regular intense bursts spread out over a longer period. As an example, my engagement with the Earth Observatory Singapore was one full-time month per year over three years, with regular monthly meetings in between.
This approach is less about producing one memorable ‘flagship product’, and more about raising the standard across all of your organisation’s communications and engagement activities.
Implementing this approach may be challenging for organisations that are structured around ad hoc project pipelines and budgets rather than a more strategic programmatic model. But the value of having game design capacity as an ongoing part of your team makes it far more impactful and cost effective than simply producing a single game product.
Some practical tips for this principle:
Find opportunities for games to support your existing activities
One risk of commissioning a one-off game is that the resulting product doesn’t fit with your actual project or program. You may even end up diverting resources away from your core activities to organise game sessions, just to justify the resources you invested in creating it.
An ongoing collaboration with a designer allows you to reverse that dynamic. Instead of creating opportunities to play the game that you commissioned, your team can instead look for opportunities where game interventions can support your ongoing activities.
An upcoming internal training for staff members? A consultation with community stakeholders? An industry conference or summit where your team will be showcasing its work? These can all become potential opportunities for games or interactive activities to help amplify your existing project goals.
Start by trialling games at internal events with team members and strategic allies. When you are confident with the game material being shared, gradually expand outwards to external and more high-profile events. At every stage, ask yourself: ‘What are the goals of this event?’ and ensure that the game intervention is oriented toward that goal, rather than becoming the goal itself.
Use your team’s existing skills
Bringing in a whole new team member to focus purely on games feels like an extravagant expense. But it’s worth remembering that the focus is not on a new team member, but on raising the game design capacity within your team.
In every team, there are team members with preexisting game design skills. Some are enthusiastic players, some are smart systems thinkers, some are great facilitators, some are merely curious and engaged. When an external game designer is folded into the team, these team members are the first to adopt gameful practices in their own work.
You are not starting from scratch. A game designer can connect and collaborate with your team to support their existing ideas, and to learn from their expertise. The team can strengthen and deepen the game designer’s output, and the designer can help develop the existing creative ideas within the team.
The benefits accrue far beyond the creation of game products. Having someone engaged part-time from outside an organisation can catalyse innovation within it. Games for systems change demand that organisations look outward and inward - through the other side of the mirror - to recognise gaps and opportunities in how they connect with other actors in the system. This perspective is more likely when team members have ongoing contact and experience across multiple organisations.
To support this approach, identify one or two core team members at the beginning of a game collaboration who will support the game activity. Keep checking in with them as the project unfolds, and let them help guide the development of the collaboration.
Engage game designers with broad skillsets
One important corollary to this strategy is that for a game designer to be a valuable contributor to a team, they need to have a diverse skillset.
A common problem in games for systems change is that form and content is mismatched. For example: a game designer might set out to create a game illustrating how stakeholders in a river valley negotiate water use. However, the interactive mechanism of the game they create is a competitive race game that has nothing to do with sharing limited resources. The form of the game does not support the ideas.
Like any creative field, game design includes craftspeople who have a varied toolkit of games and approaches, and those who do only one or two things well.
If your game designer is an expert at designing card-based storytelling games, but they can’t create a resource management game or a five-minute icebreaker activity, they will struggle to meet your needs over a longer term.
Fortunately, these skills are becoming more widespread. Game design is increasingly taught in formal settings, and for self-taught practitioners, there are many more available resources to develop your craft.
When engaging a game designer, be sure to take a look at their portfolio. Ask about what kinds of games they make - and what they don’t make. No-one is an expert at everything, but you want to be sure that a potential collaborator has a range of styles they can confidently work in so they can match their games to your system and stakeholders.
CASE STUDY: Building Resilience in Nepal
Over 2024-25, the World Bank delivered a Multi-Donor Trust Fund project to improve disaster risk management practices in Nepal.
Nepal faces a variety of natural hazard risks, including landslides, floods, and earthquakes. These challenges are being exacerbated by climate change.
The team, led by Carina Ferreira, included construction engineers, risk communicators and policy experts. Working in eight municipalities in far-eastern and far-western Nepal, as well as the Kathmandu Valley, the team worked to support earthquake recovery following the 2023 earthquake, to train local masons and construction entrepreneurs in sustainable resilient construction techniques, to improve local government disaster risk management strategies, and to raise community awareness of best practices around disaster response.
I was engaged as game designer for this project, embedded in a team of local and international experts. My brief was to develop a series of game interventions supporting the various goals of the MDTF. Over the two years of this project, I developed activities including:
A game for local government officials about preparing for an approaching storm during a cultural festival;
A training activity for small business owners to help them promote sustainable building materials to their clients;
A game for government ministries looking at the distribution of responsibilities between institutions in the aftermath of an earthquake.
In the team, I was the designated game design expert. However, game design was by no means limited to me. I worked closely with the team’s DRM experts on all the content we produced. In addition, the project engaged an external firm, Kathmandu-based theatre company Mandala Theatre, as on-the-ground facilitators.
Working together, we developed a three-pronged approach, with responsibilities including:
Game designer - developing new game prototypes in consultation with the DRM experts and the local expertise of the theatre company;
DRM experts - providing input into game design, hosting post-game debrief sessions and facilitating the simpler games for stakeholder groups;
Local facilitators - adapting game prototypes for local dialects and contexts, co-designing games and workshop activities, and facilitating the more complex games.
Over the course of this project, these three aspects became increasingly integrated and self-reinforcing, allowing us to create more elaborate and focused games more quickly.
The end result: a string of games and interactive scenarios delivered to more than 5,000 people in remote communities across Nepal, and the development of significant new Disaster Risk Management (DRM) policies at the local and national government level.
This collaboration built new capabilities within local technical and arts communities and introduced government institutions to new DRM approaches. These are outcomes with real potential to evolve and endure beyond the project’s lifespan.
2. CREATE SMALL-SCALE GAME INTERVENTIONS FOR SPECIFIC CONTEXTS
The second key principle of this model is: rather than producing a single flagship game product, the goal is to produce multiple small-scale game interventions.
‘Interventions’ here refers to the idea that these might not be full games in the classic sense. Rather than requiring a complete set of rules, a detailed narrative or an objective to achieve, a game intervention might simply be a quick roleplay activity to help embed a key concept as part of a training session, or a participatory mapping activity to identify risk exposure in your sector.
By shifting away from a large-scale game and focusing on producing multiple smaller-scale game activities, we can:
Be more targeted in our impact
Reduce the cost of experimentation
Streamline expenses
Increase the potential for a successful game, which can then be scaled up.
Some practical tips for this principle:
Define the purpose of your game intervention
When you bring a game designer into a team over the long-term, you can be more flexible in developing a game brief. You don’t necessarily need to know how each game they create will contribute to your goals. As they develop prototypes, possibilities and opportunities emerge that you could not anticipate in advance. This is a great advantage of not being overly prescriptive at the start of a process.
But once you start introducing games to your stakeholders, it’s crucial that you are clear on what each game intervention is intended to achieve.
Games can be:
Icebreakers, bringing together a group of strangers around a fun, subject matter-relevant activity;
Scenarios, enabling decision-makers to experiment with plans and strategies for solving complex problems;
Platforms for negotiation, offering a space for people on opposing sides of an issue to interact in a low stakes setting to find common ground and work towards compromises;
Training tools, helping build participants’ skills in managing uncertainty, dealing with risk and making decisions under changing circumstances.
Each context will be different, and it is valuable to be as clear as possible on the goals and purpose of this gathering, to ensure that the game activity is as targeted as possible.
One key question to ask is, ‘What conversations do you want players to be having after this activity?’ Then the game designer can build backwards from that, shaping the game or activity that will best yield those reflections.
Design games as one-shot experiences
The vast majority of participants will play your game only once.
With commercial boardgames or video games, players expect to play the game over and over. As a consequence, the first playthrough of many games is more about learning the rules than it is about enjoying the experience. Only on the second, third or later playthroughs do the game mechanics fall into place and the players experience the richness of the game.
In the world of games for systems change, it is unwise to imagine that players will play your game over and over. If you are gathering government ministers, NGOs, businesses or community stakeholders together, it is overwhelmingly likely that they will only be available once. Your game or simulation needs to be immediately impactful for first time players.
This changes what is possible for a game. If players don’t have multiple playthroughs to master gameplay, then mechanics must be radically simpler. The richness of the narrative and design must pay off immediately rather than iteratively. Instructions for play must be stripped back to a minimum, and ideally scaffolded throughout the experience rather than frontloaded in a 20 minute opening tutorials.
The trade-off for this compromise is that the game experience can include twists and surprises that only work once. A shock or a reveal that might be underwhelming for return players can be extremely impactful. In some ways, you can think of this game as a performance with interactive elements, as much as a classic game.
This significantly shifts your priorities when working with a game designer. Ensure that your design brief matches the reality of the game as a one-shot experience and make sure that the designer understands that the impact of the game must emerge immediately, not after multiple playthroughs.
As simple as possible (but no simpler)
One of the most consistent pieces of feedback game designers receive from project managers when developing a game is, ‘It would be more realistic if you added...’
Be wary of the impulse to push your game designers for more detail and specificity in a game. There are always more rules, features and textures that you can add - but additional details do not always make a game more impactful.
A good game, particularly a game for systems change, is not intended to be an entirely accurate simulacrum of a real world system. Instead, a game is a model of a system, simplified in ways that make it useful.
A classic rule in scientific modelling is that a model should be ‘as simple as possible, but no simpler’. If you need directions to get to the nearest grocery store, you don’t need a high-resolution satellite image - a map drawn on the back of a napkin is far more useful.
Similarly, a game should be as simple as it’s possible to be, while illustrating the systems principle you’re exploring and/or producing the kind of interactions you want. Extra detail can be nice, but detail is resource intensive to produce, and it often distracts from the point of the game.
Games that try too hard to be realistic - usually by producing reams of detail and texture - often end up obscuring the point of the gameplay. The game may feel ‘true to life’, but this feeling of realism may be deceptive, tricking players into thinking they’re getting an accurate view of the system when they’re not.
A better approach is to encourage your game designer to strip back, simplify, and make the core ideas of the game as clear as possible. By letting go of the expectation that the game will be ‘accurate’, we can instead make room for the players to discuss and debate how it compares to the real world system.
Use a minimalist aesthetic
Designing custom props or building bespoke digital interfaces is time consuming and resource intensive. An elegant aesthetic requires a long timeline for design and fabrication. This limits how flexible a game designer can be in experimenting with different game formats - not to mention the impact of the game on your budget.
Some of the most impactful game experiences don’t require anything in the way of fancy props or graphics. A thoughtfully designed game can be powerful with a few simple pieces or basic visuals.
On the other hand, the experience needs to feel professional and considered. Engaging with something that feels like a pen and paper prototype can undermine your stakeholders’ experience and the ultimate value of the game.
A happy medium is to pair your game designer with a graphic / props designer to create some basic assets that can be used for multiple game activities. A custom slideshow, some simple graphics, a basic kit of gameboards and pieces - these can be used over and over again in different game interventions.
For the World Bank project in Romania, I worked with artists Sacha Bryning and Deborah Ward to devise a series of storyboard images illustrating seismic risk in Romania. Different images from this series could be quickly repurposed for new games as we kept iterating throughout the project.
An important exception: sometimes an ambitious visual aesthetic is itself part of the goal of the game. For The Future for Beginners, a collaboration with Chatham House’s Sustainability Accelerator and the London Design Biennale, designers Melanie Frances, Becky-Dee Trevenen and I were tasked with creating a game that also existed as an art installation. The game was used to help communicate climate policy challenges at the city level, but also as a work of art exhibited as part of the 2023 Design Biennale.
In cases where a game will be featured as a showcase activity, to help promote the work of a team or project in a public setting such as a conference or summit, good aesthetic design is core to the game’s success and should be prioritised.
In these instances, it is important to properly resource the design components of the game and potentially bring in external graphic or materials designers.
Encourage quick games and longer reflections
A game can be a vital and powerful prompt for action and reflection, but it’s important to remember that reflection rarely happens during the game itself. The real learning usually takes place in the post-game debrief, where players reflect on their actions and connect their experiences with the real world.
The debrief is the space to bring in subject matter experts who can talk about how the game corresponds to or differs from conditions in the real world. It’s in this reflective space that participants form connections, negotiate compromises and unlock solutions.
As a rule of thumb, the debrief should be roughly as long as the game itself. If the game is 45 minutes, the debrief should be 45 minutes too. If the game runs two hours, a separate two hour debrief / discussion block should be scheduled alongside it.
One effective method is for the game designer to facilitate the game activity, and then to hand over to other members of your team, or external experts, to host the debrief. You may even include your team as participants in the game, to be best placed to reflect on the experience with the other players.
CASE STUDY: A Week in the Bush
In 2021, Australian game design collective Boho Interactive was approached by the Lowitja Institute to create a suite of new games.
The Lowitja Institute funds Indigenous health research. The Institute commissioned Boho to create a series of games to help train non-Indigenous researchers working in Indigenous health research.
Led by Nathan Harrison, Boho began by producing two games: a resource management activity about balancing research budgets and a game about assessing research proposals.
These were useful for researchers navigating the early stages of developing projects, but less helpful for working on the ground in Indigenous communities.
Based on this feedback, we set out to develop a game that explored the challenges of cultural consultation in setting up field research activities. New in Town was an investigative game in which players undertook a fact-finding mission to a remote community where a previous research project had failed. By speaking with different stakeholders in town, players set out to make sense of the connections within the community and uncover why the research project had failed.
This game was extremely effective at introducing these concepts to new audiences, and became a valuable first entry point for people encountering this system.
At this point, our Lowitja collaborators requested a game for young researchers that was flexible in duration, that could be run in sessions as quick as 15 minutes or as lengthy as 75. We created Research Journey, a storytelling game where players collectively narrate an imagined research journey based on prompt cards.
Finally, Lowitja identified an opportunity to adapt this game approach for a different context. An opportunity emerged for a game at a symposium for Indigenous health NGO staff in far north Queensland. Instead of a game for non-Indigenous researchers about engaging with Indigenous communities, could we make a game for Indigenous communities about engaging with researchers?
This time, working with James Cook University’s Indigenous Education and Research Centre, Nathan Harrison developed a game for Indigenous communities considering whether to work with researchers.
The result was Grow Your Own, launched in late 2021 on Waibene (Thursday Island) in Queensland, facilitated by Torres Strait Islanders for members of the Kaurareg community.
At each stage, we built on and adapted the games we’d developed so far, responding to new opportunities and contexts, and with a greater impact each time.
3. WORK ITERATIVELY OVER A LONG-TERM PROCESS
The best game projects are cumulative. A game designer is folded into the project or organisation, integrated with the rest of the team. Focusing on small-scale interventions rather than a single big product, you are able to trial different games with your stakeholders, learn from feedback and build on successes.
Within the team, this leads to a greater understanding of and comfort with games and interactive scenarios as a tool for engagement. Externally, your stakeholders become more engaged with the project through your use of innovative communications tools.
Over time, your process for creating games becomes more streamlined. You can respond to new opportunities quickly by adapting and modifying existing games for new contexts. Each new game gets closer to the heart of the core dynamics of the system you’re working within.
At this point, you can now think about scaling up your game collaboration to deliver greater impact towards your mission.
This principle is about building momentum over the long term, getting the most from your games, and leveraging successes over the lifespan of your project.
Some practical tips for this principle:
Commit real resources to convening game participants
Many organisations assume, implicitly or otherwise, that the game they have commissioned will have an ongoing life. That it spread by word of mouth, and be played into the future with no further effort required on the team’s part.
Even moderately successful commercial games invest a huge amount of time and money into finding their audiences. Boardgame companies will build up a preexisting community around a game on Kickstarter, then launch the game by touring to international boardgame conventions. It can take years of promotion before a game hits a critical threshold and takes off in its own right.
Games for systems change don’t need and wouldn’t benefit from this kind of promotion. In realistic terms, a game about Disaster Risk Management or sustainable finance will never take off and become a self-sustaining commercial product - and that’s okay. Instead, we will always need to curate the groups of participants who play these games.
Treat convening participants for game sessions as its own project, separate to the creation of the game. Think about who should be in the room, and what kinds of settings and contexts make most sense for them. Invite people well ahead of time, and send regular follow-ups to ensure that you don’t have unexpected drop outs.
By treating this part of the process as a creative challenge in itself, we ensure the best outcome for our games and stakeholders.
Combine modular games into larger experiences
Creating a single large-scale game about your system is an expensive risk, one that fails more often than not. However, there is a more reliable pathway to creating a large-scale game: combining modular games.
Over an extended collaboration, your game designer might develop a number of short games, each focusing on a different aspect of your system. One game might look at the history of the system, another at the competing needs of local stakeholders, another at the tipping points the system faces. When you have a series of these small games, you can invite your game designer to explore combining them into a single game.
This large-scale game might be played in chapters, each chapter containing a separate small game. Or these game modules might be woven together with an overarching game that connects them in a single narrative or meta-structure. The specifics of this larger game will depend on the setting and the participants you plan to convene around it.
But assembling smaller units which have each been proven to work is far more likely to yield a successful large-scale game than launching straight into an epic project from scratch.
Build a community around your games
The approach of creating small games iteratively over a larger period creates the opportunity to curate a community around the process of game development.
Over 2015-17, Boho worked in Sweden with the NGO Miljoverkstan and the Stockholm Resilience Centre on a series of games about the Flaten nature reserve. To begin with, we undertook a process of research and systems mapping, meeting with key stakeholders from the nature reserve: foresters, scientists, school students, neighbouring community members, local government officials and urban planners.
Next we developed a series of small games and tested them with each of these groups, eliciting feedback and adapting the games as we went. Now our expert consultants became supporters of the work, vouching for the process and bringing the games into their spaces.
Finally, the game became part of a major planning conversation at the city government level, bringing together stakeholders from around Stockholm for a conversation about the future of the nature reserve.
You can work the same way, developing games over a series of public iterations, taking individuals who are initially unsure of the value of your organisation or project, and gradually turning them into advocates and ambassadors. In this way, a game project can be the centre of gravity for an emerging community of stakeholders.
CASE STUDY: Get The Kids And Run
Over 2016-19, game design collective Boho Interactive was commissioned by the Earth Observatory Singapore at Nanyang Technological University, to produce a series of new games exploring natural hazards including volcanic unrest and approaching typhoon.
This collaboration unfolded over an extended duration: regular meetings and engagement with the EOS team over three years, punctuated by three intensive phases: one month full-time each in 2016, 2017 and 2018.
Over this period, Boho investigated and researched the subject of natural hazard risk from multiple angles, building up a systems map of the decision-making landscape in the lead up to a typhoon or volcano shock.
Over the course of the project, Boho produced seven games, each targeting a different aspect of the disaster risk system, tailored for a different audience: local government, community leaders, the Singapore military, secondary school students and NGOs.
As the game prototypes met audiences, EOS undertook a partnership with the Singapore Science Centre to act as a host for the games. SSC science communicators were trained as local facilitators for the games, and provided their own expertise in adapting the material for the local context.
At the culmination of the project, we combined four of the games into a single large-scale experience. Entitled Get The Kids And Run, the game explores a typhoon crisis from the first warnings to evacuation, illustrating the challenges facing different stakeholders in the system, from the scientists and specialists to government, emergency services and households on the ground.
This diverse selection of games has now been experienced by thousands of players cross south-east Asia, Europe and the USA.
CONCLUSION
Games are a powerful tool for bringing people together, making sense of complex challenges and exploring solutions. Designing effective games for systems change is a rich creative challenge. But no less rich or creative is the challenge of designing the right context for a game project.
There is a growing field of expertise in game design, and an emerging generation of game designers with the skills to make a meaningful impact to our organisations and projects. But we are still in the early phases of understanding how best to engage with game designers to make the most of a game collaboration.
With these simple tools, I believe we can embed games far more successfully in our work, engage stakeholders more meaningfully, and yield far greater impact in the real world. The potential for games and interactive scenarios to support our missions and goals is only just beginning to come into view. By strengthening the frameworks around games, we open up new realms of possibilities for what these tools might achieve.
Post-script
If you’ve enjoyed this Field Guide, you can read more of my work here:
New Rules for Modelling - A guide to designing games as models of complex systems
New Rules for Game Design - A primer on using game design techniques to address subjects such as sustainable finance, climate engineering, data and AI, cross-cultural collaboration and more.
New Rules for Storytelling - Subscribe to my newsletter on the art and craft of storytelling in the climate era.
You can read more about me on my website, and see a selection of games that I’ve created here.
If you have a project that you’re working on in this space and would like to connect, please feel free to reach out. You can find me here.
