For the past two months, alongside various bits of consulting and blog writing, I’ve been working on a new project. It’s a simulation game to go with my book Confluence.
You can play the game HERE.
What it is
The new game is called 1.2.many. Its goal is to help people experience and explore the intermingling and interaction of intentional plans and emergent patterns in a simulated environment. In the game, you are an interactor who needs to find and exploit resources to maintain your existence, just like everyone else. But unlike everyone else, you have aspirations of organization, so you seek out ways to observe and influence the emergent patterns of which you yourself are a part.
Where it came from
When I finished writing Confluence in 2021, I wanted to write a companion simulation that would help the book’s readers understand the concepts described in the book. I didn’t have time for it then, but lately I have been mostly waiting for people to sign up for my online courses, so I thought I’d seize the opportunity.
I have played with a variety of complex-pattern simulators over the years. They all place the player in the position of a god-like overseer who gets to decide what will happen. That’s not a problem if you just want to demonstrate what emergent patterns look like. In fact, I think oversight simulators can be valuable when people are just beginning to learn about complexity. But I also think a god game can’t help you learn how to deal with complexity in the real world. Nobody has that much global control. We are all in the thick of things.
So I wanted to see if I could build a game that would help people practice noticing and influencing emergent patterns from the ground, not from the sky.
In my spare time I like to play simulation games. I especially like colony simulators. These are games in which you help groups of people build homes, families, and communities in challenging environments (like a medieval forest, the edge of a cliff, a post-apocalyptic earth, or an alien planet). Every colony simulator I’ve ever played has had a hub-and-spoke structure to it. The non-player characters interact with the player, but they rarely interact with each other. Even when NPCs do interact, the interaction usually has a trivial impact on the simulation.
So I have been wanting to write a colony simulator in which, instead of being the mayor of the town (who gets to make every decision), the player is a traveling peddler (with goods and gossip to trade) who seeks to gain a small measure of influence in a world of people who don’t need their help. I don’t know if I’ll ever find the time to write a real game like that, but this prototype is a step in that direction.
This game is also related to (and loosely based on) a simulation I wrote in 1989 to explore complexity in social behavior.
Go ahead and try the game! I’m looking for feedback on it. The instructions are on the web page.
I have some ideas for other simulation games, so we’ll see how much interest there is in this one and how much time I have to branch out from this in the future. I’d still like to write another book, but that’s a long project, and I can’t afford to start any long projects right now. This one was bite-sized.