From Game Systems to Governance Systems
Resilience Begins with Making Space
- 6 min read
More knowledge brings fewer paths; better to keep hollow, stay open. Laozi’s Dao De Jing as translated by Ken Liu
Game Over
27 February 2024, London, UK.
It was a late winter afternoon, not long after lunch. I decided to work from the office that day. It was my ninth year as a game developer, and my second year working in London. About thirty of us were in the office; the other hundred or so were scattered across the UK, Europe, and North America. I was halfway through creating a meeting invite for a follow-up discussion on a game mechanic that I was working on with another designer when someone audibly gasped, told us to check our email, and then broke down crying.
We all scrambled to do so. Curious as to what made our colleague react that way, but also acutely aware of what we might find. The room quickly fell silent. The studio was slated for closure as part of a company-wide restructuring. All of us would be retrenched.
Some of us reacted more strongly than others. Ugly crying that was quickly comforted by friends. Awkward, pained smiles reflecting the uncertain situation that we were suddenly thrust into. Confused eyes darting around as if looking for someone who can give them guidance and answers.
Photo by James Hammond on Unsplash
The Black Elephant in the Room
None of us were truly surprised. The industry had been in freefall since 2022, with a 14x increase in layoffs from the previous year, and the numbers had been climbing every year. There was not a week that passed where I don’t see layoff and studio shutdown announcements on LinkedIn. Rather, there was a general sentiment of, “it won’t happen to us”. which is an inherently human way to think about these things. Whether it was optimism, denial, or simply inertia, it doesn’t really matter. We made the choice, by action or inaction, to stay and that led us to that situation, even though it might have taken some of us by surprise in the moment.
Looking back, that was an example of what Futurists call a Black Elephant: an event that is likely to happen but is usually dismissed or ignored.
Black Elephant (Known Known): Major, predictable event that is widely known but ignored
Seeing it unfold firsthand instead of in an academic context or a news article changes how you understand the concept. It’s one thing to analyze systemic risk. It’s another to live in it.
The Case Against Reductionist Thinking
Because of UK labor laws, we had around 6 months of consultation ahead of us - essentially paid limbo. This gave us plenty of time to discuss, ruminate, and commiserate over what happened.
As expected, everyone tried to identify the root cause. Some pinned the blame on corporate greed, others on specific individuals or decisions, another group pointed out the increasingly prohibitive cost of making a game. Everyone has their own take and we can’t quite agree on what the root cause is.
This was when I realized the inherent limitation of reductionist thinking. Real systems rarely collapse for a single reason. They unravel under a convergence of pressures interacting in ways that cannot be captured by linear cause-and-effect.
Game design taught me this long before I had language for it. A game is a complex system: mechanics, rules, feedback loops, and player behavior interact to create experiences. You don’t get meaningful insights by isolating a single element; you understand the whole by studying how parts interact.
The same applies to real life, albeit with exponentially more variables.
From the Bread and Butter of Game Design to the Kaya Toast and Butter of Civil Service
I’ve always wanted to explore beyond game development and I felt that the redundancy was the perfect opportunity to scan new horizons. So began a journey into exploring wide-ranging fields and topics that interested me. Tech, F&B, education, business, non-profits, economics - I experienced some firsthand and read widely on the rest.
Through this, I discovered parallels between the bread and butter of Game Design with Systems Design and Complexity. I saw concepts, ways of thinking, and norms that were transferable and relevant beyond the obvious.
We talk about playtesting, player behavior, and ruleset in games, which I find useful in helping me to quickly grasp concepts like sandboxes, actors, and regulation in civil service. Some parallels break, of course. It would be foolish to assume otherwise. For instance, games are centrally controlled while reality is decentralized. Players play voluntarily while citizens do not. Games can choose to cater to a niche while policies must support the entire society. These differences matter, and recognizing them is more important than celebrating the similarities.
That is why I opened with the Laozi quote. The more knowledge we accumulate, the more we risk locking ourselves into narrow interpretations, assumptions, and frameworks. To navigate unfamiliar systems, it is better to stay open: hollow enough to absorb new information, humble enough to let go of previous conclusions.
Steve Jobs’ “Stay hungry, stay foolish” echoes this idea through a different cultural lens. Both point to the same discipline: being comfortable with unlearning what you think you know.
Photo by petr sidorov on Unsplash
The Future Exists, But Not As A Primary Design Object
When I first encountered futures thinking, I assumed it was about predicting the future, like the Oracle at Delphi, or Ba Zi masters, or the Bene Gesserit in Dune. Many people still think this. But in practice, futures work is far more grounded.
The goal is not to forecast exact outcomes.
The goal is to make the future less of a surprise.
That requires tools, mindsets, and disciplines that help you identify signals, stress-test assumptions, diversify lenses of analysis, and explore multiple plausible scenarios. Instead of hunting for the “right” prediction, you focus on building resilience and adaptability.
In that sense, the layoff became my first real apprenticeship in futures thinking before I knew what to call it. It would have been impossible to predict with certainty that this is what I’d be doing today, but the choices and explorations that I did made it less of a surprise. And that, I’ve learned, is often the most practical form of foresight we can cultivate.