The games we play (wk 30/2025)
Games of uncertainty (not risk); art thinking and generative uncertainty; veal parts; accidents of the knee and of wine; patterns in fashion, AI consultants, editable drawings, AI4HR; coffee time.
Hello friends,
This past week, I went to humid, rainy Paris to join an instance of a workshop developed by Sylvain Bureau and Pierre Tectin at ESCP to bring participants through a process that reliably generates the improbable. (Doing something improbable, out-of-distribution, not-known-in-advance is crucial wherever new things need to be made because old things longer work. But most businesses, public sector organisations, and schools aren’t good at helping people learn to do out of distribution things.) There’s a clear connection with my interest in art as a meaning-making practice and a locus for research and development, but also with my ongoing investigation of how to create productive, generative forms of uncertainty.
Then I had some very good veal liver and sweetbreads at Quedubon, took the train back to the south, banged up my knee after being splashed off a slippery rock by a freak wave, checked out some of the crop of new restaurant openings in Marseille (promising!), then got on a flight to Singapore (accidentally leaving behind a case of wine ☹️).
Writing
While on the long, long flight home, a flurry of WhatsApp messages resulted in an opportunistic meeting today with two game designers (Mel Frances and Nathan Harrison) about building games that allow people to experience types of not-knowing that aren’t risky. This week, I wrote up the reasoning behind trying to build games of uncertainty which aren’t risky. In essence:
Most games operationalise risk, not uncertainty … but most important decision-making is about uncertainty, not just risk. If games are a useful, low-threat tool for learning how to make better decisions in the face of unknowns, then we need to get better at building games for all the different types of unknowns we face IRL, not just risk.
(I hope to have some game mechanisms to put into a small play room at MOD. when I get back there in 3 weeks.)
👉 Read more here about games of uncertainty.Elsewhere
Exactitudes: “Exactitudes [is] a project that … is a striking visual record of more than three thousand neatly differentiated social types the artists have documented over the last twenty years. Started in 1994 in the streets of Rotterdam, this overarching and on-going project portrays individuals that share a set of defining visual characteristics that identifies them with specific social types. Be it Gabbers, Glamboths, Mohawks, Rockers or The Girls from Ipanema, [the artists’] extremely acute eye allows them to discern specific dress codes, behaviours or attitudes that belong and characterise particular urban tribes or sub-cultures … Exactitudes is an inquiry on how the self is constructed in such a highly volatile and complex social environment like ours in which a great number of opposing forces are continuously at play.”
OpenAI joins the consulting goldrush: “The services push [by OpenAI] reveals that AI often requires significant human contribution, built on the extraction of energy, water, and human creativity, as well as underpaid data labelers and model trainers. It also relies on large defense contracts to generate a business model, the kind that people actually pay for, rather than freemium, subsidized consumer chatbots. Most tellingly, it reveals who we are and what we believe is worthy of value.” If you find this thesis sensible, please consider also reading what I wrote previously about why (and what type of) human contribution is essential for AI today.
Making images editable: “Transform your images into editable Draw.io diagrams using AI.” (The magnificently informative URL is imagetodrawio.com 💖)
Human reasoning in a time of AI: “FLF’s incubator fellowship on AI for human reasoning will help talented researchers and builders start working on AI tools for coordination and epistemics.” I’m a fellow, working on building an AI tool for helping students learn meaning-making.
See you next week,
VT
An idea since your article gave me an idea on how to improve a board game I like: El Dorado.
It is a racing game where you basically set up the map from the beginning. The map is made of multiple sections which can be shuffled to change the difficulty. First one to reach El Dorado (always the end of the map), wins.
It may get boring after some time since you know the whole map and you can just plan ahead. However, what if we insert some of these "uncertainty rules". For example, the map is created as a player reaches the end of a section through voting or a dice. Maybe the players could even create a new section or a new movement types. A combination with 1000 white cards.
It will be interesting to notice how the logic and skills of the game changes by just adding one of these uncertainty rules.