Whether we're building public services through user-centered design or trying to evaluate and learn from how a public service is being run, services rarely happen the way that we plan them. It doesn't matter what we put in our journey maps, project plans, or service blueprints—people adapt, work around gaps, and make sense of complexity in ways we can't anticipate. That’s why alongside designing how a service should work, we also need a way to understand how it does work.

Borrowing some terms from linguistics, we could think of most regular service design as prescriptive service design. It defines how things should be done — the intended journey, rules, and standards that guide delivery. Descriptive service design, on the other hand, is about how people actually behave in practice. Descriptive service design pays attention to what frontline teams actually do, what users actually experience, and how systems behave under real-world conditions. It complements prescriptive service design by grounding it in evidence from lived experience and helps us to understand real opportunities for redesign.

Why it matters

• Service designs are always prototypes until they hit live service. They might be informed by regulatory requirements, business constraints, and user research into what an ideal experience might look like, sure. But until operational staff pick that service up and start making it happen, it doesn't exist. Prescriptive service designs are nothing more than a wishlist. If staff can't get the thing done how you've designed it, they're going to find their own workarounds, shortcuts, and write their own guidance.
• Complex systems can't be predicted. When services start to get actually delivered, they immediately break down because no matter how well we plan, we can't predict every scenario. There's a person without a passport who needs to use your identity service, or a caseworker who everyone else goes to because "they just know everything". Even our best cycles of user-centered design should break down a little upon moving into operational delivery.
• ... and that's a good thing! The whole point of working in an iterative, test and learn environment is that we need to get our assumptions confirmed or disproved, we need to find the rough edges of things, and we need to do that as quickly as possible. Whilst user research can be a way of de-risking our services, the point of gathering insight is to be able to understand enough to make a change.

How do we do it?

Learning stewardship provides a lightweight way to gather descriptive insight, whilst building meaningful cross-organisation relationships. Frontline staff—from call centre advisers and case workers, to youth workers and housing officers—can act as “learning stewards,” noticing what’s happening in real time and sharing reflections in short, weekly or monthly facilitated sessions. They surface:

• what staff have been delivering,
• how they feel about what they've been delivering,
• what's working well and what isn't,
• whether they've noticed anything new or surprising,
• what end users are saying about the service.

Whilst learning stewardship activity can be run by anyone, we'd recommend service designers are at the forefront, ideally facilitating the sessions. User research being a team sport also means that user researchers shouldn't be the only people generating insight in a user-centered design team. Where user research tends to be based around the delivery of discrete projects with defined research questions, learning stewardship creates a space for bottom-up continuous insight.

This gives service designers fast and frequent sources of descriptive evidence of how a service is actually being delivered, enabling co-ordination with wider digital teams around potential changes. It strengthens prescriptive designs and highlights where services need redesign.

Look, we've all been there. The session went really badly. Or it was really difficult. Either something happened for you, someone said something that was really hard to hear, or you're just working in a space of high trauma or grief. You need to take a few minutes and talk about what just happened.

But the next call starts 2 minutes ago. And sure, people might understand, but—it's fine, you can take a break later. Another meeting. You haven't even got up from your desk since that difficult session.

I get it. I've done it myself. I always regret it. What you don't make space for now comes back to you as tension, discomfort, and secondary trauma. You really need to make space to have a good, emotionally centred debrief when you run a difficult or emotionally challenging session.

A good debrief not only helps you to remember important pieces of information, but also ensures that you're actually able to process the session. Debriefing well is an important part of having an accessible and inclusive practice grounded in an understanding of trauma.

This is a debrief method we've built to help us come back to our bodies and our feelings after a difficult session, and make sure you're able to get on with your day without thinking about the session that evening when you're sat on the sofa mindlessly watching Taskmaster.

How it works

You can do this with as little as 15 minutes, or as long as you need. In most cases, 15–30 minutes will do it.

This isn't a way to avoid getting proper professional help if you need it. This is a debrief process, helping you to feel grounded and centred again and minimising your risk of secondary trauma. This also isn't a critical incident process. If something dangerous or catastrophic happens, follow your safeguarding processes and ensure you take the time to process with professionals.

You can use the acronym BREAK to remember what's needed in the debrief:

• Boundaries
• Reactions
• Embodiment
• Aftermath
• Knowledge

Boundaries

Create boundaries around the session. Describe what you are and aren't going to talk about, and be clear about how long everyone has for the debrief.

Create a sense of calm in a way that feels right. That might involve everyone taking some deep breaths together, going for a walk whilst you debrief, or getting a hot drink together.

Reactions

Talk through your initial reactions. This is the stuff that's on the top of your mind, or might be a way you're feeling in your body. It could involve something people said, something that happened, or something that's sticking with you.

Afterwards, you might want to discuss some of what you found difficult in the session.

Embodiment

Grounding in your bodily sensations is the single most important thing to do after a difficult sensation.

Have everyone check how they're feeling in their body. Is there any tension lingering? Any surprising sensations you're not used to?

Secondary trauma can show up in any number of sensations. You might feel tight, short of breath, restless, bored, or uncomfortable. Don't judge or try to change the sensation, just notice it and mention it to each other.

If the sensation is lingering in a way that makes you uncomfortable, you could try clenching all of your muscles very tightly, holding for a count of 10, then unclenching them. Repeat as needed. It's not foolproof, but it's a way of trying to help our body close out our stress cycle.

Other ways you can close your stress cycle include:

• Physical activity,
• Breathing,
• Laughter,
• Creativity

Aftermath

After grounding in your body, ask each other whether there are any images sticking with you in the aftermath of the session. "Stuck" images can be a useful early warning sign of secondary trauma.

These images might be things you've seen, something someone has said, or something you thought of because of something someone said.

Talking about the images can be enough to help them get unstuck, but if you find them staying with you after the debrief, you can:

• Get a piece of paper and a pen,
• Hold the image in your mind, and start drawing a tight spiral outwards.
• Make the lines as close as possible without touching.

Do this for five minutes, and you might find yourself able to let go of the image.

Knowledge

Many debriefs start with knowledge. Attending to the body before discussing the knowledge is important for a meaningful and emotionally grounded debrief.

What is the important information that you're taking away from the session? Ask each other what you feel the most important things you learned in that session were. What do you know now, that you didn't before? What is it important that you pay attention to?

If you make use of our debrief process, we'd love to hear about it. BREAK has helped us to find ourselves again in the midst of some really difficult, aggressive, or grief-filled sessions. We hope that it helps you, too. Feel free to use or adapt it as you see fit.

If you'd like to know more about Critical Incident Debriefing, which informed this method, then you can find out more here. Critical Incident Debriefing is normally used for crisis events and requires more experienced practitioners to support it. We developed BREAK because we think everyone deserves access to good tools to support them in working safely.

If you’ve been following our work on using games for research, engagement, and impact, you will know that we love making games and games-inspired tools. Whether you’re communicating the findings of a research project, helping people to understand the experiences that underpin your work, or trying to explore the wild west of user research ethics, games have something to offer.

But of course we think that. We make games all the time. We play a lot of games and talk to each other about games and have serious conversations that say silly things to each other like “this is really similar to that one bit of scenario 23 in Betrayal at House on the Hill”. When games-y people like us start talking about games, you might just start thinking “well that’s nice for them, but how can I do anything with games”?

In this post, we’re going to talk you through how you might get started by hacking an already existing game—whilst talking about how we did that on a recent project.

What is game hacking?

“Game hacking [is] a critical–creative research practice that interrogates and transforms existing games to reveal the ideologies embedded in their systems and mechanics.“ (Germaine & Wake, 2025)

In our practice game hacking is the act of taking a game, and manipulating or redesigning it to explore the unarticulated worldview contained within the games’ systems and mechanics. Game hacking helps us understand the politics and practices embedded in games we play, allowing us to think about how they might be used as a design material for other games.

This might be to express a similar kind of politics or worldview, or to critique the original view. When we make games, we often start by hacking an existing game which we feel has a resonant politics. By borrowing pieces and ideas from other games, we can quickly get further along in the design process whilst remaining conscious of the underlying purpose and ideas communicated through the game. This can look like taking game mechanics from games that are ideologically aligned with the brief and adapting them to help kick-start thinking about how these mechanics might work (and how they might not) in new contexts.

Finding the right game to hack

We worked with Dr Temidayo Eseonu to design a game called Belonging, a role-playing game for teachers and other educators that helps them identify ways to shift their pedagogy and school practices and processes to create cultures of deeper belonging for more students and staff. If you’d like to hear more about the project itself, you can read it here.

From the proposal we had developed with Dayo, we were drawn to role-playing games that have rich, clear prompts, and structures for creating short role playing scenes. Our starting points were Fiasco and For the Queen.

Fiasco is a card and dice-based role-playing game, where players create characters with complicated relationships who want something, and then play through scenes with these characters to dramatise these wants. Each scene is set up by one player and resolved by another, building towards a positive or negative outcome. Halfway through, there’s a tilt, which complicates the narrative. The unarticulated worldview in Fiasco might depend on the particular scenario you’re playing, but the game itself prompts collaboration, shared agency, and an understanding that we can’t control the outcomes of what we do in the world.

For the Queen is an entirely card-based game. Each card is a question, and there is a final card buried in the back half of the deck. Players work out their character as they play by answering questions, and a narrative begins to shape up. It’s a zero barrier to entry game and promotes an emergent sense of discovery throughout. Whilst it might appear that the For the Queen’s politics is about monarchy, in practice it tends to be more about exploring our relationships to absolute power, and how we might align or distance ourselves from it.

How we hacked them

We liked the way character creation in Fiasco worked—built around a relationship and a need, object, or location. We thought this kind of character creation would work really well for teachers who might not be used to roleplaying, and give them some clear elements to cling on to. We decided to focus only on relationships and needs, because we felt they were the most important elements for the experience we were trying to craft. We created some relationships and needs that evoked dynamics Dayo had seen in her research, such as:

• [Need] To reach the next level of your career
• [Need] To change something
• [Need] To keep doing what you’re doing
• [Relationship] One of you got the job the other wanted
• [Relationship] You both have a shared belief or faith

By having broad yet still specific cards, we created prompts that anyone would be able to work with. Lots of games like this work with the principle of apophenia or forced association—we will be able to find something from our own experiences that we think can we can explore inside of this specificity.

We didn’t think the freeform scenes of Fiasco would work for our context, because the excitement of a game that might be played on a training day is a bit lower than the heists and cinematic capers of a normal game of Fiasco. Instead, we decided to draw on the scene prompts of For the Queen. Doing this meant that we could introduce some of the belonging-specific context and experiences that Dayo had learned about from the research she did with racially minoritised young people.

After playtesting, we also introduced “potential endings” to the scenes. These gave players a clear sense of a potential direction the scene might go in, and acted as an effective cue to end the scene. Yet they didn’t prescribe how scene had to go, giving players a space to maximise their agency and autonomy, try out new experiences, and explore different potentials. In playtesting, we saw players being bolder than they might normally be, trying out new strategies, and challenging the behaviour of other characters.

Finally, we designed an activity to add to the end of the game to more firmly embed the insights from play into practice. We used our facilitation experience to design an end-of-game discussion that gave space for members of staff with more privilege to speak up about things that have felt uncomfortable about them, and continued to use game mechanics in this discussion to prevent the discomfort of staff members who might be unwilling to change controlling the flow of discussion.

Designing for frame shifting

By supporting players of the game to create interesting characters that have needs that reflect the kinds of people that might actually exist in an educational environment—and then having them play through realistic scenes—we created a space of play that overlapped with people’s everyday work environments.

This helped us to develop our idea of frame shifting, which is playing with the space of the game and the social frame the game is played in. You can read more about how we design for frame shifting here. 

If we deliberately design games to overlap social frames we can play experiences matter in people’s everyday lives, not just within the game. The making and playing of games creates an alternative temporary space for players to try new things, pick up what resonates with them, and bring those back to their everyday lives and work.

If you’re interested in hacking a game for research or just for fun, get in touch or read about how we use games for research, engagement, and impact.

Dr Temidayo Eseonu, a researcher at Lancaster University

The brief

We had been working with Dr Temidayo Eseonu on another project facilitating a collective working around knowledge justice, and had spoken about how we were using games in our work. She was interested in how that might work in her research context—working with racially minoritised young people to explore their experiences of racial injustice and how to create deeper cultures of belonging in education.

Whilst we initially scoped a project around using games to communicate key themes of the research to public policy stakeholders, Dayo became more interested in the experience creation side of our practice. Her research had identified that the biggest impact on racially minoritised young people’s felt sense of belonging was the racist underpinnings of the education system’s practices, narratives, and rules. Whilst a game that communicates knowledge to public policy stakeholders might have been useful, Dayo was more interested in how the game might transform the pedagogy and practices of teachers to support them to be more bold in challenging their own practices, and their schools’ practices, narratives, and rules.

What we did

• Identified the key themes and insights from Dayo’s research
• Explored some initial game concepts and mapped out potentially relevant mechanics
• Found a clear narrative hook for the game and selected appropriate game mechanics
• Playtested with three teachers based in the North East of England
• Redesigned the game around playtest insights
• Designed the visuals of the cards and the gamebook
• Wrote the games’ rules and typeset them

What we learned

• The value of game hacking as a way into game design. Our knowledge of games like Fiasco, For the Queen, and Dialect helped us to think quickly about how different types of game could shape different experiences, and helped us to communicate these concepts clearly.
• How to bring a client on a game design journey. It’s a really unusual and different way of working for most people, so we need to be careful about how we communicate game mechanics—and ideally just need to play some games together to help give a sense of what it might be like.
• We much, much, much prefer in-person game design and playtesting. We can pick up things and move them around and have a really enjoyable time together. For people that haven’t played many games, it’s much easier to communicate what something means or might feel like. It also means we can eat delicious food together and really connect whilst we work.
• The importance of playtesting! Our early assumptions about what might work for the game were thrown out of the window as soon as we started our playtest with the intended players of the game. We found more useful ideas, more playful circumstances, and some of our assumptions were proved wrong when people loved roleplaying, even when they weren’t typical roleplayers!

What we made

• Belonging, a role-playing game for teachers and other educators that helps them identify ways to shift their pedagogy and school practices and processes to create cultures of deeper belonging for more students and staff

Building cultures of belonging and anti-racism in schools and other educational settings is essential—but getting started can feel challenging, uncertain, or even risky.

Belonging is a role-playing game for teachers and other educators that helps you identify ways to shift your pedagogy and school practices and processes to create cultures of deeper belonging for more students and staff.

No prior experience of role-playing games necessary.

Play online or print at home

The pdfs are print at home versions of the game. Use the “Print and play” files and a copy of the Instructions.

The “Print specification” document should tell you everything you need to know to get these profesionally printed.

Credit

Belonging was developed by Dr Temidayo Eseonu, Kieran Cutting, and Oliver Bates.

Contact

If you’re looking for someone to facilitate this game at your school, or are interested in research collaboration, contact Dr Temidayo Eseonu: t.eseonu@lancaster.ac.uk

Interested in designing a game like this about your research, for engagement, impact, or even data collection? Get in touch with fractals co-op: hello@fractals.coop

As a non-profit private company that operates as a co-op, our business profile intrigues people. When we share that we have a flat structure and all get paid the same, that really intrigues people.

We get asked a lot about how we make decisions, especially how we decided on how we pay ourselves, so we made a zine about it! In the zine you'll find details about our decision-making process, the principles underlying our governance, a small case study, and the template we use.

Download it below, print it, fold it and share it around. We hope it inspires you!

‘Yee haw! The wild west of user research ethics’ is a workshop game and discussion tool designed to help people imagine what user research ethics could look like in the future. Yee haw! is useful for people who want to discuss, imagine, and create ethical user research practices in public sector organisations. Originally designed for SDinGov 2024, Yee haw! can easily be adapted for different contexts and can be played with researchers and non-researchers alike. 

The game is called ‘Yee haw! The wild west of user research ethics’, not because user researchers are wildly unethical but because user research does not have an agreed framework or consistent approach for ethics. As user research tries to find its place alongside longer-established and overlapping practices in the public sector like social research, medical research, Quality Improvement, or citizen participation, it can find itself in a wild west. 

I designed Yee-haw with Soh-yon Park to reflect our experiences as user researchers in the NHS and various central government departments. We have noticed that a lack consistency in user research ethics has resulted in:

• Questions about the legitimacy of user research
• User research plans being subjected to inappropriate ethics governance 
• User research plans going ahead with little or no ethics process
• User researchers feeling uncomfortable and unsupported in their jobs.

Yee-haw is a rules light, collaborative game that brings together a number of things that make tabletop roleplaying games so effective for imagining and experiencing social change and different futures: 

• Creating space for growth through imagination to aid in practicing new skills, facing fears, and gaining confidence for addressing things in real life
• Helping players explore self-expression by experimenting with hidden aspects of themselves and trying out new roles 
• Encouraging people to imagine different perspectives and experiences through story and roleplay
• Strengthening strategic skills through collaborative decision-making, systemic thinking, and problem solving 
• Providing a creative outlet to process emotions, reflect on workplace dynamics, and rehearse responses to real-world challenges
• Foster connection and community by bringing people together through shared storytelling and co-creation of new worlds. 

Try Yee-haw for yourself! You can download all the workshop material below under Creative Commons CC-BY-SA 4.0. Start with the facilitator script to understand how the game works and to organise your own workshop around the game. All you need a 20-sided die and creative moxie and you’re ready to create new ethical futures for user research! 

Whether you’re writing bids, evaluating, or disseminating your research project you’re probably thinking about how to communicate your research in fun and engaging ways to a range of audiences.

Are you interested in communicating key themes and experiences from your research in novel ways to a broad range of stakeholders (e.g., public-policy, key leadership, decision-makers, general public)?

We work with our clients to design games, immersive experiences, and interactive narrative systems for engaging audiences in playful ways with serious topics and complex systems. Whether you’re thinking about a REF impact case, or are just looking to translate your academic outcomes for different audiences, we can cater for you.

Board, card, and roleplaying games can be incredible tools at any point of the research lifecycle. Whether youʼre writing a grant application, collecting new data, or trying to make your research have a lasting impact, tabletop games can be a huge asset.

We work with our clients to design games, immersive experiences, and interactive narrative systems that playfully engage audiences on serious topics and complex systems. Some examples of our prior work include:

• We designed The Tomorrow Deck to help people settle into research workshops and engage them in creativity and lateral thinking processes, ahead of data collection or engagement
• We disseminated findings playfully and experientially to help people understand cycle courier’s experiences and the reality of gig work in Meal Deal
• We designed and hosted an engagement and impact event, to help people experience reproductive justice and abolitionist futures at a felt and bodily level in The Museum of Lost Futures

Our process

We don’t just reskin popular games with themes from your research,  we want to understand your work and deliver a game that is bespoke to your work, the intended audience, and the messages you wish to communicate. We understand that Academics are at different points in the research project lifecycle, want to communicate with different audiences, and have different intentions for their dissemination activities.

There are two key principles to our game design offering:

• Knowledge communication: making sure that the audiences know the things you want them to know
• Experience creation: making the audience feel the things they need to feel

1. Understanding your research

We work with you to explore themes from your research, and think with you about the ideas, experiences, or systems that you might want to communicate through a game.

2. Prototyping initial game mechanics

Then, we’ll work with you to find the right way to create those experiences and encounters through a game. We usually start with card games or role-playing games, because they’re quick to iterate and cost-effective to print—but if the situation demands it, we’re happy to explore bigger board games or immersive experiences.

3. Developing game assets

To develop a fuller game once we’ve developed a prototype with you, we’ll spend some time developing all of the necessary game assets. That will involve things like writing text for cards, deciding on components, and writing the game’s rules.

4. Testing and iterating

After we’ve got a game prototype, the fun part begins—testing and iteration. Our prototyping process is rapid and lightweight, to ensure that we can make changes as we design and playtest to reach our intended goals.

5. Designing the visual experience

After prototyping and testing, we will help you to think about the visual designs you want in the game. Here, we’re trying to help you think about how to translate themes from your research into the player experience and visual storytelling in the game.

6. Production and printing

Finally, we manage the process of production and printing the game so you don’t have to. We’ve worked with printers across the country and know the right suppliers to create a high-quality game that’s right for your budget and use case.

Optional: hosted play and facilitation

After we’ve produced and printed your game, we can help you to host play sessions of your game. We are experienced facilitators, gamesmasters, and playtesters, so we can help to ensure your intended audience gets the most of playing.

Our costs

• We can do the full game design process described in the slides from £8000. (Optional activities cost £400 per session.)
• We can make a lightweight prototype with you from £1600.
  (Lightweight prototypes are just those first two stages.)
• Host a reflective play session of an existing game from £200
• Adapt an existing game to your research context from £800

In all of this, we're open to discussing price (and process) if something different would work better for you.

Lets talk about working together

We have successfully supported academics to work with us via:

• engagement and impact funds,
• commercialisation funds,
• Strategic Priority funds (e.g. QR-SPF),
• new and existing grants

If you’re interested but don’t know how it could work financially—it’s still worth a chat, as we might be able to help you think about or access sources of funding, or link you up with others interested in similar projects.

If you'd like understanding more, you can read our full service description below.

If you follow our work, you’ll know that we’re doing monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) a little differently.

We see MEL work as an incredibly important part of the process of delivering public services, but too often it becomes a bureaucratic activity. Something people dread. We can’t count the number of times we’ve felt people instinctively recoil and freeze up when the word “evaluation” gets said.

If MEL work focuses too closely on producing quantitative outcomes—things that you think you can count—then it can disconnect people from the importance of evaluation and make their workplaces a less human place to work. It makes them freeze up, because they think of boring forms that have no connection to their actual work—just a tacked-on, tickbox extra.

We’ve written before about using theories of change as a way to build aligned practice in teams and “signalfinding”—identifying what the desirable states or potential outcomes of a project are. This informed our work in developing an evaluation approach that prioritises the expertise and insights of frontline workers.

We’ve shared the nuts and bolts of how we designed that approach already—signals, strategies, and stories, identified and paid attention to by frontline workers in participatory learning groups. The people who actually do the delivery work should be the people front and centre in evaluation but it also needs to fit alongside the work they’re actually here to do.

Below, we share the resources we use to help onboard new learning stewards. You can use these as the first touchpoint in your learning stewardship programme or you can ask us to help you adapt these to your context.

An introduction to learning stewardship

You can find our introduction to learning stewardship here:

We’ve run this with all new learning stewards on our current programme with Barnardo’s and The Co-op. We like to use this in a 1 hour or 1.5 hour session. We’ve successfully been using these to onboard new learning stewards for almost a year now.

In these slides, we outline what we do in our learning groups, and recommend that you run a mini learning group session with people as part of this introduction. We also give some advice on doing light-touch but high-quality research for people who haven’t done research before.

Don't take our word for it: here's some feedback from two of our learning stewards:

What I’ve really enjoyed about our meetings is how conversations from other people/perspectives help me to formulate my own answers – it’s a dynamic environment that shapes my evaluation. I come out with more thorough and nuanced answers than if I was to write them down without sharing and hearing what others think.

The sessions have been super helpful in both evaluating and informing our practice. The sessions provide a brilliant platform to offload, learn from each other, and unpack how the service has been, looks now, and what it could become.
Everyone at fractals does such a great job because I am not a talking in an online meeting kind of person, but the sessions are structured and run in such a way that I - we! - feel super comfortable to share and I genuinely look forward to the meetings!

We’re releasing these under CC-BY-SA. That means you are free to:

• Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format for any purpose, even commercially.
• Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.

If you do that, you have to attribute us and distribute your own contributions under the CC-BY-SA licence too.

If you use these, we’d love to hear about it. Get in touch.

Deep inside yourself, you hold a great power. But something has been working behind the scenes to hide it from you, and to make sure you never learn how to harness it.

You might be familiar with fractured signals and their attempts to help people learn to harness their own power: An Introduction to Futureweaving, the Museum of Lost Futures... You're probably less familiar with Singularity, who try their hardest at every stage of history to destroy, compress, control.

To avert one of the many beautiful futures you might build, Singularity have flattened your timeline. To reconnect with your inner power to harness possibility, you will have to complete The Ritual of Rebinding and learn how to see through the eyes of other versions of yourself.

The Ritual of Rebinding is a play experience about the different paths our life could have taken, for any number of players.

For now, The Ritual of Rebinding can only be run by those that have learned the ritual in depth. Get in touch with us if you're interested in playing.

Credit

The Ritual of Rebinding was developed by Kieran Cutting, initially commissioned for Multiplatform 2025.

License

CC-BY-SA

Last week, we visited the Manchester Game Centre for their annual conference, Multiplatform. This year’s theme was Rituals of Play, and we were there to present our work on designing and using games as a way of building better futures, and to host a play session of our new game The Ritual of Rebinding.

We had a great time meeting likeminded games designers, academics, students and others in the games space, talking about the occulture of games. In our presentation, “Rituals for building futures: games as speculative praxis”, we spoke about how games and games-making can act as a form of “speculative praxis”, a sustained political effort to build new possibilities for the future through creative acts of speculation.

We use systems thinking in our work to understand the contexts we work in. Things have a tendency to get stuck, though. It’s what Lauren Berlant called a “suspended imaginary” and what Mark Fisher called “the slow cancellation of the future”. The dominant system is being hospiced and composted to create the fertile soil of an emergent system, and people are planting seeds, trying to grow something new. But it struggles to.

That’s why we need to cultivate what Ruha Benjamin calls our “radical imagination” - or as the Joseph Rowntree Foundation call it, the “imagination infrastructures” that support the development of our “collective imagination”. We think analogue games are really good at doing that.

Games as imagination infrastructures

Analogue games are one of the most active parts of our collective imagination as a society. Think of the ways that you start constructing tiny narratives during a game of Catan, Monopoly, or Pandemic. You’re not just playing the game, you’re briefly stepping into a different world where you really care about the fact that someone just stole your wheat, again.

As part of our work on speculative praxis (experimental creative action that opens up possibilities for people), we use games in two main ways.

• Speculative interventions, where we create spaces or experiences where new kinds of interaction become possible. The idea here is to create new possibilities through new spaces with different rules and constraints.
• Object-based interactions, where we focus on designing an object or set of tools that change something about the interaction qualities of a space, process, or system.

We use this throughout our work. The Tomorrow Deck, for example, isn’t quite a game but is an object-based interaction, opening up new possibilities for conversation. Our Campfire workshop as part of the Facilitating Bravery Initiative (that we co-ran with our friends at the Collective Impact Agency) created a speculative intervention where the way that teams interacted with each other was different than during the rest of the work day.

These work because games engage players in a “double consciousness” of the game world, the real world, and the interface between these. You’re simultaneously:

• A person in a larger social setting (person)
• A player in a game (player)
• A character in a simulated world (character)

You move flexibly between these social frames as you play. You roll the dice, proceed seven spaces, land on another player's hotel (player), desperately beg them not to make you pay rent (character), then tell everyone you're just going to grab a snack (person). The movement between frames doesn't hurt your immersion: it enhances it.

This is often spoken about as “bleed” in LARPs or tabletop role-playing games. It's the spillover from player to character or vice versa. Sometimes this is spoken about as something undesirable, but we think that bleed can be a transformative and potentially emancipatory experience.

We call the process of designing games that elicit these experiences designing for frame shifting. This kind of design foregrounds the movement between social frames as part of the game, perhaps blurring the line between each frame. Am I taking this action as my character inside of a game world, or am I taking this action as a person in my wider social setting? More casually, these kinds of games might be called “meta”.

If we deliberately design games to overlap social frames or move between them, experiences we have within one frame can influence our experiences at other frames. We can make player experiences matter in people’s everyday lives, not just within the game. The making and playing of games creates an alternative temporary space for players to try new things, pick up what resonates with them, and bring those back to their everyday lives.

If you’re interested in understanding more, you can read our full presentation below. Our script is in the presenter notes, so you can follow along as if you were there.

You can read more about The Ritual of Rebinding here (and soon, on its own page).

If you‘re interested in how you could use games in your work as part of meaningful experiences that really stick with people, contact us and we’d love to chat.

The Tomorrow Deck is an ideation card deck used to help people think creatively about the future and settle into workshop sessions. It can be played by groups of any size.

To play, deal every group a value, object, and mood card. Each group should talk about how their cards can come together: ‘How can you combine your value and object to create your mood?’ 

After giving people time to come up with as many ideas as they want, we hit them with a disruption card and a prompt: ‘How will you have to alter or change your ideas as a result of the disruption?' 

For example, how can you combine fairness with bread to create hope? Maybe you imagine a fair distribution of bread programme that gives people hope because everyone has regular access to nutrition. There are beautiful bread commons set up in communities where people gather and share food. With full bellies and convivial spaces, hope springs. Then, with the disruption that ‘The most connected people take the largest share of resources’, the question becomes how to design our bread programme to mitigate, prevent or leverage the most connected people taking the largest shares.

It's great to use at the beginning of a creative workshop to get people's minds going.

Play online or print at home

The pdfs are print at home versions of the game. 

The cards are suitable for printing on standard playing size cards, so would need rearranging for printing on A4/letter.

Credit

The Tomorrow Deck was developed by Leah Lockhart and Kieran Cutting.

License

CC-BY-SA

Update: After our relaunch at Multiplatform 2025, The Museum of Lost Futures is now able to pop up at venues with lower budgets as The Ritual of Rebinding. Get in touch with us if you're interested in hosting a pop up of the Museum.

If you're interesting in hearing about how we can support academics to use games for research, engagement, and impact, you can find out more here.

As all good temporal archaeologists will know, the Museum of Lost Futures exists outside of time and space and moves from place to place, showing up in the places it's most needed. It’s a museum filled with objects from lost futures and possible histories, things outside of time, existing orthogonally to our current timeline.

Visitors to the Museum of Lost Futures will be given the opportunity to connect with an object from the Museum's collection and use this to explore their own personal timeline, sliding door moments and lost futures. By visiting the Museum, you'll develop your futureweaving skills, helping you to harness raw possibility as you shape our collective future.​​

The Museum of Lost Futures: The Ritual of Rebinding is an immersive play experience about lost futures for any number of players.

In its initial run, the Museum of Lost Futures focused on abolitionist futures, reproductive justice, and haunting. Taking the form of a museum outside of space and time, the Museum of Lost Futures guided two participants at a time through encounters with objects from possible futures and alternative histories, and the stories stories from the people attached to those objects. This leads into conversations about our desires for the future, what haunts us, and what chains us in our lives.

The files below will give you a taste of what the original experience was like.

We're working on a portable game version of the Museum right now, so check back in the future for an experience you can try.

About the downloads

The downloads above contain some images of the Museum, the audio files that played throughout the Museum, and some supplementary materials that might help you get to grips with what being at the Museum was like.

Credit

The Museum of Lost Futures was developed by Kieran Cutting and Dr Mwenza Blell.

License

CC-BY-SA

fractured signals is a game and reflection tool designed to help people imagine and work towards different kinds of futures. It was originally designed for use within the youth work and social care sectors during the COVID-19 pandemic, but anyone who works in a social change setting might find it useful.

As it's a game for self-reflection, you may want to use the cards as part of a journalling activity, or incorporate them into any other mindfulness or professional development work you do. The files below include a 2 week reflection process you can follow, which the first players of the game experienced through a series of phone calls.

We're currently working on a new version of fractured signals called An Introduction to Futureweaving that should be available later in the year. Get in touch if you're interested in keeping up to date with its development.

Play online or print at home

The pdfs are print at home versions of the game. 

The cards are suitable for printing on tarot size cards, so would need rearranging for printing on A4/letter.

Credit

fractured signals was developed by Kieran Cutting, with illustrations and visual design by Daniel Parry.

License

CC-BY-SA

Meal Deal is a game that puts players in the saddles of cycle couriers working in the gig economy. With a finite amount of stamina on tap each day, the cards allow players to weave their own gig economy story expanding on research with couriers who’ve worked in Manchester, York and Edinburgh in the UK as part of the Switch-Gig and FlipGig research projects.

It is for 1-4 players and takes around 30 minutes to play.

The aim of the game is to make enough money to pay rent, by taking courier jobs delivering food and groceries by bicycle, and dealing with the challenges of this kind of work.

What does it look and feel like to be in the saddle, with a bag full of hot food on your back, as your traverse city high-rises looking for the address of customer? What is the financial impact of waiting around all day for work that never comes? Is it worth pushing your luck and taking a risk if it makes the difference in wages?

What does it look and feel like to be in the saddle, with a bag full of hot food on your back, as your traverse city high-rises looking for the address of customer? What is the financial impact of waiting around all day for work that never comes? Is it worth pushing your luck and taking a risk if it makes the difference in wages?

The lived experiences of cycle couriers are often invisible to consumers. Their needs can side-lined by app-developers who focus on the customer experience rather than that of the worker.

Meal Deal invites players to share experiences that gig economy cycle couriers face. When we say gig economy courier we mean workers who access work through platforms like Deliveroo or UberEats and deliver food, medicine, and other consumer goods on their bicycles.

Play online or print at home

The pdfs are print at home versions of the game. 

The cards are suitable for printing on 62x100 size cards (UK "Trump" sized) so would need rearranging for printing on A4/letter.

Credit

Meal Deal was developed by Oliver Bates and Ben Kirman.

Card illustrations and visual design by Emily Martin. Illustration and visual design for the logo and rules by Tony Pickering (Pick-Art).

License

CC-BY-SA