Ember · Field games
Field Games
世光 · 田野游戏
Four short games about how development work actually goes: what you notice, who decides, what the report can see, and what is still standing after you leave. Each takes five to ten minutes, in any browser, with nothing to install and no sign-in.
Play the gamesThe Needle Leaves针走了
Three years in a hill village. Listen, stitch houses together, and see what holds after you leave.
Five Steps五步
Run a summer camp with four parties through SEESALT+'s five steps. Does it run without you?
Before the Flood洪水之前
Six years of adaptation finance. Prevention works when nothing happens, and nothing happening is hard to report.
What the Number Sees数字看见了什么
Design an indicator to find the worst-off households. Then a funder starts paying for the number to rise.
How the games are made设计理念
A paper can state a trade-off. A game lets you make it, under a deadline, with a funder waiting, and then shows you what it cost. Five rules hold across all four.
- Two numbers, never oneThe report and the place
- Every game keeps two counts side by side: what the report can see, and what is actually there. The gap between them is the game.
- No villainsEvery choice is reasonable
- Each option is one a sensible person would pick. The funder is not greedy; it counts what it can see. The trap is built into the counting, not into anyone's character.
- You win by leavingJudged after you are gone
- Success is measured in the winter, the second summer, the sixth year. A project that only works while you are there does not count as working.
- Invented places, real patternsFiction with sources
- The villages, districts and households are made up. The mechanisms come from SEESALT's research and from the literature each game names.
- Quiet on purposeOne line, one bean
- One line weight, no sound, no timer, no leaderboard. In The Needle Leaves, red appears once, and only if the village holds without you.
How to play玩法
Open a game for its rules, two questions to argue about afterwards, and something to read with it.
The Needle Leaves
针走了3 years · ~8 min
How to play
- Listen. Tap a house. It costs one day, and you learn what the person there already knows. Listening never shows up in the report.
- Stitch. Tap two neighbouring houses you have listened to. One day. Stitched houses carry each other's light.
- Deliver. Two days, and the report jumps at once. On a house already stitched to two others, the project is built with them and lasts. Dropped in from outside, it dims the houses around it and stops when you leave.
- Winter. Between years the village works without you: well-stitched houses reach out to neighbours on their own. Next year's field days depend on this year's report.
To discuss
- Your report and the village moved apart. When did you first notice, and what did you do about it?
- What would a funder need to see to pay for listening?
Read with
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State (1998), on mētis. James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine (1990).
Play →Five Steps
五步5 steps · ~6 min
How to play
- Five decisions. Convene, co-design, pool resources, implement, hand over. Each has three answers, and none of them is foolish.
- Watch the side panel. Trust from each of the four parties, how much the camp belongs to them, the budget, and the report.
- Things happen. Rain, a funder's deadline, a teacher transferred. Some events resolve themselves, if the right people already hold the project.
- Three summers later. The camp runs without you only if the parties own it, no one has been left behind, everyone put something in, and you handed it over.
To discuss
- Which step felt cheapest to skip? What did skipping it cost later?
- Where is the line between consulting people and deciding with them?
Read with
Sherry Arnstein, "A Ladder of Citizen Participation" (1969). Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons (1990).
Play →Before the Flood
洪水之前6 years · ~5 min
How to play
- Split the budget. Each year, set how much goes to prevention: drainage, raised paths, early warning. The rest goes to response.
- Choose whether to measure. Up to a fifth of the budget can pay for a study of floods that did not happen, so the funder can see them.
- The river decides. Prevention builds up over the years. Response shows up on the funder's dashboard at once.
- The funder renews. Next year's budget follows what the dashboard saw. After six years, compare what it saw with how many homes stayed dry.
To discuss
- Was the measurement worth the homes it did not protect that year?
- Who gets the credit when a flood does not come?
Read with
Andrew Healy and Neil Malhotra, "Myopic Voters and Natural Disaster Policy," APSR (2009). SEESALT, "Attributive Ambiguity," AAG 2027.
Play →What the Number Sees
数字看见了什么2 rounds · ~5 min
How to play
- Spend four points. Build an indicator from what you can measure: roofs, school enrolment, reported income, meals a day, phones, savings groups. Or spend three points to ask the village.
- Pick eight households. Your number chooses who the programme reaches.
- Meet the ones it missed. Each missed household tells you why the number could not see it.
- Then the funder pays. Payment now follows the number. See which rises faster: your indicator, or the lives it was meant to describe.
To discuss
- Which indicator was easiest to game, and who would game it first?
- Asking the village costs three of your four points. When is it worth it?
Read with
Robert Chambers, Whose Reality Counts? (1997), on participatory wealth ranking. Charles Goodhart (1975), on targets.
Play →In a seminar课堂
The games were made to be argued about. One way to run a session of about fifty minutes:
- Play one game in pairs, ten minutes, without talking about strategy first.
- Each pair writes down their final two numbers on the board.
- Discuss why the numbers differ, using the two questions above.
- Close with the reading.
The Needle Leaves and What the Number Sees draw a new village each time, so pairs end up with different numbers for the same game. Nothing a player does is recorded.
What the games leave out局限
A game has to simplify, and these do it in known ways. Politics is mostly absent: there is no chief, no party, no county office with its own plans. Communities appear as one voice when they are many. The numbers behind each mechanism are chosen to make a pattern visible, not estimated from data.
The games show patterns SEESALT has seen and studied. They do not prove that those patterns hold everywhere. If one of them misleads you, tell us.
The games open in a new tab. Places and numbers in them are invented; the patterns are not. Built on SEESALT's research and on SEESALT Terra.