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Playmatics is a leader in innovation, serving players, institutions, museums, corporations and communities that are directly involved in impact games and serious games for learning, education and training. We combine product creation and commercialization know-how with the freshest design thinking.

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Decisions for a Decade with USAID

n Decisions for the Decade, each participant is a provincial governor and small teams make up the governing body of a nation. Central to the game experience is that participants do not initially recognize the likelihood of disasters as deeply uncertain and, like many decision makers in the real world, plan for the most likely disaster scenarios rather than for extreme events that can bring devastating outcomes. All participants begin the game with a budget of ten beans (for a ten-year cycle), and seek to maximize the prosperity of their province and country by investing their budget in long-term development. However, floods and droughts can threaten this investment. The threat of extreme events is initially depicted by a six-sided die, introduced to players as the probability distribution function of precipitation based on the past record (a 1 represents a drought, a 6 a flood). Governors may choose to allocate a portion of their budget to disaster protection to avoid humanitarian crises – investing one bean offers protection against one extreme event. If each extreme event that occurs during ten rolls of the dice is matched by a corresponding protection investment, their development investment leads to prosperity, and the player will accrue Prosperity Points. However, if they incur a crisis (for example more floods occur than flood protection beans invested) all of their development investment for the decade is diverted to crisis management, and the prosperity of their province does not increase. After three ten-year cycles, the winning provinces are those that have accrued the most Prosperity Points while having simultaneously avoided crises. Importantly, unknown to the players, the object representing rainfall is changed at the start of each new decade: the six-sided die is first replaced by an eight-sided die (a flood occurs if the roll is 6 or more: i.e. a probability of 3/8, or more than double the original probability of 1/6); and then by a truncated cone that is nearly impossible to understand in terms of the chances of falling on the big base (representing floods) or the small base (representing droughts) vs. landing on its side (good conditions). As with actual climate projections for much of the world, different players formulate very different interpretations of whether future conditions are likely to become wetter or drier, and as a team they have a chance to reflect on how to manage the emergent deep uncertainty. The game offers participants robust options, which are insensitive to the probabilities of disasters, but which also have a lower payout than would an optimized investment if these probabilities were known. In other words, the robust options work well no matter what the disaster regime, but they may not be the best in any single predicted regime. The game further invites urgency, as scientific information changes during game play, and conflict, as certain decisions require consensus in the face of diverging beliefs about the scientific information.