As part of a project looking at the resilience of the UK fresh fruit and vegetable supply, we invited 20 players in the South African fruit sector (a major exporter to the UK) to a workshop where we explored how they see resilience. Unlike other games-based methods, we decided to cut out the middleman. Instead of learning from the participants and then going away and making a game ourselves, we gave them a heap of game components and asked them: “If the South African fruit industry was a game, what would it look like?”.

We started with a few exercises with dice and cards to warm up, and then the participants had two hours in groups of 4-8 to design their games. It was amazing to see the fundamental questions that come up in such a fun exercise: what does “winning” look like? Should all players start from a fair starting point? What risks will players be exposed to? How can we fit this plastic rhino into the game?

Once the games were designed many of them led to rich discussions. I was surprised by how sophisticated some of the games were: there were mechanisms with competing personal and group objectives and scope for bluffing (and even cheating).

After the workshops I did an analysis of the games to see which mechanics were used and what assumptions about reality hid behind the games. This contributed to answering questions such as “What timescales are relevant for fruit sector decision-making?” or “What events are seen as external risks and which are seen as “part of the industry”?”.

This was the first time we’d used game design this way, and we were really excited about the results. For us, the strength of the method is that it poses deep and important questions in an implicit (and non-threatening) way. It gets at the knowledge we all have floating around in our heads which we don’t usually give voice to, and does so without putting us on the spot.