Concept Map for Game:
Concept Map for Chosen system (data center in real world)
Both maps include real-world relationships among governments, nonprofits, tech companies, public opinion, economic concerns, environmental concerns, and infrastructure such as power, water, connectivity, and location. It shows how data center development emerges from many interacting social, technical, and economic pressures rather than from a single decision. The game map abstracts this complexity into a smaller set of mechanics that players can understand and manipulate during play.
Government, nonprofits, and tech companies remain as the three major stakeholder groups, but many real-world processes are simplified into game components. Despite the fact that the technology company plays a major role in location selection, the game simplifies this to permits created by the government so that each player has one area of control within data center creation. Likewise, the many possible consequences of data center development are compressed into three shared measures (Profit, Community Benefit, and Power/Water) which players influence and use to earn Victory Points.
Obviously the specific profits of the tech company are different from the economic improvement from job/tax shifts in an area. However, the overlapping area of interest is an opportunity to create player dynamics that support relationships that shift between collaborative and competitive throughout the game. Both maps therefore preserve the central idea that different stakeholders affect the same interconnected system and have overlapping and competing interests. The key difference is that the real-world map emphasizes complexity and causal relationships, while the game map intentionally removes or combines elements for ease of play. This abstraction makes the system playable while still preserving the core tensions among economic growth, community outcomes, infrastructure constraints, and stakeholder decision-making.
