One of the things I found most engaging about P3 was the opportunity to build a game around something that felt consequential. I enjoyed our P1 game and thought it was genuinely fun, but I felt disappointed seeing the learning that other projects were able to inspire. With this game, the subject itself is important and timely. I don’t think I went a day of this project without seeing some media reference data centers. Decisions about where data centers are built, what they are used for, and how they affect water, power, communities, governments, and companies are already shaping the world around us.
Before this project, I tended to think of systems games as primarily technical. Games like Pandemic, Power Grid, or Terraforming Mars foreground interconnected resources, constraints, feedback, and optimization. Other games, such as Diplomacy, Werewolf, or The Resistance, get much of their fun from social interaction, negotiation, alliances, trust, and betrayal. What interested me most about our game was trying to combine those two things. Players had to reason about a technical system (power and water stability, data center locations, workloads, permits, delayed effects) while simultaneously navigating a social system of tech companies, governments, and nonprofits with different incentives.
That combination created a game that combined both these aesthetics to create fun through both challenge and fellowship. Players competed for victory points and pursued asymmetric objectives, but they could rarely accomplish anything alone. Temporary alliances emerged because another player might help you now even though you knew your goals would diverge later. Watching that happen (and the laughing and trash talking that came with it) was one of my favorite parts of the project. There is something especially satisfying about watching people become invested in a system that you helped create.
This project also connected more strongly to my long term goals and academic focus. Given my focus on curriculum and teacher education, one might ask if this course is useful. However as I’ve reflected more I see that the joy I get from building curriculum where people understand something by doing and discussing rather than listening to lectures is deeply connected with this course. Games takes those values further: instead of designing an engaging activity around content, we designed a system in which the content and the experience were intertwined. Going forward, I would like to continue exploring games that sit at this intersection of technical systems and social consequences, especially for emerging technologies where young people need to explore and participate in complex learning.
