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How to use game design for education around political and social issues and complexity science

Edit since a few people asked: I don't have good answers for this yet, but some thoughts:

• According to C. This Nguyen, games are the art of agency (in the same was as music is the art of sound). Agency is core to politics and activism, and the antidote to apathy and despair. I think (some kinds of) games can make you think in really interesting ways about how you can approach agency, or how it is taken from you.
  • Some excellent examples include Wintergreen and Bloc by Bloc. Basically any storygame can, if you want it to.
• Games are basically a voluntary and temporary acceptance of an arbitrary set of rules, with an arbitrary goal that you strive to overcome. They often include metrics that tell you how well you are doing. To some degree, the same can be said about modern bureaucracies (albeit less voluntary and temporary), where the metrics might be KPIs or money.
  • Games can satirise this in educational ways, e.g. this was the purpose of The Landlord's Game (the precursor to monopoly)
  • This is another C. Thi Nguyen thing - really worth listening to his podcast episode on the Ezra Klein show.
• Some games show amazing emergent complexity. That is, complexity that isn't due to underlying complexity of the system parts, but emerges as a result of their many interactions, like turbulent eddies, or bird murmurations.
  • Go/Baduk is an extreme example of this. 2 rules that have produced 3000 years of culture surrounding one of the most difficult and engaging games I know.
  • Tak is another example that's a lot easier to learn (because it doesn't require building up a bank of pattern recognition)
• TTRPGs are also super interesting to me, because narrative is one of the tools that the human brain has developed to help understand complexity. I don't think they exhibit emergent complexity so much, but they bring in a lot of complexity via the players' life experience, and via the setting/world.
• Different game mechanics and story tropes provide different affordances - that is, they allow or encourage some behaviours, and disallow others.
  • No one ever forments a revolution in monopoly, right? Why not?
  • Affordances is an excellent frame for understanding how agency relates to systems, because all systems have attributes with affordances (and constraints). What are the affordances of a capitalist democracy? I think games are an ideal vehicle for explaining affordances easily.

There are probably plenty more links. I've been playing some of those games for years, but am still relatively new to some e.g. story games. And I'm just starting out looking in to game design..

edit 2: also, a plug for !complexity@lemmy.world