Experimental Automata

gameplay

Experimental Automata is an educational salon experience for up to 60 people that takes about one hour to complete. In the game, players take on global leadership roles that encompass politics, business and science while jet-setting to international summits. At each summit, a policy question is proposed, and each player will vote for one of the three available options.

The game has 30 Indicators, which are updated after every scene. All Indicators begin the game at 100, and move up and down based on which policy is selected at each summit as well as that scene’s particular story. There are six regions for Indicators: the United States, United Kingdom, Europe, China, India, and Global, the latter representing the world as a whole. Each region then has five axes of Indicators: Research Competitiveness, Advanced Manufacturing, Population Health, Fiscal Strength and Supply Chain Sovereignty. For the Global region, Supply Chain Sovereignty is replaced by Supply Chain Integration.

Each role in the game has two Indicators assigned as Objectives that fully determine the score for that player. The first Objective is worth 2/3 of the final score, and the second is worth 1/3 of the final score. Indicators are distributed across the players symmetrically, with each Indicator being used twice as a primary Objective and twice as a secondary Objective.

In each scene, players will be sent to one of five pre-assigned cities to attend a summit: Atlanta (United States), Bombay (India), Cambridge (United Kingdom), Dalian (China) and Essen (European Union). The summits are conveniently named in alphabetical order, and each city symbolically represents one of the regions in the game. For about 10-15 minutes, players should debate the policy question offered on their Ballots, keeping in mind their own Objectives.

At the end of the debate, players should vote for one policy option and return their Ballot to the Game Leader. The Game Leader will tally all of the Ballots from each summit, with the option receiving a plurality winning. If there is a tie, the Game Leader may use the tie-breaker cards or just select an option at random.

After scoring is complete, the Game Leader should inform all of the players what the policy questions were at each summit, as well as which policy choice was selected. Then, the Indicator display will be updated and current scores and rankings will be displayed for all players.

At the game’s end, all players will receive a final score, and the player with the highest score will be the game’s winner.

Key Lessons

While the implications of all of the policies in Experimental Automata are vast, there are a few important patterns in the game worth highlighting.

First, each policy affects nearly all of the Indicators in the game. Given that the world is a deeply interlocked system, it’s very hard to surgically improve one indicator without affecting others. For example, improving the research competitiveness in one nation generally implies a relative decline in the competitiveness of another, although positive sum policies do exist.

That leads to a major tension in the game between developed countries and emerging markets. The overwhelming weight of policies in the game help developed countries that are on the frontiers of research and business, making it difficult for emerging market countries like India to catch up. The high cost of AI research and its insatiable demand for energy only exacerbate this tension.

Some players have Indicators to improve the Global region as a whole. Just as in real life, however, they are a distinct minority of the players in the game, giving them little ability to move policies toward greater openness and cooperation. Where their interests coincide with the pecuniary interests of the sovereign nations, there is traction, but such moments are rare.

In our experience, most debates end with the players selecting the middle option, which is written as a status quo choice in all 20 summits. One of the biggest challenges with consensus-based processes like the ones in Experimental Automata is that deviating from the status quo requires a lot of individual support from other players under very strict time pressures. Since players regularly head to different summits where most people around the table will be new to them, there is little time to build the trust needed to select the most disruptive policies. In some but not all cases, the status quo option is the worst of the trio offered — a reminder that the middle option (like the middle seat on a plane) is more often surrendering than leading.

One exception to the yen for the status quo has been among younger tech founders and engineers from Silicon Valley, who often quickly write off the status quo choice and proceed to debate the two more extreme options for most of the scene. We’ve never seen geoengineering selected in Scene 4’s Cambridge summit when players are drawn from the policy world, but that option got universal support with a Silicon Valley crowd. Even with incentives, our fundamental dispositions to innovation and the future can reign supreme.

Finally, in the game, biology, pharma, agtech, and healthcare systems are tightly interconnected. These worlds are very far apart in real life, but the fundamental science and the AI models that take advantage of it are quite linked together across these domains. It’s well past time for more cross-pollination.

Acknowledgements

This game was brought about by a request from the United Kingdom’s Embassy in Washington, DC. The ambassador and his staff wanted to convene several dozen top scientists, biotech executives and non-profit leaders for a bilateral symposium as part of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s trade mission to the United States in early 2025. They hoped Riskgaming would be an energetic introduction to the day. I want to thank the entire UK diplomatic staff, and particularly Jonathan Tan, for their industrious partnership in making this Riskgaming session a unique and compelling offering.

Credits

Designer: Danny Crichton
Editor-in-Chief: Danny Crichton
Front Cover Illustration: Feixue Mei
Editor: Katie Salam
Production Designer: Justin Barber
Website Designer: James Clements
Partner, Research: Laurence Pevsner