Foundation: An interactive game about not-knowing

You’re invited to play a game designed to help you experience different types of unknowns and not-knowings.

We face unknowns in life all the time. But not all unknowns are the same. Sometimes we don’t know what exactly will happen, but we do know everything about what we can do and what might happen from our actions. This type of unknown usually gets called “risk” or “chance.”

One example of risk is a game where you flip a coin and try to guess whether it will land heads or tails. There’s only one action you can take (flipping the coin) and you don’t know what the outcome is in advance, but you do know that either side has a 1 in 2 chance of showing up.

There are also deeper kinds of unknowns that aren’t knowable in advance and that you can’t just look up the answers to. We run into these kinds of deeper unknowns all the time in everyday life. They’re usually the really important unknowns that shape our lives.

One example of these deeper unknowns is trying to imagine what jobs you’ll do after finishing school. Twenty years ago, very few people would have imagined a job like social media influencer. Technology and business keep changing in ways we can’t predict, and these changes will affect the kinds of jobs that exist and create some brand new ones.

This game, designed by Visiting Research Fellow Vaughn Tan, helps you experience some of these deeper unknowns. In this game, no one knows in advance what actions you can take or what outcomes you might achieve. You can change the rules, creating possibilities that didn’t exist before.