Thomas Biedermann on CyberNations

Thomas Biedermann on CyberNations

This episode of Experience Points features Thomas Biedermann, a senior lecturer at the Australian National University School of Cybernetics and designer of CyberNations, a semi-cooperative board game about leading responsibly in a complex, adaptive world. Thomas traces the threads running through his practice - homemade board games in a French basement, tabletop and live-action role-playing at summer camp, systems engineering, and organizational design - and explains how cybernetics gave him a way to steer complex systems made of people, technologies, and ecologies. He describes how CyberNations models feedback loops inside a single session while persisting between sessions, so each group inherits the world the last group left behind and writes an entry in the game's living Chronicle for the group that follows. Thomas discusses the three books that shape his design decisions - Casper Harteveld's Triadic Game Design, Amabel Holland's Cardboard Ghosts, and Michael Sellers' Advanced Game Design - and the argument that game mechanics are not just building blocks but claims about how the world is or could be. He closes with stories of players who deliberately wrecked their community for the next group and players who abandoned a winning objective on principle and makes the case for modding as a reminder that agency in the real world takes many more forms than a rulebook allows.

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Get the full transcript and references for this episode here: https://www.universityxp.com/podcast/174