World Factory: interactive theatre/gaming as social commentary

World Factory is an interactive play/audience participation game (currently playing at the Young Vic in London until June 6) in which theatre-goers are challenged to run a textile factory in China. As they do so, they are faced with a series of challenges about pay and working conditions.

The Guardian has an excellent review by their economics editor, Paul Mason:

The choices were stark: sack a third of our workforce or cut their wages by a third. After a short board meeting we cut their wages, assured they would survive and that, with a bit of cajoling, they would return to our sweatshop in Shenzhen after their two-week break.

But that was only the start. In Zoe Svendsen’s play World Factory at the Young Vic, the audience becomes the cast. Sixteen teams sit around factory desks playing out a carefully constructed game that requires you to run a clothing factory in China. How to deal with a troublemaker? How to dupe the buyers from ethical retail brands? What to do about the ever-present problem of clients that do not pay? Because the choices are binary they are rarely palatable. But what shocked me – and has surprised the theatre – is the capacity of perfectly decent, liberal hipsters on London’s south bank to become ruthless capitalists when seated at the boardroom table.

The classic problem presented by the game is one all managers face: short-term issues, usually involving cashflow, versus the long-term challenge of nurturing your workforce and your client base. Despite the fact that a public-address system was blaring out, in English and Chinese, that “your workforce is your vital asset” our assembled young professionals repeatedly had to be cajoled not to treat them like dirt.

And because the theatre captures data on every choice by every team, for every performance, I know we were not alone. The aggregated flowchart reveals that every audience, on every night, veers towards money and away from ethics.

Svendsen says: “Most people who were given the choice to raise wages – having cut them – did not. There is a route in the decision-tree that will only get played if people pursue a particularly ethical response, but very few people end up there. What we’ve realised is that it is not just the profit motive but also prudence, the need to survive at all costs, that pushes people in the game to go down more capitalist routes.”

In short, many people have no idea what running a business actually means in the 21st century. Yes, suppliers – from East Anglia to Shanghai – will try to break your ethical codes; but most of those giant firms’ commitment to good practice, and environmental sustainability, is real. And yes, the money is all important. But real businesses will take losses, go into debt and pay workers to stay idle in order to maintain the long-term relationships vital in a globalised economy.

Why do so many decent people, when asked to pretend they’re CEOs, become tyrants from central casting? Part of the answer is: capitalism subjects us to economic rationality. It forces us to see ourselves as cashflow generators, profit centres or interest-bearing assets. But that idea is always in conflict with something else: the non-economic priorities of human beings, and the need to sustain the environment. Though World Factory, as a play, is designed to show us the parallels between 19th-century Manchester and 21st-century China, it subtly illustrates what has changed….

Also in The Guardian, their theatre critic describes it as:

Beautifully facilitated by a cast of four, who act like croupiers, dealing each table a new card with a developing scenario and a binary choice, the show is like a speedily played boardgame. Yes, there’s a lack of nuance in the choices offered, and the breakneck speed at which the scenario unfolds doesn’t really allow for reasoned discussion. It sometimes all feels a little earnest and lacks a sense of drama. But it’s sociable, exhaustingly good fun and it would work particularly well with young people, as it clearly connects actions to consequences, and tots up the real cost of cheap clothes in the high street – both to people and the planet.

And in The Independent:

This engaging project from Company of Angels and political theatre group METIS presents uneasy facts about the global textile industry in the form of an interactive monopoly-style game.

In a breeze block-built room, the audience is divided into teams and tasked with running an imaginary factory in China for one year. Equipped only with a file of Chinese workers’ profiles, fake money and playing cards with a choice of two options per card, the teams are faced with dilemmas like whether they should pay below the living wage or cut their staff to save money.

Four digital projections on each wall show real factory footage and interviews with  textile factory workers while the ‘game’ takes place. Four actors play several roles, representing different sides of the textile debate, interacting with the teams and acting as factory managers and offering a potted history of how we became a global consumerist society, with speeches from Reagan, Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping on wealth creation and free trade, but there’s enough fun interaction to stop this from feeling like a lecture.

As each answer the teams give leads to another question, the consequences of their decisions is revealed. The cumulative effect of these decisions (265 made in total, we’re told) leads the audience to see how difficult it is to make clothes in a way that benefits consumers, workers and the planet.

The Financial Times too has positive things to say too.

John Nash, 1928-2015

John Nash—one of the great intellectual figures in the development modern game theory—died today in a car crash in New Jersey. According to the New York Times:

John F. Nash Jr., a mathematician who shared a Nobel Prize in 1994 for work that greatly extended the reach and power of modern economic theory and whose decades-long descent into severe mental illness and eventual recovery were the subject of a book and a 2001 film, both titled “A Beautiful Mind,” was killed, along with his wife, in a car crash on Saturday in New Jersey. He was 86.

…

Dr. Nash was widely regarded as one of the great mathematicians of the 20th century, known for the originality of his thinking and for his fearlessness in wrestling down problems so difficult few others dared tackle them. A one-sentence letter written in support of his application to Princeton’s doctoral program in math said simply, “This man is a genius.”

“John’s remarkable achievements inspired generations of mathematicians, economists and scientists,’’ the president of Princeton, Christopher L. Eisgruber, said, “and the story of his life with Alicia moved millions of readers and moviegoers who marveled at their courage in the face of daunting challenges.”

Russell Crowe, who portrayed Dr. Nash in “A Beautiful Mind,” tweeted that he was “stunned,” by his death. “An amazing partnership,” he wrote. “Beautiful minds, beautiful hearts.”

Dr. Nash’s theory of noncooperative games, published in 1950 and known as Nash equilibrium, provided a conceptually simple but powerful mathematical tool for analyzing a wide range of competitive situations, from corporate rivalries to legislative decision making. Dr. Nash’s approach is now pervasive in economics and throughout the social sciences and is applied routinely in other fields, like evolutionary biology.

Harold W. Kuhn, an emeritus professor of mathematics at Princeton and a longtime friend and colleague of Dr. Nash’s who died in 2014, said, “I think honestly that there have been really not that many great ideas in the 20th century in economics and maybe, among the top 10, his equilibrium would be among them.” An economist, Roger Myerson of the University of Chicago, went further, comparing the impact of Nash equilibrium on economics “to that of the discovery of the DNA double helix in the biological sciences.”

…

In game theory Nash was particularly known for the Nash equilibrium, a solution in non-cooperative games in which neither player can improve their pay-off by unilaterally changing strategies. In prisoner’s dilemma, for example, an outcome wherein both parties choose to defect forms a stable Nash equilibrium because both are better off by choosing that strategy regardless of what the other party chooses. In this case, however, when parties choose to defect they also fail to obtain the maximum possible payoff (cooperate/cooperate).

video source: Khan Academy

A heavily fictionalized version of John Nash’s life (and his struggles with schizophrenia) were featured in the movie A Beautiful Mind.

PAXsims at ISCRAM 2015

I have just arrived here in picturesque Kristiansand Norway, to attend the annual Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM). At the moment the weather is very. ahem, ‘Norwegian Seaside’ (read 50 degrees F, with cool rain blowing in off the ocean, and dense fog), but I’m excited to here. As Rex noted earlier, the association has added a new Serious Gaming track to the conference this year, and I will be delivering a paper on a training simulation ICONS developed in conjunction with some crisis communication experts and the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) for the US Department of Homeland Security. I am also very much looking forward to many of the panels in the Analytical Modeling and Simulation track.

I plan to post at least once this week with updates and worthy information for the community of interest. Check out the Conference Proceedings and comment on this post or drop me an email if there’s a paper you would really like live reporting on, or an author I should approach for more information.

From ‘The Norwegian Riviera’
Devin