Games for Change: Empowering Civic Imagination Through Tabletop Play

This conversation begins with 463NCY, a fast-paced tabletop skirmish game that casts players as cybernetically enhanced agents battling for digital rights, privacy, and autonomy in a city governed by total surveillance and algorithmic control. Designed for quick tactical sessions, 463NCY invites players to inhabit the friction between insurgency and infrastructure. The missions unfold in a near-future smart city dominated by the Technoligarchy and its all-seeing nervous system, The GRID. Whether playing as VECTORS, hacking for liberation, or as PIGS AUDITORS defending the system’s integrity, participants explore the moral complexity of technology’s role in society.

As a “serious game,” 463NCY belongs to a growing body of creative work that repurposes game mechanics not just for entertainment, but as platforms for learning, rehearsal, and speculation. This panel brings together designers and artists working at the intersection of games and social change to discuss how tabletop formats can raise critical questions about urban governance, mobility, AI, and democracy. We’ll explore why tabletop games are particularly effective at modeling complex systems, fostering empathy, and enabling situated decision-making in public policy contexts.

What does it mean to design games not only as stories or simulations, but as infrastructures of imagination? What might games teach us about resisting the logics of optimization, surveillance, and control?

Also check out other Arts events in Detroit.