Episode 174 Thomas Biedermann on CyberNations
Thomas Biedermann on CyberNations
Episode Summary:
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.
Thomas Biedermann
he/him/his
Senior Lecturer & Game Designer
Australian National University School of Cybernetics - Canberra, ACT Australia
Boundary worker. Playcentric designer. Educator. Thomas is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Cybernetics, at the Australian National University (ANU). He integrates his background in systems engineering and interests in organizational design to research and deploy methods to create safe, sustainable, and responsible systems. His approaches draw on cybernetics, visual arts, and playcentric and embodied methods, to support diverse participants in imagining and acting towards hopeful futures. He has applied these approaches in various contexts and scales, including a Chinese-French joint research lab on hematology in Shanghai; the science diplomacy sections of French embassies in the USA and Australia; and the Australian Higher Education sector. Prior to his current role, he served as inaugural manager of the 3AI Innovation Institute at ANU, and inaugural program manager for the ANU-wide decarbonization program, Below Zero.
(LinkedIn): https://www.linkedin.com/in/tbiedermann/
(Research Gate): https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Thomas-Biedermann-3
(Facebook): https://www.facebook.com/thomas.biedermann.92
(Website): https://cybernetics.anu.edu.au/people/thomas-biedermann/
(Other): https://cybernetics.anu.edu.au/projects/gameful-experiences-for-hopeful-futures/
[Dave Eng] (0:00 - 1:04)
Hi and welcome to Experience Points by University XP. On Experience Points, we explore different ways we can learn from games. I'm your host Dave Eng from Games Based Learning by University XP.
Find out more at www.universityxp.com. On today's episode, we'll learn from Thomas Biedermann. Thomas is a boundary worker, playcentric designer, and educator.
He is a senior lecturer at the School of Cybernetics at the Australian National University, where he helps people imagine and build safer, more sustainable, and more responsible systems. Drawing on systems engineering, organizational design, cybernetics, visual arts, and embodied play, his work brings diverse groups together to imagine and act toward hopeful futures. His career has spanned research, science diplomacy, and higher education.
Thomas, welcome to the show.
[Thomas Biedermann] (1:05 - 1:06)
Hi Dave, thanks for having me.
[Dave Eng] (1:07 - 1:38)
Great. I'm glad to have you here, Thomas. I know that you've been a great supporter of the Games-Based Learning Virtual Conference in the past, and there's a lot of different aspects to your work that I think is really worth discussing.
But the first thing I wanted to jump into is the overall threads into your practice. For listeners who are probably meeting you for the very first time, can you share a bit about your background in systems engineering, cybernetics, organizational design, and game design, and how those threads led you to the work you're doing today?
[Thomas Biedermann] (1:40 - 4:57)
Yeah, sure. With pleasure. I'll start with the game design because that's the earliest thread.
I was the kid who spent hours in the basement scribbling rules and drawing tokens for homemade board games. Growing up in France, there was a summer camp that was all about games, where I also got into tabletop and live-action role-playing games. I got to run many scenarios and to experience how players co-author the narrative and the game experience.
I studied systems engineering, which is about coordinating between different technical specialties and stakeholders on complex projects. I was interested in it because it's deeply interdisciplinary. Working across disciplines, sectors, and cultures, that's been a red thread throughout my whole career.
This is exciting but challenging work because the incentives and ways of working of the people involved are just so different. To give you an example, bridging the gap between the French administration and US startups, that's not for the faint of heart, let me tell you. Throughout this work, I kept bumping into this notion and idea of cybernetics.
At its core, cybernetics is the interdisciplinary science of studying and steering complex systems. These systems may involve people, technologies, and ecologies. They could be an organization, an ecosystem, a society, or even yourself as an individual.
The word is interesting. It comes from the ancient Greek kybernetes, which means steersman or the pilot of a ship. In essence, the system is the ship and you are the pilot.
You're steering it towards its destination. You're constantly tracking the state of the ship and the crew. You're keeping an eye on currents and using that information to adjust your course as you go.
What happens when the ship is huge and hard to steer, or when new technology changes how it functions, or when there's too much information for the pilot to keep track of? These are the kind of challenges that our real systems face today. Cybernetics tools and methods help.
They help by bringing different perspectives in dialogue so that we can make sense of the complexity together and so that we can act in that complexity. Those tools have been super useful in the organizational work that I've done at the University, from managing a new academic unit to running a campus-wide program to reduce carbon emissions. Now, as a faculty member in the School of Cybernetics, I run a program that's called Gameful Experiences for Hopeful Futures.
In it, I study and develop and test games and game-based learning experiences that hopefully help people and organizations learn and use cybernetic methods. My aim overall is to enable more people to see and participate in the systems that they are a part of. The program in this way weaves all these threads that we're talking about.
The idea of players as co-authors, from my early years in France, what's possible when our organizations bring different perspectives together, and then this notion that complexity might be scary, but it doesn't stop us from being able to act.
[Dave Eng] (4:58 - 5:41)
Great. Thank you, Thomas. I appreciate that.
I also appreciate your insight on creating games at the very beginning, when you were younger, and how all of that really tied into cybernetics, like you were saying before, but also just systems thinking. It only dawned on me later in my career, thinking about games as systems, but was there any particular game that you really enjoyed playing as a child that you wanted to recreate, I guess, how that game operates, its core mechanics or its systems? Because for me, I always grew up playing a lot of Risk as a kid, and I looked at all games in the lens of Risk.
I want to know if you had a game like Risk when you were growing up too.
[Thomas Biedermann] (5:42 - 6:30)
Yeah, look, I did play a bit of Risk. I did play a bit of HeroQuest. I think that the thing that comes closest to what you're describing would be, at some point, I created my own version of Warhammer Fantasy Battle, the tabletop war game, if you're across it.
Just because I was living in a rural part of France, there wasn't really any Games Workshop shops nearby. Those things were expensive, and so I ended up creating my own rule system. We were playing on little pieces of paper, and I put my long-suffering younger sister through playtesting and refining my ersatz version of that game.
[Dave Eng] (6:30 - 7:15)
Excellent. Well, I can't say that I played a lot of role-playing games growing up, but I do know that HeroQuest is a very beloved title in the tabletop and role-playing games community, so I appreciate you sharing that. But I also wanted to jump into our second question here, and this was the latest presentation you had for the past Games-Based Learning Virtual Conference.
You presented on your project CyberNations. My question is, what is CyberNations, and what kind of learning experience are you hoping players have when they step into this world of community leadership, complexity, and long-term decision-making? I'd like you to couch this from the perspective of a listener who may not be familiar with your work or may not have actually sat in on your presentation on CyberNations.
[Thomas Biedermann] (7:16 - 12:38)
Yeah, of course. Look, just to give you the context, so within that program of work, CyberNations is kind of my first and flagship experiment in game-based learning for teaching responsible leadership in complexity. It's a semi-cooperative board game that's set for one to five players, and it's aimed at players who are age 13 and above.
It's set in a near-future Australian community, and as a player, you play as the new generation of leaders in that community. The community has turned to you to achieve its preferred vision of the future, which game-wise is an objective that is shared among all players. You also have, as a player, as an individual, you have your own agenda, which is linked to a role card that you draw.
One of the key components of the game is that your starting point, how you set up the game at the start of the session, is not random. Your game starts where the previous one ended. So, you inherit the world that the previous group of players or previous groups of players have created with all its qualities, all its issues, warts and all.
Likewise, the decisions that you make in the game will shape the world that the next group of players will start with. As players, the game is about how you balance these various levels of goals and responsibilities, from the individual to the collective to the intergenerational. Within a session, the game models feedback looping complex systems.
Your simulated community and its environment generate a series of effects that reshape it over time. The community and the environment reshape themselves through the game rules. For example, a thriving natural area in your environment might start spreading into other game areas, or an unmanaged industrial plant may start creating environmental damage.
The game turn, as a player, is your window of opportunity to manipulate these change effects. By playing the game, you practice identifying these feedback loops and acting on them to steer the community towards your goal. There are complicating factors, of course, the shared and individual goals that we mentioned earlier.
There's disruptions that come and throw a wrench into your plans. And there's also the fact that all players share all in-game currencies between themselves. Whether you achieve your goal or not, by the end of your game, you're going to resolve how the community adapts and learns from what has happened during your tenure as a leader.
Successful players may leave legacies or be able to shape the culture of the community. The environment itself will respond to changes that have happened throughout the game. And the very last thing that you do is to reflect on the kind of world that you have created, and you write an entry in the game's living Chronicle.
You shape and record the unique history of your community, game after game. You also write a message for the next group of players, in which you might tell them of your success or ask for their forgiveness for your failures. Really, the game is about providing an experience of leading responsibly across different roles and agendas in a complex system that is connected to both the past and the future.
What I'm aiming for with that is experiential learning of how society's imagination of the future and the system that that society builds shape each other. I model that in the game by this persistence mechanism. So, the game state that you inherit from the previous players might make it super hard to achieve the community's preferred future that you've just drawn for your game.
On the other hand, the preferred future and the roles that you draw and that you play are going to be major factors in the evolution of the game state and the game board itself. I've run that in classrooms and in team-building sessions, and it's landed pretty well. There's a learning curve to the game, for sure.
But once participants get familiar with the rules, they tend to enjoy the experience. The post-game reflections are positive. I've had team leaders say that this has helped them show the value of having diverse teams to tackle complex issues.
But also, some of the tensions that come from having a very diverse group of people who might have not entirely aligned agendas and goals and how you have to work in order to get them to work synergistically together. Students have reflected that the game helped them consider the consequences of their actions on multiple levels and on multiple time horizons. A few even said that the experience helped them to think more clearly about who they are and what they want in life.
Hopefully that gives you an overview of the game and the intent, but feel free to follow up if there's anything that's unclear.
[Dave Eng] (12:38 - 13:16)
Thank you, Thomas. I know that that aspect of the game, of the last game state, like the gameplay, informing the next gameplay is a mechanic I'm really familiar with in board games. It's the legacy mechanic of the game constantly changing and evolving.
My question though is like the operationalization of it, though, is that when you bring this game to a group and they inherit the previous game state of the last people that played, is it the last people that played with you? Tell me more about how, like, you know, when players start playing the game for the first time, how you explain how the game is set up now based on what happened in the previous game.
[Thomas Biedermann] (13:18 - 14:49)
There's a set of rules that I use to teach the game that actually set the scene. So, there's a walkthrough of the game which runs over a turn that actually helps you go from the very initial set of the game, which is preset, to the starting point for your community. So, I typically run it within one session.
So, explain the game, explain the intent, get the players to play the game, and by the end they fill out the Chronicle, they get the game ready for the next group of players, and from there things can diverge. I've had playtesting groups and playing groups who have kind of kept on going session after session. I've also had a couple of more open-ended playtests in which I play with one group, and another group might play the next game, and then the first group comes again, etc.
And it's been interesting to see the sense of ownership and care and also sometimes loss that comes from those various ways of playing the game. There's a deeper sense of responsibility if players play all the games in a series, but there's also a deeper sense of challenging past decisions that comes from inheriting someone else's future, or one of your own past games, if that makes sense.
[Dave Eng] (14:50 - 15:35)
Yeah, it does. Thank you. Wow, that's great.
I've seen the legacy mechanic be used in many different tabletop games before, but not really in this kind of format, and I hope that, I mean, it's inspired me. I hope that it inspires a lot of other listeners as well as they really kind of take their first steps into educational games, serious games, and applied games. But that also brings me into our third and last question here, because I think that CyberNations as a whole is a very interesting and unique concept, and like you said, it draws on a lot of ideas from the fields that you're familiar with.
Cybernetics, futures thinking, serious games, and cultural critique. So my question for you, Thomas, is how do you decide which real-world ideas should become game mechanics and which ideas are better explored through reflection or discussion after play?
[Thomas Biedermann] (15:37 - 19:53)
Yeah, look, I think there are three books that I find really useful for making this kind of decision. One is Casper Harteveld's Triadic Game Design. Second one is Amabel Holland's Cardboard Ghosts.
And the third one is Michael Sellers' Advanced Game Design. And my synthesis of these three is that game mechanics are building blocks of a game, for sure, but they're also arguments about how the real world is or how it could be. And so, the game designer puts these arguments together into a game and expresses a perspective or a vision.
And then the players engage with, learn, and potentially challenge these arguments. And so, for CyberNations, the guiding question was, what would a hobby board game look like if it was based on complexity, sustainability, responsibility, and cybernetic ways of thinking? And how would it amplify certain trends and subvert certain expectations in contemporary board games?
And so out of that, three of the core mechanics of the game landed early. First, this notion of the persistent world and that kind of legacy-style mechanic to communicate that our societies and our organizations don't usually get to start again from scratch. We're shaped by the decisions and ideas that have come before us.
And the flip side of that is that our own decisions also shape the future. Second, that core kind of feedback loop within the game. The game itself is the main engine of its own change.
For me, like in the real world, the player's agency is quite often indirect. It's about nudging and steering the system rather than having complete and total control over it. And then third and last, that semi-cooperative mechanism, which I ended up adapting from the hobby board game Dead of Winter if you're familiar with it, because I wanted CyberNations to give players a choice as to how collaborative or how competitive they want to be.
I didn't necessarily want to force one or the other. And so that human element, like the messiness almost, and the complexity that the humans and the players bring into the game, that's the main idea that's explored through the in-game reflection in the Chronicle. There are a variety of shared victory conditions and roles for the players to encounter and to combine.
And some are more positive than others. For example, possible roles include the conservationist and the futurist, but also the dictator and the plunderer. And so, players get to decide individually and as a group what goal they pursue and how much they collaborate or compete, how they reflect on the world that they've created, and what they express in their written message in the Chronicle.
That's also up to them. So that's the in-built reflection or discussion through that Chronicle mechanism. But in facilitated sessions, we go a bit further, and discussions happen after play, once the Chronicle has been filled out.
Typically we connect that in-game experience back to the real world and analyze the game as a model. And so we ask questions like have the players encountered a similar dynamic in their workplace or study? Or how might the strategies that they've developed in the game individually or as a group apply in the real world?
Or in that critique of the model itself, was there something in the game that felt surprising or wrong? And then the very last thing is, I often encourage some creative agency in the player as well. Is there a new role that players would like to introduce into the game?
Or is there a rule that they would like to change to model their own community with more verisimilitude? I encourage modding of the game as a way for players to realize that their agency in the game might be limited by what the rules enable, but agency in the real world can take many, many forms. And so that imagination, that creativity, and sometimes the resistance, these are all valid ways to inhabit and steer the systems that we live in.
[Dave Eng] (19:55 - 20:28)
Thanks Thomas. I appreciate the insight here and I think that it's a really beautiful and poignant way of using games for teaching and learning, especially this reflective aspect. My question for you is more of an anecdotal one.
I wanted to know have you ever played CyberNations with anyone who has really made a decision in the game in order to affect how the next group would play it? Because for me, I'm thinking as an individual it has no impact for me, but I could potentially change something in the game that will affect someone else. Has something like that ever happened to you?
[Thomas Biedermann] (20:29 - 23:05)
Yeah, look, there's been a couple. I'm going to give you two examples. When I was playing at a game designers conference here in Australia, I had two new players who came in who were very good friends, very full-on players, and they picked up the idea of the game very quickly and they completely turned it on its head.
They started playing hyper-competitively, so they were less interested in achieving the community's vision and more in stopping each other from achieving their own goal. And then out of fun or for release, they just decided to crash the community and make it as horrible as possible. And obviously this is not what the game is trying to teach, but that's also a way for players to express and to engage with the next group of players to create a different challenge and see, okay, if we are actually completely hell-bent on our own selfish goals and our own enjoyment, what kind of world are we creating for the next group of players?
And the next group of players after that one had a really, really tough game to try and clear things out, but they engaged with it beautifully. And then the second one was in a game where the players had a very specific set of objectives to achieve that asked them to set the community and its environment in a very particular way. Throughout the game, a series of disruptions came in that changed that goal and that moved it from basically achieving sustainable development to a version in which the players were asked now by the game to start generating environmental damage.
And those players decided to forego their own goal and their own winning of the game because the objective had been changed in such a way that they didn't feel comfortable and okay in pursuing that goal anymore, which to me was an interesting experience of they were on board for the goal, then the goal changed and they decided to abandon the goal. Thinking of the next group of players.
[Dave Eng] (23:06 - 23:22)
Interesting. I feel like based on this, every game of CyberNations that begins is always going to be truly unique because it's based heavily on who had completed it before and how that first game went or previous game went. Wow.
Yeah.
[Thomas Biedermann] (23:24 - 24:29)
Sorry, I was going to say, yeah, I think it's interesting because there's the mechanical carrying over of the game between each session, but there's also the kind of stories and the messages that the players kind of put into the game. And to me that's been one of the really interesting things that have come out of running those various kind of parallel play sessions, is that the weight of history and the histories that the players build has a very strong kind of influence on the kind of actions and perspectives that future players take in that area. If a game starts, it might be going similarly to another, but the way that the players kind of couch their message shapes how future players kind of engage with that story, with that lineage, that timeline if you wish. So the narrative elements are powerful in there as well.
[Dave Eng] (24:30 - 24:49)
Yeah. Very exciting and very interesting and something that I think that others I hope in the field can really explore and iterate on on their own. But Thomas, unfortunately we've come to the end of the show.
Thanks for joining us again today. Where can people go to find out more about you and your work online?
[Thomas Biedermann] (24:50 - 25:15)
Yeah, look, my pleasure. Look, people can find me in the people section of cybernetics.anu.edu.au, which is the website of the school. I'm also on LinkedIn and Facebook as Thomas Biedermann.
Or Thomas Biedermann, I should say. I've become anglicized myself. You can find me there.
All right.
[Dave Eng] (25:16 - 26:16)
Well, thank you, Thomas. I appreciate you being here. I hope everyone has found this episode useful.
If you'd like to learn more, then a great place to start is my free course on gamification. You can sign up for it at www.universityxp.com/gamification. You can also get a full transcript of this episode including links to the references in the description or show notes.
Thanks for joining us. Again, I'm your host Dave Eng from Games Based Learning by University XP. On Experience Points, we explore different ways we can learn from games.
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Also, feel free to email me anytime. My email address is dave@universityxp.com. Game on!
Cite this Episode
Eng, D. (Host). (2026, [October 4]). Thomas Biedermann on CyberNations. (No. [174]) [Audio podcast episode]. Experience Points. University XP. https://www.universityxp.com/podcast/174
Internal Ref: UXP6EZ8VITLP
References
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