Why I Believe “Playful Things to Think With” Can Change the World

Stephen P. Anderson
7 min readJan 23, 2025

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Some of you may be aware of my personal mission:

To make learning the hard stuff fun,

by creating ‘things to think with’

and ‘spaces’ for generative play

I want to elaborate a bit on this mission statement, specifically the second line about creating ‘things to think with.’ I maintain the Thinking Things newsletter, where I regularly share a variety of ‘playful things to think with’ — everything from card decks (always!) to interactive visualizations to facilitation frameworks. To date, I’ve shared close to 500 examples. But why? Why is finding, curating, sharing, and making ‘playful things to think with’ so… missional for me?

When I look out at the goings on in the world, behind all the polarization, hate, incoherent ideas, knee-jerk reactions, and so on, behind it all I see a fundamental lack of critical thinking skills. I see the kind of future Ray Bradbury warned us about in Fahrenheit 451, where complacency has given way to an illiterate and unquestioning society. I see Idiocracy. Note, I’m using ‘critical thinking skills’ here as a catchphrase for all kinds of literacies (digital, visual, data, media, computational, cultural, problem-solving, etc.) as well as the harder work of looking inward, to assess our own biases, blind spots, and blockers.

There is no shortage of books, coaching options, courses, and more, created to address these issues. And I have no issues with these materials. But… there’s an effort in these things that is often too much friction for a large majority of folks. Or, the effort required to understand something outweighs the casual interest most people have. Low interest and low motivation lead to no effort put into understanding.

But what if… some of the effort, some of the friction, could be reduced? What if it was easier to honestly and thoughtfully engage with difficult topics?

I believe many difficult ideas can be made more accessible, NOT by dumbing things down, but by rethinking how we interact with information. My book Figure it Out was precisely about this: How to work with information to create understanding. Notice, understanding is something you create, not something that comes to you. Learning requires active engagement.

In the years since that book was published, I’ve boiled down the essential message of that book to three simple statements:

Give form to ideas.

Manipulate those forms.

Do this together.

By creating visuals, making games, creating and playing simulations, and so on, we can make complex ideas more accessible — and personally relevant. And, as learning is social, it’s critical that we practice collaboration in the process of sensemaking.

I’ll pick one medium (board games) to elaborate on how these thinking things can alter and/or improve our thinking.

Strategy board games as playful things to think with

Strategy board games are great at letting us play through complex scenarios, to see — and feel, viscerally — the cause and effect outcomes of our different choices. We play a game, lose, and — if it’s a fun game — we play again. We test out different strategies and tactics, until we discover those patterns that seem to change the outcome in a desired direction. We acquire heuristics. We make difficult choices. We learn. We keep playing until we learn how to master the game, whether that’s defeating opponents or, as is the case with cooperative games, we defeat the game — together.

As I write this, my friends and I have been playing Daybreak, a cooperative game where players must work together to decarbonize the planet and create resilient societies. If you don’t play the game well, all kinds of bad things (hurricanes, fires, famines, a global financial crisis, etc.) begin to cascade upon each other, until there’s a collapse of… everything! We haven’t beat the game — yet. But, we’re getting better. And we’re learning.

Hero shot for the board game Daybreak

It was during our last game that I half-joked: I wish the incoming administration was required to play this game, until they beat it, just once. While this wish is unlikely to happen (and the critical climate issues at stake are likely already understood [??] and just ignored — calling for a different kind of thing to think with), I might expect this to happen elsewhere, with family members or acquaintances who might not share my same concerns about our climate crisis.

  • IF… through playing a game like this, someone becomes more familiar with the concepts behind the science headlines,
  • IF… the effects of not responding sooner were experienced and understood in a fictional setting,
  • IF… players could debate the merits of the game,

…aren’t these all win conditions?

If people are honestly engaging with critical issues, in a civil and critical way, isn’t this a good thing?

Photo of an in-progress game of Daybreak
A game of Daybreak in progress. [Source]

All models are wrong

I will of course add that games such as Daybreak, are an abstraction. As the adage goes, ‘all models are wrong, some are useful.’ As a game, Daybreak has to focus on a few considerations, to the exclusion of others. It can’t realistically account for every climate detail in a scientifically accurate way, else it’d be an overly complicated and boring game. The ultimate win-lose condition of Daybreak is that of managing climate change (with winning mostly limited to reducing emissions). But, climate change is one of nine planetary boundaries we need to stay within, so humanity can safely operate (FWIW, the nine planetary boundaries framework is also a model; also, climate change is one of the three core boundaries closely linked to all the others). None of this abstraction of details makes Daybreak any less useful as a thing to think with. As with tools like the Business Model Canvas or singular metrics like GDP, abstracting out some details to direct our focus doesn’t invalidate the usefulness of these things as a thinking tool — one tool among many, in the tool belt.

Play

There’s another hidden advantage to games: Play. Play is how we learn. Play is a powerful way to diffuse difficult situations. When we play at things, we are, in a way, removed from present (and combustible!) realities. When we play games, we enter a “magic circle” with others, with shared goals and rules. If I play Daybreak with a climate denier, those beliefs get set aside for the moment, as we work toward the shared goals within the game, whether that represents our personal views or not. But what happens next? Exposure to ideas, some of which may be new. Reflection. Conversation. Dialogue. A common refrain I find myself saying about most facilitation activities is that it’s the dialogue that these things open up that is most important. It’s the mapping, not the map. My article on dot voting ends with this little quip: “The value of dot voting is as a discussion tool, not a tool for making decisions.” With a game, there’s now a bunch of social objects around which we can have a conversation; these things depersonalize the conversation. We’re focused on a something shared between us. There’s a small — but critical — degree of difference between debating deeply held beliefs versus debating a thing we’re both looking at, and a thing neither of us proposed! Play is a social lubricant, that allows us let our guard down, and have more civil conversations. Hence, this is why I’m especially interested in playful things to think with.

All kinds of playful things to think with

I’ve only focused on board games here, and only one example of a board game, but I see the same kind of potential in all kinds of mediums:

  • Graphic Novels / Comics
  • Flowcharts
  • Interactive Fiction / Gamebooks
  • Card Decks
  • Simulations
  • Board Games
  • Wargames
  • Video Games
  • Interactive webpages
  • Cases / Case Studies
  • Role-Playing Games
  • Frameworks & Canvases
  • Facilitation Activities
  • Conceptual Maps
  • Zines

In varying degrees, these playful things to think with all represent different ways to hold and interact with complex ideas. In distinct ways, they transform a passive learning activity into something active, demanding participation & engagement. And they’re fun!

Changing the world, one ‘thing’ at a time?

As I survey all the challenges facing us, our civilization, they range from:

  • the already solved (but not widely understood), to
  • the mildly complicated, to
  • the truly complex, to
  • the infuriating kinds of manufactured asymmetric polarization, used to distract and manipulate.

We also have systemic issues that require us to connect the dots or scratch at the surface to see what’s really going on; if you’re thinking critically, these things can be obvious, but to others it can seem cryptic or conspiratorial. I believe no amount of messaging will convince another person, especially if their worldview or identity is wrapped up in their beliefs. But, acts of imagination, open ended questions, tools that make it easy to play with possibilities — these create safe ways to consider an otherwise foreign or offensive idea.

And there is no shortage of topics that could benefit from deeper reflection. Common themes in the things I’ve shared include:

  • our present climate crisis
  • thinking strategically
  • self-awareness
  • various scientific theories
  • sustainability
  • accessibility and inclusion
  • limits of growth
  • leadership
  • narrative structures
  • making difficult decisions
  • useful meeting practices
  • navigating conflict
  • energy
  • management
  • motivation
  • futures thinking
  • ethics
  • AI
  • cybersecurity
  • community
  • grief
  • digital literacy
  • systems thinking / complexity

Whew! I could go on.

The more we can equip ourselves to reflect on (and eventually take action on) these kinds of topics, the better off we’ll all be. This is why I share playful things to think with. Both for what each “find” offers, but also what we can learn from these mediums, from a cognitive perspective. In doing so, we can be more than being mere consumers of these things, we can learn to create our own playful things to think with, as ways to make sense of difficult situations. I believe these kinds of playful things to think with are a way to make us all a more literate and educated society.

Maybe this is all wishful thinking, But this is what I am believing, and how I, personally, choose to make the world better a better place.

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Stephen P. Anderson
Stephen P. Anderson

Written by Stephen P. Anderson

Speaker, facilitator, and product leader. On a mission to make learning the hard stuff fun, by creating ‘things to think with’ and ‘spaces’ for generative play.

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