LAB A/U

types on the board -- those are the game pieces. Each player has their own color of developments, but the pieces only differ by size -- short, medium, and tall -- not by program.

We tried to avoid value judgments, and simplify development as a type of investment in the land. Even at the beginning of the game you are given conditions of how to build, but not what you’re actually building.

There is no question about quality of life on those properties. If you are using it as simulation it breaks down, because there’s no explicit programmed activity to simulate among the properties. Some Situation Cards do refer implicitly to quality of life or a particular activity, and are based on historical issues: smog, riots, the Olympics. If you have the personal relationship, you can refer back to that specific moment and personalize the game, but if you don’t know it, then you get an idea of what developing Los Angeles might have meant.

The game avoids simulation, focusing more on creating a fiction -- the outcome is always going to be different. I think there is a false logic in data-driven design, that treats data as the beginning and end. Something like, “we used all our data therefore it is an infallible judgment and product”. At that point, if everything is supported by the irrefutability of data and not by the designer’s choices, it no longer has authorship, and that releases the “designers” of any social or political responsibility. It also gives their design strategy a kind of datasupremacy and inevitability, while part of it is indelibly about a personal style and design.