CyberNations

CyberNations is a semi-cooperative board game about leading a community through an uncertain near-future Australia. Players take on different roles, balancing shared goals with personal agendas as they respond to crises, negotiate priorities, and shape the future together.

At its heart, the game is about leadership in complex systems and intergenerational fairness: feedback loops, disruption, adaptation, and the difficult trade-offs involved in collective decision-making. Every choice changes the world, and each game leaves a persistent legacy for the next group of players through the evolving Chronicle.

CyberNations is developed at the ANU School of Cybernetics to help people explore systems thinking in a social, hands-on way. Today, it’s being used in classrooms, workshops, and community settings to spark discussion about resilience, leadership, and the futures we want to build together.

Please read the background information: About the Game - LINK.

Systems shape today's fast, connected and changing world. Organisations and communities need to invite and synthesise different perspectives to make sense of the world, anticipate futures, and maintain their viability. Tailored gameful experiences like CyberNations provide spaces to share those perspectives; formulate scenarios and strategies; and safely practice implementing them.

In this session, you will:

• Receive a brief introduction to systems modelling;
• Play a facilitated game of CyberNations;
• As a group, discuss your experience and share insights.

And explore some of the resources:

• An introduction to cybernetics (Ashby, 1961, Chapman & Hall), pp202-205
• Homo Ludens (Huizinga, 1949, Routledge) p1
• Gaming: the future’s language (Duke, 1974), p170-171
• Cardboard Ghosts: using physical games to model & critique systems (Holland, 2025, Taylor & Francis), pp58-64
• Inayatullah, S. ‘Gaming, Ways of Knowing, and Futures’, Journal of Futures Studies, Dec. 2017, 22(2): 101–106
• Gaming Utopia: Ludic worlds in art, design and media (Pederson, 2021, Indiana University Press) p230

CyberNations is part of a research program at the ANU School of Cybernetics, about developing, deploying and assessing gameful experiences for education, decision-making and impact. You can learn more at: https://cybernetics.anu.edu.au/projects/gameful-experiences-for-hopeful-futures/

Please consider the trajectory of the game of your group. Take a photo of your board at the end of the session. We will discuss as a group around the following prompts at the end of the session:

The game as a system:

• How does the game behave as system?

• Were there times where you had a particularly strong (positive or negative) reaction? What do these reactions tell you?

• What were the tension between the overall mission goals and your individual goals Were there trade-offs that you had to manage?
  
  

The game as an analogy:

• Were you able to align your strategy with others in the game? What helped or made it harder to do that?

• Does the game remind you of particular situations you have experienced in your life, education or work?

• Are there parts of the game that feel particularly realistic or unrealistic?
  
  

Looking forward:

• What is the key learning you are taking from this playthrough?

• Are there you will do differently from now on (in a future play of the game or in your own context?)

• What do you need to research, ask or talk about? With whom and when?