Thailand Institute of Justice – Welcome to Arcadia the Game
Challenge
How do you create a shared language for policymakers working across fragmented and siloed justice initiatives? The goal: spark collaboration and proactive design in a system known for complexity, contradiction, and inertia.
Approach:
We designed a cooperative Serious Game that draws from speculative futures tools, ethnographic research, and real-world justice work in Thailand. The gameplay challenges participants to navigate justice scenarios while balancing power dynamics, representing community voices, and identifying actionable entry points for systems change. It became a platform for learning, trust-building, and conversation that continues long after the session ends.
Interesting Insight:
A person’s norms and state of being can shift radically as they move from one space to another: from a train station, to a public park, to work, to home, etc. The way we act, feel, and speak is deeply rooted in the space we are in. But this isn’t one sided; government officials, community organizers, and people of the public all have specific roles they can play to shape these spaces in return to make them equitable, resilient, and healthy. When you layer in who typically appears across these different spheres of influence, which exact cultures, you can then strategize how even the most unlikely partners can collaborate.
Impact:
The game is now a regular staple in the Future Thinking for Social Justice curriculum, played by hundreds of policy makers. It is currently being turned into a standalone single player experience to help policy makers strategize on their own projects.
Related Work:
The game is a vital part of a much larger whole. The team has conducted participatory, longitudinal research into building resilient communities within Bangkok. This work fueled a project on assuaging gender based violence using a strategic foresight lens, started the Smile Space initiative to overcome unhealthy self-expression habits, and influenced strategy at the social teen program Mindventure and the mental health campaign “Unknown Together,” sponsored by Facebook and UN Thailand.