Market Entropy

Market Entropy is a board game prototype originally created in the context of the ReShaping the Plastics NZ Ecosystem project. This multiplayer game is applicable to any stakeholders striving to transform their business attitudes to focus on market-shaping within entropy.

The game is played out on a slanted grid to display the interconnectedness of policies and demands in a generalised, abstracted marketplace. Resources are symbolised by colour-coded, stackable blocks which can be built into products. Over nine phases including turns of purchasing, running factories, voting, and building, players use tokens and playing cards to create actions, bids, and player-roles in the market.

The market-shaping perspectives in Market Entropy acknowledge that players have agency to influence the market ecosystems themselves, creating strategies that hold up even as the marketplace is in constant flux. Players who are more adaptable are more likely to succeed.

The physicality of a table-top board game makes visible and tactile the often secretive practices of market players and treats resources, such as energy and funds, as exhaustible rather than exploitatively viewing them as infinite.

The game premise exists to symbolise the shifting affects of demands, policies, and available resources and how players can actively participate in shaping them. Gameplay captures the entropy of market systems and communicates that while players can prepare for flux they cannot predict everything.

Playtesting will provide the space to gain feedback and collaborate creatively with our business partners, mapping out dynamics and finding communal win-states, and bridging our understandings.

Should the win-states truly be based on capital? Or could it be sustainability? The power to influence the market? During play, these decisions can be made through safe, virtual interventions to inform how we work together in the real-world.