Objective

Trade policy is the least playable subject imaginable. The decisions are slow, the feedback arrives years later, and the interesting part, that everyone else reacts to what you did, is exactly the part a static explainer cannot show.

Which is the argument for making it a game rather than another report. But a game about tariffs has to teach its own rules while being played, to an audience who came for the subject and not for the genre, and who will close the tab the moment it feels like homework.

Creative response

Game interface design, for Coriolis Technologies.

• A front end that behaves like a game. Career mode, Challenges, How to play, Options and Saved games: the conventions of the form, used straight, over a world map
• A two-question setup. Choose your country from the G20, then choose Real play or Free play, the whole difficulty model in one dropdown, real-world constraints on or off
• Six policy levers as icons, with the actions written out beneath them: reduce tariffs, increase tariffs, increase sustainable energy, decrease sustainable energy
• A proposed-action panel. The move is stated as a sentence, United Kingdom to increase sustainability, and confirmed with GO, so a player always reads what they are about to do in plain English before it happens
• A timeline from 2000 to 2060, running the width of the board, with the play head sitting near the present
• A Global News feed, carrying dated events, a US election, a national lockdown, a vaccine, so the world has a life independent of the player's turn
• Two mock-up rounds, 18 February and 8 March 2021, in the MultiLateral and Coriolis livery

Stating the move as a sentence is the decision that makes the subject teachable. A game that reports Tariff −2.5% is asking the player to already know what that means; United Kingdom to increase sustainability, sitting on the map next to a GO button, teaches the vocabulary in the act of using it. The number can come afterwards, once the player has a reason to care about it.

The news feed does the harder half. Without it, a policy game is a spreadsheet with buttons: the player acts, a figure moves, nothing else happens. Dated headlines arriving between turns establish that the board is not waiting for you, which is both the truth about trade policy and the thing that makes a turn feel worth taking.

And the sixty-year timeline is a claim about the subject. Set the range to a parliament and the game rewards the moves that pay off inside one; set it to 2060 and the player finds out which of their decisions were actually about energy.

• A front end that behaves like a game. Career mode, Challenges, How to play, Options and Saved games: the conventions of the form, used straight, over a world map
• A two-question setup. Choose your country from the G20, then choose Real play or Free play, the whole difficulty model in one dropdown, real-world constraints on or off
• Six policy levers as icons, with the actions written out beneath them: reduce tariffs, increase tariffs, increase sustainable energy, decrease sustainable energy
• A proposed-action panel. The move is stated as a sentence, United Kingdom to increase sustainability, and confirmed with GO, so a player always reads what they are about to do in plain English before it happens
• A timeline from 2000 to 2060, running the width of the board, with the play head sitting near the present
• A Global News feed, carrying dated events, a US election, a national lockdown, a vaccine, so the world has a life independent of the player's turn
• Two mock-up rounds, 18 February and 8 March 2021, in the MultiLateral and Coriolis livery

The work