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The NIMBY Game
The NIMBY (Not In My BackYard) Game is board game that challenges players to plan a city in such a way that the quality of life for all players is maximized. Players are forced to make difficult decisions and compromises in order to place a range of urban elements — parks, factories, a casino, a convention center — so that they do not disproportionately affect any one neighborhood. By virtue of the geography of the board game and core objective of the game, the fate of the players is bound together so that self-interest must be balanced by the common good in order for the game to be won.
The NIMBY Game was produced as a part of Social Media for Social Change, a project of the Philadelphia Applied Research Project at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Social Media for Social Change is a design research project that asks the question: "How can we re-imagine civil discourse in the context of social media and networked communication?"
There are many assumptions about how the internet and social media facilitate democracy and interaction. This project aims to break down some of these assumptions and test them out in controlled environments so that we can better understand how to create space for real civic discourse.
SMSC is collaboration between The Action Mill and Professor Jeremy Beaudry (Multimedia) and undergraduate students (Ona Krass, Hunter Augeri, and Alie Thomer) at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Initial funding for SMSC is provided by the Philadelphia Applied Research Project within the College of Media and Communication at The University of the Arts.
Project website: teach.boxwith.com/socialmedia
