Abstract for: Glaring Reality Simulation Game Workshop

Glaring Reality is an innovative physical simulation game designed to support collaboration, systems thinking literacy, and systemic sense-making across diverse stakeholder groups. Domain-agnostic, highly customizable, and adaptable to co-design and co-creation, the game enables participants to explore scenarios that evolve from simple and complicated situations to complex, wicked, and black-box problems. Its non-academic, low-barrier format makes systems thinking more approachable for non-specialists while maintaining depth and richness of engagement. Delivered in workshop settings that combine introduction, gameplay, and organic reflection, Glaring Reality has been used in business schools, city councils, NGOs, universities, and other settings with participants from varied domains and age groups. Across these sessions, participants have engaged deeply in both play and reflection, generating “aha” moments, questioning their own mental models, discussing feedback loops, and connecting the experience to challenges in their own contexts. The game has consistently been experienced as immersive, insightful, and fun. In a time of increasing uncertainty and growing need for collective futures-thinking, Glaring Reality offers a promising and scalable approach for wider systems engagement, with strong potential to complement other system dynamics and systemic change practices in both nonprofit and for-profit sectors.