Greetings from Asia, where I am on vacation eating so much good food just to prove that one can out-eat Ozempic. Do let me know if America still has a government at midnight.
We don’t have a guest this week on the podcast, so instead, Laurence Pevsner and I recorded a special outdoor episode from Carmel Valley during our Lux Leaders Retreat to reflect on our recent Riskgaming launches and runthroughs and what happens next.
We discuss the emergent gameplay in Gray Matter that surprised us — from spontaneous character-driven debates to unexpected trading outcomes — and we explore the game’s core mechanics around information markets, attention economies, and strategic publication decisions, examining how players navigate the tension between keeping information proprietary versus making it public for advantage.
We then shift the conversation to Southwest Silicon, our full-immersion simulation focused on Arizona’s semiconductor industry and water security challenges. We discuss how this immersive format differs from our larger salon experiences, highlighting the intricacies of water rights in the American Southwest and how players grappled with resource allocation decisions that mirror real-world policy dilemmas.
Looking ahead, we preview upcoming games exploring urban automation, critical mineral supply chains, university research funding, civil infrastructure security, and the future of international development institutions. Finally, we also discuss our philosophy of using game design to model emerging technologies and reimagine institutional frameworks for an AI-driven future.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. For a full version of the conversation, please subscribe to our podcast.
Danny Crichton:
Laurence, we just launched your new game, Gray Matter, at two locations — in New York and here in Carmel for our Lux Leaders Retreat. How did it go?
Laurence Pevsner:
It was a smashing success, I think, but I’m a little biased.
There’s nothing quite like having all of these ideas in your head. You’re designing the game. You’re thinking about how players are going to interact, what they’re going to do, and then what they actually do is always different. It’s always incredible.
That’s the beauty of these games — the emergent quality. People do things you don’t expect. In New York, for example, at one point one of the players took a champagne glass and rapped their spoon against it as if they were making an announcement. The whole crowd hushed because they thought it was one of us making an announcement about the game.
And instead this player went on a rant about how all of the NeuroLifts [the three drugs at the center of the game] were terrible — it was all part of their character. And then all of a sudden other people in the crowd started shouting back with their opinions based on their characters.
And it really felt like, okay, this is happening. These people are really embodying these roles. And we didn’t tell the players to do anything like that.
Danny Crichton:
Let’s take a step back here and say how this game works.
Laurence Pevsner:
So Gray Matter is about the intersection of informational markets, attentional markets and money markets. Who has information? Who’s putting that information out there and making it go viral? And who’s using that information to make money?
One of the main aspects of this game is that people can take private information and make it public to everybody — all the other players, the FDA (which is monitoring decisions), and fact-checkers (who are looking at the truth environment of the game). There are some players who are heavily incentivized to publish private information. And some players are heavily incentivized to keep information private.
Logically, it’s the attention agents, the people who are podcasters or Substackers, who want to put out the information they get. That’s their whole stock-in-trade. And then you’ve got the people who have money. Sometimes people who have money want to put information out there; think about the investor who wants to pump their product and make sure that their company is getting the eyeballs they need. But sometimes if you’re an investor, you want to keep information private.
Danny Crichton:
Right, so we have information markets, we have attention markets, and we have money markets. You also have a mechanism, and I don’t know if this happened in either of the games, where if you can keep one of your clues completely unpublished so that it doesn’t become available to the public — it’s basically information held only by you. There’s a small bonus for doing this with one of your clues and a massive shoot-the-moon bonus if you can get both. Did anyone actually succeed?
Laurence Pevsner:
Yes. Not only that, but the two players who won here in Carmel Valley both succeeded on that front.
Danny Crichton:
Amazing.
Laurence Pevsner:
Right? And actually it was amazing to watch. I was watching one of the players, our own Michelle Fang. There was a player who was going to publish information, and she literally dove in front of the public board and was like, “Wait! I need that not to be published. What can we do to make that happen?”
She gave away quite a lot from what I could tell. It was a little bit of carrot, a little bit of stick, and eventually they got a deal done, and she was able to maintain that high quality, highly credible clue that didn’t get published, and it ultimately allowed her to be tied for first at the end of the game.
Danny Crichton:
Unbelievable. This game is a lot of fun.
Beyond Gray Matter, we also just launched Southwest Silicon with our designer, Ian Curtiss. We did an episode with him about the game two weeks ago, and he just subbed in for me as a guest host in last week’s episode.
Let’s talk about Southwest Silicon, because one of the things we’re really just now learning as Riskgaming entrepreneurs is the model of having two types of games. We have full-immersion simulations like Southwest Silicon, which is played by smaller groups of people, six to eight or nine, multi-hour. We really go in-depth on a specific topic. And then your game Gray Matter, and two others — including DeepFaked and DeepSixed, which is on our website — are these sort of salon experiences. They are often designed with partners who are hosting a conference and have an hour or so when they want to do something more interesting than sitting at cocktail tables regaling about their LinkedIn.
Laurence Pevsner:
If you think about a game like Gray Matter, we are covering a lot of different subjects. We’re looking at all kinds of things in the field of biotech, nootropics, which can be seen as a metaphor for AI. We’re thinking about Ritalin and psychedelics and all these crazy topics. And it’s a big broad-based view. I had people come up to me to talk about the lessons they learned.
But it’s fundamentally different from a game like Southwest Silicon, through which you go really deep on one particular topic. And in this case, it is a topic most people don’t really understand. Of course, everyone’s talking about chips these days. When we played the game in London, a lot of those folks were very familiar with the topic. They knew about the importance of chips to the future of tech. But almost none of them knew about the water security element of this. Every chip fab has to deal with water security, it’s just that the problem is particularly acute and complicated in Arizona, where the game is based.
I was struck in that game by a couple of things. One, by how much the background really helped the players. So we gave a really in-depth pre-brief so that, when the players were negotiating, they had a really deep sense of the policy landscape. I think that helped them play the game appropriately.
The second thing I was surprised by, and I’m curious if you expected this as well, is that the game was a slow burn. Trades were being made, deals were happening, people were making moves, but it wasn’t frenetic with energy until the very end. And then all of a sudden there was this amazing auction that took place, where the person deciding where the factory was going to go was literally wheeling and dealing between the various cities, and other players were tripping over themselves to get the deal and then seeing what they could tolerate.
To me, that was demonstrative of how these things often work in real life, where there’s a lot of quiet conversations that happen behind the scenes. Maybe it’s boring paperwork. People are making their moves, but then it comes to a head. There’s a moment when it explodes onto the scene, and the big conflict happens, and the news reports on that. But to get to that moment, there was a lot of setup that had to take place. I’m curious if you feel like you’ve seen that in other Riskgaming scenarios we’ve run before?
Danny Crichton:
I think it depends on the runthrough and the group of people. Some people don’t want to make decisions upfront. We played a beta test of this game in Tokyo, and that was a slow burn. In that case, it was a very cultural dynamic, where people were just trying to learn the rules and the experience. At some point, toward the end of the game, it’s like, no, no, it’s time to make decisions!
In other cases, groups don’t compete or they’re trying to figure out whether they should compete or cooperate, and exactly when to do so, and so there’s just a miscalibration. In some other cases, we have business execs or folks who are in much more intense industries and are comfortable making decisions instantaneously. Often they make the wrong decision, and sometimes they’re basically irrevocably going to lose after the first round because they’ve made a terrible mistake early on. And so it really just depends.
To me, the thing that’s interesting about our contribution to the debate is that everyone’s focused on data centers, water, security, and how much water is being used. And there is a big debate on how much this matters versus a golf course, which is a huge issue. Or an Arizona alfalfa farm.
What they’re not focused on, though, is the complexity around water rights in the American Southwest and West in general, where over the last 150 years, in order to get water to a place, you either had to channel it, dam it, go through an irrigation district, et cetera. And so there’s just thousands of these water districts. And in order to get water to your chip fab in the center of Phoenix, you have to cobble together a path through all these individual water rights from Point A to Point B.
It’s a little bit like trying to cobble together property to build a building. You don’t want people to know you’re doing it. So there’s all this skullduggery going on. You have all of these corps with anonymous owners. They’re trading these rights. It’s very, very opaque. And yet water is the elixir of life. It’s the most important resource, particularly in the desert, particularly in the American Southwest, which is going through a drought with the Colorado River at historic lows.
We try to offer a little bit of a different perspective of saying, we should really focus on what these rights are, how they work. When we played in London, they didn’t understand any of this. It just doesn’t work that way, obviously, in London. So on top of the value of understanding the chip fabs and water and security and economic growth, we also have this another layer of imparting more understanding of the American political system.
Laurence Pevsner:
One of the important players in the game is a Native American tribe. In real life, tribes own a good amount of water rights. And I remember the players in London asked, “Can you give us a metaphor for a UK equivalent?” It’s hard to do.
Danny Crichton:
And look, these issues are going on in real time. The Gila River Indian Community, which is in central Arizona, was named for a river that has water, but that water was stolen by the federal government a century ago. Recent Supreme Court cases have basically returned access to that water to the Indian nation. And so all of a sudden, you had this bounty of a resource everyone needs. You want to protect it for yourself and legacy and heritage, but you also have this economic resource that’s valuable.
In the last couple of years, we’ve seen this massive shift around those rights led by Neil Gorsuch and others on the Supreme Court who have made that an issue for the first time in almost 100 years. And so these water rights are not just a couple sheets of paper in the game. They’re literally being traded at the highest levels of American jurisprudence, and they can massively affect communities throughout Arizona and the American Southwest.
Laurence Pevsner:
One other thing I noticed about the game as we were doing what’s called “the teach” — when we try to explain to players how to play the game — one of the more complicated aspects of the game is the water rights. There are different kinds of water, and there are different levels of rights you can have. The players are like, “Wow, this is complicated.” And what’s funny about that is we have already massively oversimplified the different ways water rights work to make the game function. And yet, that was still the most complicated part of the game.
Danny Crichton:
Yes, yes. So that game is online. You can download it. It’s the fourth one we’ve published. We have a total of seven games that have been designed. We have three others that, someday, you and I will get around to actually publishing on the internet. So what’s next? What are we doing?
Laurence Pevsner:
I am really excited about the games we have coming up. We have a number of new games and new partners we’re going to be working with to develop those games and to put them out. I’m particularly excited about a game exploring automation in cities. Players will actually get to play different kinds of cities and different places. So think resort towns versus college towns versus manufacturing towns. Everyone’s thinking about AI. And of course, we were here at the Lux Leaders Retreat, and all of the CEOs who work in AI are like, “Yeah, there’s a really good point about potential job loss here.”
Some are obviously arguing that AI is going to be a boon for jobs. Some are saying, “Yeah, if I’m being honest, it’s going to be really tough, especially for white collar workers and especially for workers coming out of college who aren’t already at the top of their field.” So that game is going to be particularly applicable. It’s only going to become more and more relevant as time goes on.
What games are you excited about?
Danny Crichton:
Ian is working on his next game, which is focused on critical minerals. We finally gave in to the constant demand for a critical mineral supply chain game! Although I think we have quite a twist in it that will make it way more fun than people expect. So I’m looking forward to that in the next couple of months. We’ll hopefully publish it early to mid next year.
And then we have a lot of conceptual stuff going on. We have stuff around Taiwan. We have stuff around space, specifically the balance between space commerce and space security. And we’re seeing more and more nation-state actors as well as just everyday hackers going into these systems.
These days, I’m particularly interested in civil security. So looking at civil infrastructure — power plants, sewage, water systems. These are increasingly being digitized. They’re on the web. In California, where we’re sitting now, PG&E has connected its grid to the internet to be able to monitor it, to be able to check for wildfires. But that means they are now vulnerable to hacking, and they need to be secured. And in many cases, there’s no security at all in these systems. It’s a huge topic we’ve even had senators mention.
And then the last is going back to sci-fi. We have a lot of science-fictional companies, companies in xenotransplantation, orbital mirrors for sunlight. So many interesting new businesses that are going to come in the next five to seven years and are going to transform humanity. I feel like we have a lot of present day security problems, and the bias is always what’s happening today. But we really want to look around the corner and say, “What happens if all these technologies come together?” A world in which photovoltaic farms are fed 24/7, 365. Does that transform the energy grid? What does that do? Suddenly solar doesn’t turn off at 8:00 PM.
We have these huge changes and shifts that are underway in the next couple of years from science and technology, and I’m really excited to try to model those in real games.
Laurence Pevsner:
I’ve been thinking along the same lines. I’ve been toying around with the idea of cutting-edge science research and how that happens at the university. I didn’t go to a big university. I went to a small liberal arts college. And so I found universities totally bizarre once I started looking into them and all the different functions.
How cutting-edge science gets developed there has become especially relevant. A lot of our companies are spun out of labs at these schools, and it’s become a big problem because all of their science research funding is getting cut at the federal level. We have, of course, the Lux Science Helpline, which you can still call in if you need help. We are here to help. Since we’re getting tons of outreach through that, it started to make me think like, well, what is it about the university that relies on federal funding in this way? And how would they do without it? How would that work?
Danny Crichton:
The last thing for me is thinking about the next generation of institutions like USAID and others that have been demolished. In many cases, they had good missions although there’s definitely a diversity of views on their effectiveness. Now that they have been dismantled, what does 2.0 look like? There’s a real opportunity from the Riskgaming perspective to simulate new types of institutions, whether it’s science or universities, whether it’s research funding, whether it’s USAID and global development, et cetera. There’s a whole new set of institutions that can come up.
Laurence Pevsner:
Yeah. And I think the exact same thing is true with the universities. It’s true with some of these big companies that are being disrupted. It’s true even within the game we have with the chip fabs. Okay, yes, we had the CHIPS Act. What’s next, and how do we actually make this work? That’s what we’re always trying to search for: how to build something better out of the rubble.
