Gamifying CSS’s Picture This! Tool for Workshops

Gamifying CSS’s Picture This! Tool for Workshops

Whether you are an organizer wanting a fun way to brainstorm new tactics or a group of friends plotting to take over the world, get the creativity flowing with the Picture This! Tactics Game.

With the Picture This! Tactics Game, you and your team can quickly break from formulaic, predictable protest tactics and into creative, exciting new territory with a game that’s fun and accessible for activists and organizers of all backgrounds and experience levels.

A gamification of the Picture This! tool from Center for Story-Based Strategy, this game challenges players to come up with the most entertaining and thought-provoking descriptions of social movement protest tactics in response to hypothetical social injustice scenarios. Through the game, players learn how to target strategic points of intervention with their protest tactics in order to disrupt systems of injustice.

The game can be played virtually using zoom and this website or in-person with a physical Picture This! card deck and these instructions.

Game Play

Overview

The object of the game is to come up with the most entertaining and thought-provoking descriptions of social movement protest tactics in response to hypothetical social injustice scenarios. Players decide on a social injustice scenario and each round take turns creating fun, inspiring, or wacky tactics in response.

The Play

Each player is given cards with a set of three constraints they must follow in designing a tactic. They are 1) a Point of Intervention in the system of injustice that their tactic will interrupt; 2) a Medium that their protest will take; and 3) an Emotion that their tactic will provoke in the public that views your tactic.

Each round, one player will be the decider/judge who picks the winning tactic while the other players try to win the decider/judge’s favor by proposing the most creative, fun or powerful tactic following the constraints on their cards. The decider/judge picks the tactic they like most and the player who proposed the tactic wins a point.

Winning

First player to get 3 points wins.

Using the Game in Campaigns

Use the game with your campaign as a fun way to learn points of intervention. The game can be used before a strategy session to get participants thinking nimbly about systems of injustice. Or it can be used after the campaign strategy is set and your team is ready to design tactics.

Allot enough time to learn the rules and play 5-8 rounds (about 1.5 hours). Start by playing a few rounds of the game normally. Do not put any additional constraints on the play aside from those in the rules.

After a few rounds of play for fun, introduce constraints specific to your campaign. Constraints could take the form of operational values (adherence to principles of nonviolence), landscaping/power mapping, or your campaign’s theory of change. If you started the game with a fictional campaign scenario, make sure to pivot at this point to your actual campaign. Make sure you assign a scribe to capture as many of the tactic ideas as you can for future reference.

As you go, you may add additional constraints that escalate your campaign (high chance of disruption/high risk of arrest) or that focus on points of intervention specific to your campaign (Point of Destruction: County Jail).

Innovating the Center for Story-Based Strategy’s Innovation

This game is based on and inspired by the work of Center for Story-Based Strategy. I came across CSS’s Picture This! tool for prototyping activist tactics and began to use it in workshops as a basic activity to get ideas and discussion going. In an effort to bring more joy into workshops and trainings, I decided to turn Picture This! into a game.

I finished designing the game right before the pandemic hit. So I pivoted to making a game that could be played virtually.

Before taking the game live, I sought CSS’s blessing and added CSS’s logo, as well as a link back to a page where players can buy a physical copy of CSS’s Picture This! card deck.

After reaching out to CSS, they told me they, too, were innovating their tool. Felicia Perez was inspired to gameify Picture This! and had a physical game in the works. That game released in early 2021 as Game Changer: The Game of Activist Tactics. You can order it from TESA Collective here.