Quantified

a cooperative boardgame
about algorythmic citizenship,
privacy and human rights

‘Quantified’ is a cooperative board game (in development) about algorithmic citizenship signed by Berlin-based board-game publisher Quality Beast.

We see the quantification of our behaviour in more and more areas of our life: whether it’s how much we work out, what we eat, what we like or who we date. It makes life more convenient, but it could also determine whether we have eaten healthy enough to get a discount on our health insurance premium. Mass quantification and Big Data, like any technology, can be used for the ‘good’ or the ‘bad’ of society, however you define it.

Quantified illustrates how surveillance laws can render human rights conditional to what an algorithm classifies as ‘good’ behaviour and how this affects our right to movement, work and communication in everyday life. Players produce physical personal data traces in the game and get more agency in sharing or obfuscating their data. Quantified invites its players to engage in active decision-making on how to ‘spend’ their data within the system of a board game, trying to make the abstract concept of Big Data and its possible long-term consequences easier to grasp.

Watch the reactions to our game testing session at Fairphone here:

Listen to the reactions of Shut Up & Sit Down to our game testing session from minute 36:20:

Conception
Janna Ullrich

Game Development
Janna Ullrich, Dylan Cromwell, Stefan Brakman, Roman Rybiczka

Signed and developed by
Quality Beast

Special Thanks
to Stimuleringsfonds Creatieve Industrie NL for supporting this project, to Ron Huising for his mentoring in the early stages of the design, for all the clever minds who came to play test our game at the many different games fairs and provided their valuable input, to Andy Mesa for touring Quantified around the US

Supported by: