The World Needs Systems Learning

I’ve written several articles before about how narrow our thinking is. People generally pick a single factor of a problem, and change that, and then think they’ve solved it. Even politicians, even people I’d consider very smart, think this way. They hyperfocus on one aspect that is somewhat associated with a problem, and if they just solve that on its own, they think they made an improvement.

Unfortunately, this generally isn’t true. At all.

Most problems are the result of systems.

This is obvious when you look at political problems. They often talk about issues that arise from an entire society of people, from an entire pile of laws or policies. All of these things are interconnected, so of course “solving one aspect” isn’t actually going to solve the problem. A different aspect will simply become more important, or worse, to compensate.

But it’s also true for smaller and smaller problems, until we get to the point that I dare say any problem worth solving is a system.

An example

Let me give an example.

Recently, I was reading the newspaper. Yes, I still do that, I’m a very old soul trapped in a young body ;)

It contained an announcement for “Instagram Teens”. A special version of Instagram for, you guessed it, teenagers. You can guess all the reasons why: to protect their privacy, to give them a more “healthy” way to interact with social media, etcetera. Among the changes were “no notifications after 10 PM” and “if they’ve been online for more than an hour today, they get a warning telling them to get off the app”.

And also, as expected, parental controls. This is what always happens. To “protect the children”, platforms will present these grand features that basically boil down to ignoring the human right to privacy. Which children also have, for they are humans too. If their child has a Teens account, the parents can see every single thing they see, like, click, whatever.

When I look at parents of teens, many of them truly believe in changes like these. They want control. They want to see all of that and to protect their child this way. And they think changes like these are the way.

Then the article asked the experts, and they all said the same: this will not work for obvious reasons. Children will just make a different account and use that when they want to do something without parents watching. Children will just switch to a different social media app when their timer runs out. Even worse, that “warning” to get off the app is just that—a warning. Click it away and continue if you like.

The thinking behind this seems logical.

• Problem? Children are on screens too much, and they’re exposed to the many dangers of social media.
• Solution? Tell them to get away from the screen, and let parents watch for any danger.

But this problem is not just a simple series of facts. You can’t 1-to-1 solve a problem with a focused solution.

It’s a system.

Children sit on their screens all day because it’s addictive, and because most parents don’t provide anything better to do. Children do stupid stuff on social media because that is the only space these days where they get to “play around”. They like having profiles on social media because it is “their thing” and not something controlled by their parents.

The system makes people addicted to screens. Telling them to get away from screens is like dangling candy in front of them all day and telling them they can’t eat it.

Precisely the control by parents (and schools, and other adults in a child’s life) is what pushes them to search for freedom and self expression in social media. It’s precisely what pushes them to want “their own profile” and to learn the ways of secrecy.

In a way, you can look at each person as a system. A child has certain needs, for entertainment, for self expression, for socializing. If you forcibly take away one thing … they’ll just jump to another thing that satisfies this need, otherwise the system is unbalanced. And usually, because of those actions, that jump will be secret and to something worse.

In other words, these “great changes” for Instagram Teens will do nothing but make children secretive and push them to worse behavior. Ruin one part of the system, and the other one will fill in the gap, no matter how bad that is.

If you wanted to actually solve this problem, you have to look at the system as a whole.

• You have to make social media less addictive and predatory in the first place.
• You have to actually reduce control and punishment by parents. This pushes children further away from you and makes them more likely to distrust you and trust online strangers.
• You have to provide other spaces where children can just be children, without supervision, playing around and experimenting. Spaces that are healthier for them than the entirety of the world wide web. If you do that, they won’t feel the need to be on social media so much and to “play” with things that have more dire consequences.
• You have to ask children why they spend so much time on screens. What need is filled or what role does it play in the system? The answer to that will give a hint as to what you need to offer to replace that.

You can only solve this problem if you tweak all the relevant parts of the system at once. Solving it step by step, focusing on only one part at a time, will be an endless loop. Because by “fixing” one thing, two more (and different) problems will crop up in another part of the system.

Why does this matter?

This is just a very simple example of systems thinking. Of why most “solutions” sound or feel incredibly reasonable, but they’re really not. If a solution promises a 1-to-1 fix, it’s usually not actually good. If anyone reduces a problem to just one factor, and then fixes only that, they’re likely to just make it worse.

Most adults fall for this all the time too, of course. Because it’s simple. It simplifies the world and provides you a nice package that will solve everything, right? It makes for easy political slogans and short tweets.

Instead, we need to teach everyone, from the start, to think in systems. To learn in systems.

You can think of systems like spider webs. Pulling on one string will cause reverberations across the entire web, creating changes in other parts. Destroying one part will force the spider to modify the other parts, lest they risk the entire web breaking.

Nature is a system of ecosystems. Economy is a system. School is a system. Your social circles are a system, and your own brain and body are systems.

History is a system. Chemistry is a system. Geography is a system. Religion is a system.

Everything that school claims to teach you is a system.

Or, more generally, any skill worth learning is a system. Not a single action. Not a sequence of facts or chapters from a textbook. No, a system of complex interactions that one has to learn, discover and play with.

Sufficient experience playing with a system is a requirement to deeply understand said system and solve problems in it.

So why then, I ask, is education not interested in actually teaching systems? Why is education only interested in pushing raw facts into your head? In written tests that merely ask you to regurgitate that sequence of unrelated facts?

Many text books or curriculae are neatly divided into seperate topics and chapters. So neat, in fact, that you can focus on one thing in isolation for weeks, then get a test, then forget about it because you’re focusing on something else in isolation the next week. This is horrible for actual learning or understanding. It’s the exact opposite of what you want to do.

With enough effort and training, sure, the current system of education might teach a child that the symbol “3” represents three things.

This is useless, however, if they don’t actually understand the system of math and can’t do calculations with any set of numbers.

This is what I mean when I say our current educational systems are not just useless, they are actively harmful. They teach children the exact opposite of what matters. They teach children to think in isolated facts, to just memorize patterns of superficial knowledge. They even punish you for doing anything else.

The whole world would be better off, and actually solve problems, if everyone deeply understood systems instead.

So, what is the solution?

If you know what this website/project is about, you obviously already guessed it.

We need education that immerses people in systems. That simulates complex issues or skills in real life. That let’s them play around with any system, as realistically as possible, and learn from that.

What is that magical tool? What is the wonderful method that would do that? Surely it doesn’t exist, surely it’s expensive, surely it—

It’s simple. We’ve known this forever. It’s just games.

In the general introductory text of this website I claim that games ARE learning. Now you hopefully get a deeper understanding why that is.

Games ARE systems.

Though there is no formal or agreed-upon definition of a game, all of them have something in common: they call games a system or framework.

• A game gives a starting state (setup)
• And rules for how that state changes and interacts (gameplay)
• And players are agents trying to reach a goal, within the boundaries of that system (objective)

Games are the definition of a system. They define its starting state, they define its interactions, and now they let players play around with it and try to get the best out of the system.

Any game with money teaches the players about economy and money management.

Any game about building a city teaches players about the many different factors that go into that and how to balance them.

Any game about placing things on a map teaches the players about how different terrains interact, how distances between cities matter, how events in one part of a world affect another part of that world.

Any longer game teaches players about planning, thinking ahead and patience when needed.

Any game with different mechanics teaches players about how different parts can interact. As they play, they get to experience exactly how pulling on one string will cause reverberations through the entire spider web of mechanics.

Any game that requires math strengthens the player’s math skills. (This is basically all of them.)

Any game that requires language strengthens the player’s language skills. (This is basically all of them.)

Any game that requires cooperation, negotiation, communication—it all strengthens a player’s social skills.

Games are a simplified version of real-world systems, and they test streamlined versions of real-life skills. This means they are accessible, cheap, and fun. It also means they are risk-free. Children can experiment and learn, kick against the boundaries of a system, without actually losing money or doing permanent damage to anything.

It’s probably exactly why we, as a species, evolved to play games and enjoy them. There is evidence of very, very early humans already playing games, usually including dice or some other randomization mechanic.

When you play a (board) game, you are taking the most efficient path to deeply understanding all related topics. You get intuition and experience, not superficial facts and memorized patterns. You see the effects of doing one thing or the other. You experience why focusing on only one part of a system will cause you to lose the game as a whole.

And you’re actually having fun and spending quality time with others.

Another example

I’ll give a more unexpected example to finish the article: soccer. (Or team sports in general.)

The following situation happens all the time.

• A team is winning. They’re up by at least 2 goals. Great!
• Way before time runs out, they substitute attackers (or midfielders) for more defenders.
• This completely changes the game and they often end up losing.

This is a great example of something that sounds reasonable again. You’re winning? You don’t need to score more goals? Well, just add even more defenders and defend your way to the end of this match!

This 1-to-1 solution to a problem sounds so reasonable that high-level coaches still fall for it. They don’t even look at the outcome, they don’t care about statistics, they just think “need more defense? Add more defenders!”

By now, I hope you see why I give this example.

A team is a system. If you change one player, everyone else has to adapt. If one player is out of position, everyone else has to compensate and will soon be out of position too.

So far, you were winning that soccer match. This means the system was working. By substituting other players into a working system, you just ruined it and start to play badly. This often ends up losing that team the game, or at best turning into a draw.

You can’t replace one player for a different one—with different skills, different stamina, a different position—and expect a team to function exactly the same.

And yet … this is what we’re doing with all our problems in the real world. Serious problems, large-scale problems, which involve many people. And most (government) policies are nothing more than replacing one player of the entire team. Replacing them for someone who is “better” when compared to that one original player. But that doesn’t mean the overall team gets better at all.

Conclusion

Most problems worth solving, and skills worth learning, are part of a system. Of multiple facts, events, actions, and people that are all connected and influencing each other.

As such, only focusing on one factor and trying to solve that is (often) useless. You need to look at the system as a whole and provide a solution that looks at all relevant puzzle pieces.

If your kid spends too much time on their phone, don’t just get mad and take away the phone. There’s a reason they are doing that, and there are consequences to this behavior. So look at their life, their needs, and the entire household as a system. Find out what creates the need to use a screen all day, so you can actually balance it with something else.

If you want to learn mathematics, don’t just memorize the specific outcome of a formula or the specific steps for solving a problem. Throw yourself at a wide variety of problems, with a wide variety of numbers, and play around. What happens if I do the opposite? What happens if I switch the numbers? Could I solve this in another way? Why does this formula work? Only by treating math as a bigger system than your homework exercise, will you actually gain understanding and intuition for it. Which will make it easier, of course, to learn any new math concepts later.

Similarly, if you want to learn language, don’t just memorize word shapes and what they mean. Actually learn the system. And you do it by playing with language, being creative with it, playing games that test your spelling and communication in all sorts of weird ways. Do it by asking yourself why language is the way it is, and what would happen if you purposely broke those rules. Kick against the system. Pull on the spider web and see which parts move.

This is the only way to get truly good at something and to truly solve problems. Which is why I recommend everyone learn this way and think this way.

The most common systems of education are, unfortunately, the exact opposite. They focus on isolated facts and memorization, and might even punish you for trying to think more freely or broadly. They might feel or sound reasonable on a superficial level, but they are useless if not harmful. The question should always be “what would happen if you do this weird thing to the system?” instead of “please tell me the memorized answer to this stale question?”

Instead, immerse yourself (or your children / pupils) in systems. Train yourself by experimenting with systems. This includes having fun just playing around, making mistakes, and kicking against stuff to see what happens. This includes doing a lot of things you have no “reason” to do, or which most adults will be quick to call “silly”. By actually doing it, by actually modifying the system in that weird way, you will learn a lot more.

And the very best method we have for this are games.

They are a fun, accessible, risk-free environment that simulates most of the real system.

That’s why I created this project. All those arguments, together with my 20 years of experience playing games, designing games, and teaching others, gave me the confidence. The certainty that playing a variety of board games (that simulate all sorts of systems) is not just a nice way to learn, it’s a replacement of school. No, it’s an improvement.

I simply suggest people give it a try. Try some of these games with your kids (or pupils). Encourage them to try stuff and to have fun and that it’s about playing the game as well as they can, not winning. If you’re too afraid to play, or you never experiment and make silly mistakes, you still won’t learn as much as you could from games.

Then, after a while, you can tell me how surprised you are that your kids became math wizards overnight ;)

And then, once they’re older, they can go into the real world and modify the real systems with knowledge, experience, intuition and skill.