Nicky Case
Independent game designer & explorable explanation creator
About
Nicky Case is an independent creator known for interactive games, simulations, and “explorable explanations” that teach complex social and scientific ideas through play. Their projects include The Evolution of Trust, We Become What We Behold, Adventures with Anxiety, and Parable of the Polygons. Case’s work blends systems thinking, game design, education, and public-interest technology, often making abstract ideas feel concrete and emotionally accessible. They make their work freely reusable under a public domain waiver.
Key Contributions
- Created The Evolution of Trust, an interactive guide to game theory and cooperation
- Created We Become What We Behold, a viral game about media feedback loops and social polarization
- Built Adventures with Anxiety, an interactive story about anxiety and mental health
- Helped popularize explorable explanations as a format for learning through interaction
- Publishes open, freely reusable educational projects on systems, AI safety, mental health, and social dynamics
Notable Projects
The Evolution of Trust
An interactive guide to the game theory of trust, cooperation, betrayal, and how social systems shape behavior.
Parable of the Polygons
An explorable explanation showing how small individual biases can produce large-scale segregation and systemic patterns.
We Become What We Behold
A short game about media feedback loops, outrage cycles, and how attention can reshape society.
Videos & Interviews
Connections
Donella Meadows
KindredEnvironmental Scientist & Systems Thinker
An interpretive pairing across media: Meadows taught systems literacy in prose — stocks, flows, balancing and reinforcing loops — and Case builds the same literacy into things you can poke, from LOOPY's sketchable causal loops to a Long Now talk on seeing whole systems. Read her primer, then play their simulations: the same lesson delivered twice, once as a book, once as an instrument.
Chris Olah
KindredCo-founder & Interpretability Lead, Anthropic
An interpretive pairing rather than a collaboration: two inheritors of Victor's explorable explanation who took it to opposite subjects. Case builds playable models of social dynamics — trust, segregation, anxiety — where the reader learns by moving the sliders until the rule becomes obvious. Olah built a journal where a machine-learning result arrives as something you can pull apart and inspect. Both hold that some ideas cannot be transmitted by prose at all, only by giving the reader the controls, and both treat that as a claim about knowledge rather than about presentation.
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