This game was a lot harder than I was expecting. In the first round, Fatou and Kodjo lost over 50% of their health. I didn’t really know what the right settings were, and what aspects to focus on in order to give them the best health possible. After the first round, what I did know was that I wasn’t doing it right. I noticed specifically, the water cleanliness was in danger. To be honest, I wasn’t sure exactly what settings to change in order to fix this, as well as make their health increase. After only playing with one setting in the next round, Fatou and Kodjo died.

What I then noticed was that I was doing it all wrong. Instead of starting off slow and making small decisions, I went all in in the first round and changed a lot of the settings. Part of me felt like because this was a game, I wanted to just see what would happen. Looking back, if this were a real village and system that I was interfering with, I definitely should have made smaller decisions. I think making smaller decisions in the first round would have allowed me to figure out what went wrong in the second round, to then be able to fix it. Another thing I recognized after playing the game was that I should have thought more long term when it came to my decisions. For instance, I should have thought about what my decisions would do if they maintained a homeostatic feedback loop. Would it be a good thing or a bad thing for the villages system?