Play testing

cards for healing with Chloe Agape

Xiaowei Wang: Can you introduce yourself and share what brought you to the Collective Action School space?

Chloe Agape: My name is Chloe and I’m a software engineer who is kind of a generalist, and also very creatively and artistically inclined. I do tattooing. I’m nomadic: generally very west coast between California and Washington. When I was at Microsoft, I was in this group chat where I met someone who went through Collective Action School’s first cohort. They told me about CAS while we were spilling tea and were encouraging people to apply. I felt like the questions on the application were affirming of the experience I was having in tech and all that I’ve been through, so I felt like it was the right place for me.

Xiaowei: What was your experience of CAS and also can you tell us a little about your final project?

Chloe: I’m pretty used to being the outlier in tech: the person who always has to speak up about things that are happening in the workplace or questioning what companies might be doing with our product. When I was in Collective Action School, it felt like a space that had taken the nicest people and put them together into a place where we didn’t all feel crazy. It was very therapeutic. It was like “Oh, I am not that weird, I’m not alone!” I really underestimated the value of a space like that. It’s not just about feeling not-crazy or alone, but it was also really encouraging. I think it’s easy to get into groups of people who feel dissatisfied with the system and just critique it, but I feel like the CAS space provided a sense of possibility—like, hey, we could continue to complain but here are people who are actually doing something about it, who are extending a hand to ask questions. It’s something that I hadn’t experienced before, so that felt a little bit of an awakening for me—like, hey, I can actually touch reality and push it a bit.

My project for CAS is an online card game meant to be played at parties (parties that have a lot of tech people). In my years of working in tech cities and hubs like San Francisco, the Bay Area, or Seattle, I realized that there is this phenomenon where tech workers mostly hang out with each other. Simultaneously, they really don’t know how to voice their experiences beyond pretty capitalistic topics: like, “What’s your salary?”, or “How do I get to this other company to get a better salary?”, instead of actually opening up about the hard stuff that we all go through.

Just as an aside...there’s this person I dated from Tinder, who, the second time we met, on video call, just started dumping on me how he was about to get fired from Amazon and how he couldn’t talk to any of his friends about it. It was depressing. I was like, “I don’t think your problem is that you’re getting fired from Amazon, I think the problem is that you have no one to talk to about this.”

I’ve had a lot of experiences like that, especially as a femme in tech. Maybe it’s because there isn’t a culture of opening up in ways that feel safe. When I go to parties, I like to engage deeply with people, through deep sharing and listening. So, I combined two of my favorite things together and created a card game that is very similar to a game called “We’re Not Really Strangers,” where people basically use the cards as conversation starters to talk about things like how their experience is living in a city. And I think that’s a really good way to connect with someone on something very deep—maybe deeply traumatizing work experiences depending on how the group wants to take it.

It was really nice to have CAS as a space where everyone is encouraging and you have people that you can bounce ideas off of. I put together the website for the card game in 3 days, hackathon style. I was mildly obsessed with it because I was like, “Oh my god, I finally get to make something that I truly own.” I felt immediate excitement and gratification from it. It really unlocked the programmer spirit that one can easily lose within a corporate structure.

I put together groups for play testing, and it was really fascinating to see the kinds of people who would get together to discuss some of the questions that would never be discussed anywhere else, honestly. The feedback that I got from it was pretty positive and there were people who immediately saw the value of this game and who also helped shape it too. Somebody mentioned that maybe there should be trigger warnings for the questions and I implemented that immediately. I do think that people can see how this is a powerful game, and I’ve gotten the feedback that it could be very useful in co-working spaces, or for people who are trying to make more friends in work spaces beyond “networking”.

Xiaowei: With people’s privacy in mind, what was the experience like for you, what were some of the conversations that unfolded?

Chloe: There’s so many that I can think of. I think when somebody hosts one of these games, they’re almost kind of being a healer in some sense. I’m deep into spiritual spaces and healing arts and I do think there’s an aspect of inviting in the right people: people who are open and ready for this type of thing. There were moments where I noticed that some people weren’t completely ready, and it really highlighted some of the problems in the tech industry with disconnection. At the same time, it was probably the closest that we could get to touching that problem directly. For example, if someone has bias against someone’s race or ethnicity, that’s going to get exposed in this game, whether you like it or not.

At the same time, people did also mention a sense of opening their minds to the fact that people could have such deep conversations with others that they haven’t known for a very long time, and saw that this game was an avenue to create those connections. The magic is the people who come to this game and open up, not the game itself.

Xiaowei: There’s not a lot of spaces for self-reflection in the world, but also in the tech world, certainly, and I love that you’re providing these prompts, the space and this tool for self-reflection. It sounds like that’s something that you’re really providing too: the sapce and this tool. Are there long term effects from this play testing?

Chloe: I definitely have had people asking me, “Are you going to arrange another game?” because they enjoyed it. And people reaching out who had heard about it and missed out on the play-testing session. A lot of the labor is actually taking the time and effort to put together the space. I think ultimately people don’t think about the particular questions, you know, I think they remember the space that was created and the possibilities that the space opens.

Xiaowei: Anything else you want to add?

Chloe: There’s a lot! The whole experience was electrifying. And the only thing that’s limiting me right now is just the fact that I’m juggling so many things. But something I really wanted to do was to hold workshops, tapping into some of my connections to do some kind of self-care workshops. To connect people and potentially empower or train people to do this in their spaces too. I was also thinking of expanding this to unions. I was talking to someone from the previous CAS cohort about this, who is in a union, and we discussed how the challenges of a union are very different and specific. But I’ve been thinking about how we get people with the right energy who want to connect together using this game.

During the past couple of months, I’ve also been thinking about tech work and change. I’ve been having experiences over the past month that have made me realize that my definition of revolution is a little bit different, I guess. Sometimes people think revolution ought to be disruptive and violent. And I think some of the things I’ve been working on in recent months have been showing me that my way of revolutionizing or changing things is to just be brave and do or say the thing that everyone had been wanting to say but just haven’t, you know? So I think that’s what this game is trying to do: to allow people to safely say all of the unsaid things that we couldn’t have before because we were too scared. It’s breaking the silence.