Chuk Tai Wai 祝大為

Pick a Side

Twenty rounds, played by the whole camp.

Each round put one case on the screen and asked everyone to walk to the left or the right side of the room, with no way to abstain. The cases came in pairs that changed a single feature, so a student who moved for one case and stayed for its variant could see which commitment was doing the work. A father who steals bread for a starving child, then a father who steals a steak. A Hong Kong tea restaurant that will serve only local customers, then the identical notice in a Japanese izakaya.

The pair structure owes its shape to Michael Sandel’s Justice lectures, where the hall votes on the runaway trolley, gives its reasons, meets the footbridge variation, and watches itself change its mind. Sandel asks for a show of hands. Here the room walks, which puts the count in front of everyone standing in it and makes changing your mind something you do with your feet. Twenty pairs then carry a whole session, and the opening rounds ask about congee and pineapple buns so that moving feels safe before the cases get hard.

Language Architect

Four groups, ten rounds.

Each group designed a language for a tribe that had none, agreeing a vocabulary of ten words and later thirty, under one rule, that every word had to appear in a published Chinese dictionary. Each round showed a scene and the sentence the tribe needed to say, and the groups built it from their own vocabulary while the floor voted on whether the meaning came through. The sentences were chosen so that each one called for something the groups had usually left out, such as counterfactuals, hedged belief, estimation, concession and the word for should.

Two lines of thought meet here. Wittgenstein opens the Philosophical Investigations by imagining a complete language of four words, block, pillar, slab and beam, called out by a builder and answered by an assistant. The principle of linguistic relativity that Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf set out asks whether a language can put some thoughts beyond the reach of its speakers. The game puts the second question inside the first. The groups build the primitive language themselves, and the budget rising from ten words to thirty is what makes the question testable, since what becomes sayable when the budget rises is the evidence.

Republic of the Veil of Ignorance

Four groups, one constitution each.

Each group sat as a legislature and drafted a constitution in six parts covering property, labour, healthcare, education, punishment and taxation, with every article required to say who, how much, and who decides. Before drafting began, each participant drew a number and was told only to remember it. Once the articles were on the board, the numbers turned out to be identities. Everyone read the four constitutions again from the position they had been given, and voted on one question, whether they would be willing to be born in that country.

A revision stage completes the design. Each group hears the people who voted no, and either amends the article that drew the objection or keeps it and says why the objection fails. A second vote follows on the same question, and the two tallies stand side by side on the board.

The design follows Rawls closely and needs three of his ideas. The original position becomes four legislatures drafting in parallel. The veil of ignorance is built out of the order of events, since the numbers are handed out before anyone writes a word and explained only afterwards, so nobody has to pretend not to know. The second round is reflective equilibrium, where a group holds its principles against its judgments about particular cases and gives way on whichever of the two has the weaker claim. Keeping an article and answering the objection counts as a completed move, because a group that always gave way would be counting votes and not reaching equilibrium.