About

Bewitching Technologies is an oracle card game and playful environment developed in partnership with The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest (TITiPI), Justice Adda, and Inanna’s Flood (IF). A list of all the people associated with this project may be found here. Accessible play resources detailing the game and ideas for how to use it in various contexts are available here (download and print).

Bewitching Technologies is a browser-based narrative-driven card game. Some have described it as a cross between Dungeons & Dragons and Tarot. The game invites participants to approach legal and computational practices like AI as socio-political forms of technology. We encourage players to deconstruct dominant ideas about computing technologies as well as the law and digital policy using the in-game oracle constituted by the oracle cards, which players shuffle, draw, and interpret. Through this process, players draw upon forms of collaborative more-than-human imagining and meaning-making; or ‘magic.’ Through its oracular and divinatory activities, Bewitching Technologies invites us to consider and challenge the magic of the computational and legal technologies that we are given. Instead, we are asked to radically reimagine what could be, by paying deep attention to what is and what has been and what is. This occurs in tandem with both the human player agencies and the non-human agencies which manifest as randomness within the play environment.

AI is already affecting every aspect of our lives. It is crucial that we build capacity to critically engage with the technologies and legal policies shaping the AI landscape. Bewitching Technologies creates a space for digital rights activists, tech workers, artists, community organisers, academics, and lawmakers to converge and challenge the siloed ways that digital policy responds to AI, highlighting its sobering consequences for labour, the environment, and other public policy areas. Players are encouraged to critically think about and discuss how AI evangelism materialises in digital policymaking, as well as who benefits or suffers from those policy decisions.

Bewitching Technologies can be played solo or in small groups or workshops. It can be played alongside non-player characters to guide your approach and journey, or it can be played without storytelling guidance. Towards the end of the play, you are invited to use your play insights to create a manifesto or a prayer that subverts the technologies of computation and law, and creates different imaginaries of our post-apocalyptic presents and futures.

Player Takeaways

• Expanding and deepening critical engagement with computational practices like AI and the law by creating spaces for conversations about the colonial, racialised, gendered, and capitalist logics of modern computing and law.
• Connecting AI/digital policy issues with environment, labour, and other public policy areas to challenge policy silos that result in disconnected policymaking.
• Reconfiguring AI evangelist discourses of the ‘posthuman’ that centre machine agencies. Players are instead invited to understand the ‘posthuman’ as the entangled exploitation of land, environment, and labour underlying computational technologies like AI.
• Using the oracle’s mechanism of shuffling and randomness as an introduction to 'divinatory play,' which may be understood as a mode of nonlinear engagement and discussion to encourage critical thinking that challenges dominant narratives and players’ own presumptions.

Game Philosophy

Bewitching Technologies takes a decolonising and queerfeminist approach that centres questions of power, inequality, and justice to spark conversations and collaborations for advocacy, education, and research.

Digital Policy Beyond Dominant Discourses

A significant intention of the game is to expand and deepen engagement with digital policy for advocacy, education, and research in ways that critically evaluate and speculatively reimagine both computational and legal approaches. The game seeks to do this with and beyond dominant policy discourses and stakeholders in law and academia to also engage artists, digital rights activists, tech workers, community organisers, and students. To challenge the study and practice of public policy in silos, the game is also designed to draw the connections between digital policy and other areas of public policy like labour and environmental governance.

Critical Understandings of ‘Posthuman’

The game is particularly geared to highlight posthuman and more-than-human agencies operating in computational and legal design and practice. In recent times, ‘posthuman’ or ‘more-than-human’ agencies in technological contexts have been largely associated with machine agencies like that of AI as well as problematic TESCREAL ideologies and practice. In contrast to this, Bewitching Technologies draws upon Indigenous approaches to encourage reflection on how ‘posthuman’ agencies of the land and racialised ‘human’ agencies entangled with it are implicated but invisibilised from the conceptualisation of ‘data’ and the ‘digital’ in both computational and legal discourses.

Divinatory Play as Speculative Methodology

The game develops an approach for ‘divinatory play,’ which is proposed as a speculative methodology that combines the intertwined mechanics of play, magic, and divination. Key mechanics in the game rely on communication and meaning-making with human and non-human elements mediated via random card draw outcomes. This ‘divinatory’ mode of ‘playful’ communication is rooted in irrationality. By bringing irrationality to the forefront, the game disrupts causational modes of thinking embedded in Cartesian space and linear temporal approaches that structure dominant legal and non-legal thought. Instead, the game creates ‘magical’ openings to foreground and challenge power relations that are too often naturalised and backgrounded within legal, computational, and public policy discussions. Simultaneously, given the problematic and oft-oppressive histories and presents of magic and divination, the game also encourages players to approach its oracle critically and with caution. After all, divination can be as much of a ‘bewitching technology’ as computation and law.

Development & Testing

Bewitching Technologies builds on a card deck prototype called ‘Speculative Machine Learning’ conceived by Dilan U+16DE in 2020. This was tested within a collaborative workshop on decolonisation and machine learning organised with Noopur Raval at the REALML Conference. Shortly after, it was also tested with members of The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest (TITiPI).

The ESRC-IAA grant Ghosts in the Machine: Rethinking Posthuman Agencies for Digital Policy through Divinatory Play enabled the further development of Speculative ML themes into Bewitching Technologies. To do this, two game development workshops were organised in May and June 2024 that saw participation from lawyers, artists, academics, and tech researchers.

Collaborative game production for the website ensued from June to September 2024 with Yarli Allison on art direction and illustrations, Mehmet Erk on web development, Jenny Davis on graphic design, and Dilan U+16DE on concept and game writing.

Game testing workshops for Bewitching Technologies were organised in September and October 2024, with the official web launch of the game in November 2024.

If you are looking to use Bewitching Technologies to organise a workshop, we are here to support you with play resources here or facilitation here. Please do reach out!

If you have played or organised an event with Bewitching Technologies, please do share your experience here!

Useful Links

• Bewitching Technologies Play Resources
• Bewitching Technologies Linktree
• Inanna’s Flood (IF) Youtube (contains video tutorials and recordings of game events)
• Inanna’s Flood (IF) Discord (hosts channels with resources, events, and space for Bewitching Technologies players to connect with each other and the game developers)