Simulation
Ages 12+
About 5 minutes
5 days per week · 6 people in rotation
Feed Keeper
Run one person's feed for a working week. Your manager watches one number, minutes watched. The person writes down how each day actually felt. A simulation about attention, proxies, and feedback loops, with no clock and no score.
How to play
- Each day, six posts arrive ranked by predicted engagement. Pick three to show.
- Watch the minutes on your manager's dashboard, then read the person's note that evening.
- Press 1 to 6 to pick by keyboard, then Enter to show the day.
- After Friday, compare your week with a pure minutes-maximiser's, then sit with the questions.
What it teaches
A feed can only rank what it can measure, and minutes watched is easy to measure. Running one for a week shows how a reasonable proxy drifts away from the thing it stands in for, how choosing the metric is itself a decision someone makes, and how a feed slowly shapes the very tastes it then reports back as demand.
For educators
Play it twice with the same group: once trying to please the manager, once trying to help the person. Then ask what one extra number on the dashboard would change, and what it would still miss.