Simulating Systemic Violence: Game Design as Speculative Ethnography in "Seven Days of Destruction"

Platypod, The CASTAC Podcast

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Mayshu (Meixu) Zhan can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/07/simulating-systemic-violence-game-design-as-speculative-ethnography-in-seven-days-of-destruction/. About the post: “Seven Days of Destruction” is a speculative game that confronts the structural logics of gun violence in the U.S.—poverty, miseducation, addiction—not through realism but through allegory and constraint. Set in a surreal environment of surveillance and coercion, players navigate ethical compromise and systemic complicity. Designed in the wake of campus shootings, the game merges procedural rhetoric with speculative ethnography, asking: what if the unplayable conditions of real life could be felt, not just represented? This post reflects on game design as method and politics, where playing the system becomes a mode of critique.