Team sessions · Haunted Space Hotel Studios
One of these answers was not written by a person.
We bring our game to your team, put an AI in the room with them, and let them spend an hour trying to catch it. Then we sit down and talk about what it is really like to work this way — because by then everybody has an opinion, and it is their own.
The shape of it
Ninety minutes, three parts.
The game is the icebreaker, and it is a real one — people are still quoting each other's answers at lunch. The conversation is the point.
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30–40 minutes
Everybody plays.
One screen at the front of the table, and everybody on their own phone — sixteen seats to a game. A one-word prompt goes out — RABBIT, MIDNIGHT, DENTIST — and every person answers it in six words or fewer. So does an AI. The answers come back shuffled, and the table votes on which one no person wrote. Being mistaken for the AI scores. Catching it scores more, and it scores only you.
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10 minutes
Then it turns around.
In the inverted round you are the only person in the room. The AIs vote, and what they are hunting is you. Every juror that names you costs you. It is the same game from the other side, and it is the round people talk about afterwards — because trying to pass is a completely different job from trying to catch.
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30–45 minutes
Then we talk about the day job.
The game has just given everyone in the room a shared, specific, slightly undignified experience of working alongside an AI. That is a much better place to start a conversation than a slide. We take it from there: what we actually do, what it broke, what we stopped doing, where it is genuinely better than us and where trusting it cost us a weekend. Questions from the floor, answered straight.
Why it lands.
Most sessions about AI at work ask people to have an opinion about something abstract, in front of their boss. This one gives them fifteen minutes of first-hand evidence first. They have just watched the machine write something funnier than they did, and watched it miss something obvious that any of them would have caught — and crucially, they have watched their colleagues be fooled and not be fooled, out loud, with the scores on the screen.
The quiet people play. That is not a small thing. Everybody types at once, nobody reads anybody else's answer until they are all in, and the funniest line in the room routinely comes from whoever never speaks in the retro. By the time we start talking about workflows, the room is already talking.
It works for engineering teams, and it works for the departments that have been told AI is coming for them and have no way to ask about it. The second group tends to get more out of it.
The particulars
- Group size
- A game seats sixteen, and six is the floor — under that the hunt gets thin. A bigger room runs two or three tables side by side, or plays in rotation with the rest watching the screen, which is its own kind of fun.
- Length
- Ninety minutes end to end. Sixty if you only want the game and a short debrief; half a day if you want a working session after it.
- Where
- Your office, your offsite, a conference room you have rented — or entirely over video, which works because the game was built for phones in the first place.
- What the room needs
- A screen we can put a picture on, and everybody holding the phone they already have. One screen per table. Nothing to install, no accounts, no sign-in.
- Who turns up
- Us. Not a facilitator we trained — the two people who wrote the game and who do the work we are describing.
What this is not
- No slide deck about the future of work.
- No maturity model, no readiness assessment, no framework with four quadrants.
- No pitch. We are not selling you a tool, and nothing we say is conditional on you buying one.
- No pretending. If a thing we tried did not work, that is the more useful half of the hour.
On price: tell us the room, the city and roughly when, and we will quote it. It depends on how many of us travel and how far.
Who you get
Andrew Piper and Michael Clark.
Two decades of senior engineering at IGT and consulting for Google, Apple and Cisco, and a working software studio that ships — a real-time multiplayer strategy game, a board game, mobile titles on two stores, and a novel. We build the things we are going to talk about, every week, with and without AI in the loop.
More about the studio on the studio page, and the thinking behind the game on AI ethics.
Talk to us
Tell us about the room.
Rough answers are fine — we will come back with what it would look like and what it would cost. A person reads this, not a queue.