The Ripple Rebellion
Murmuration or Data Dystopia
Two ways to play the same story — the everyday choices behind water, data and power. One you play on your own screen. One you print out and play around a table. The choice, in both, is yours.
The Computer Game
First-person · about 5 minutes · works on phone and desktop
You are handed a role — a tired junior regulator, a shopkeeper minding a grandmother, a teacher, a resident on the third hosepipe ban in four summers. Then you walk a corridor lined with decisions.
Each card is a small, ordinary dilemma. You're busy. You could look away — it's human, it's what the vast majority of people do. You mention it to a few people around you and you're told to stay in your lane, that it's somebody else's job, that that's just how it is, that you're getting distracted. And maybe it doesn't cost you much today. But your nervous system notices, and cares. It always has — you were just built that way. Not honouring your own moral compass has its own consequences. And the future, future generations, and the planet's future — now that's a different matter again. You could call it out publicly — which takes real courage and can carry real consequences. The people who do this have played a difficult and vital role in society, often at great personal risk, and that courage is commendable. Or you could take the third way: the question put in writing, the date kept on file, the risk noted on the public record.
Every choice draws power and water from a real place — and that draw only ever rises, like the real one. But if enough people take the third way, the flock turns, and the ending changes. The game pulls no punches: the outcomes speak plainly, and they don't soften what any of these choices can cost.
The fact remains, though, that the future is not written. We write it every day, through what we choose to do — and what we choose not to do.
“The greatest danger to our future is apathy.”— Jane Goodall▶ Play the computer game
The Board Game
2–6 players · about an hour · a classroom or a kitchen table
Murmuration is also a print-and-play card game for a group. Same world, same dilemmas — but played out loud, together. Each player takes a role with different power and different room to act, and you quickly see how few good options come with the most power, and how much can quietly be done from the bottom.
The Dump on the table only ever rises. The Flock on the other side can turn — but only if enough of you spend what it costs to turn it. It's designed to be printed at home on a few sheets of A4, cut out, and set up in minutes, with a country-pack design so any place can drop in its own sites and its own stories.
New to it? Watch first — the short video walks through how it's played, how to print the cards, and how to set the table up.
▶ How to play, print & set it up video coming soon