NIGHT SHIFT.
A factory that counts everything. Except what matters to the people inside it.
Eight shifts. Twelve allocation units each. Two ledgers. No perfect answer.
Created from an argument by Sahil Tayal.
Where does
the time go?
Distribute twelve fictional capacity units across four competing demands. Change the arrangement; run a shift; live with the trade-offs.
The world reacts to your choices. What it displays is invented, not measured.
What gets counted.
The organisation needs resources to keep its doors open.
Are people leaving with more options than they arrived with?
The second ledger.
An organisation can become more efficient while the people inside it become more exhausted, less autonomous or less able to leave. It can also invest in people while facing genuine commercial constraints. Neither story fits inside a single productivity number.
In Human Capital for Humans, Sahil Tayal proposes considering two separate questions: what economic value capabilities help create, and what happens to the people whose capabilities create it. This game translates that ethical argument into an imagined factory—so you can feel the competing pressures rather than merely read about them.
Nothing disappears
when a shift ends.
VISUAL HISTORY: ORANGE = OPERATING RESERVES (SCALED FOR CHART). GREEN = CAPABILITY. DIFFERENT UNITS; COMPARE SHAPES, NOT MAGNITUDES.
Shift transcript
- Your decisions will appear here after each completed shift.
No player data is sent to a server or stored across visits. Results depend entirely on fictional game rules and choices.
Read beyond
the game.
The simulation is an artistic interpretation of public essays—not a quote from them or an empirical test. These are directly relevant works, linked to their actual published pages so the reader can judge the argument independently.
Human Capital for Humans
The two-ledger proposal: economic contribution is not a complete measure of a person's development or dignity.
The Future of Human Work
Job design, workplace trade-offs, voice, recovery and the question of who captures gains from automation.
The Human Capital Project
The difference between skills and opportunity, and why informal workplaces reveal overlooked capabilities.