The only things I had to go on when I showed up at the basement of the National Gallery of Singapore in early January were the knowledge that what I was about to experience was a game, and some hints offered up by the name – Scarce City.
Clever play on words, I thought. A phrase reminiscent of SimCity, the video game of my childhood where players build a city under limits of resources, space, and time. A little tongue-in-cheek evocation of a city that cannot stop reminding itself of the kind of city it is or hopes to be: smart city, green city, MICE city.*
Scarce City, says the press release, is an “exploration of our relationship to resources and what it means to have enough in a world obsessed with scarcity,” combining immersive theatre with interactive gaming.
Designed by interdisciplinary artist Elizabeth Mak, the game asks participants to consider what it means to have enough in a world that is constantly reminding us of scarcity, i.e., the lack of resources. The show is produced by climate arts nonprofit Rainshadow Studios (founded by Mak), which also brought us Alien Nation, another climate change-themed escape room, in 2021.

Into the dark
In the middle of the concourse at the National Gallery, behind a wall marking the entrance to the show, we check in at a small reception counter. Then we wait, staring ahead at the dark-curtained area that we are about to enter. With around fifteen people assembled, two staff welcome us to the game, and sort us into groups.
But we are first led to a demo panel, which we discover isn’t just an ordinary textured plastic wall. Shaik Nazray, our guide, hovers his hand over one of the light blobs and follows it as it gently migrates across the panel. After a few moves, the blob disintegrates into smaller pulses of light that flutter swiftly away. The aim of the game, Nazray explains, is to cover the trail of light until it bursts, and before it disappears. We all give it a go, a dozen hovering hands spread across the panel, going to the benign and friendly blobs of light as they appear and shift across the plane. There is a certain satisfaction in the way we make them pulsate and turn green-blue towards the end of their short lives and burst into showers of bright confetti.
Now the black-curtained recess beckons. We shuffle inside group by group, a beginning that already immerses us in the theatrics of the show: it’s pitch-dark, we are warned; we are each to hold on to the shoulder of the person before us; I am in the group with just one other person; at some point, a guide inside is taking my hand and leading me; it is there that I lose my companion, who did not follow and has to be brought back. The guide whispers: Wait here.
The dark is bewildering and discomfiting. But something does start up — music and bits of light, and now we see a much bigger version of the translucent rock wall. The light display bubbles like the Northern Lights and we watch this and the blobs, until my companion clues in on what we need to do. It was mesmerising, I told everyone later at the discussion after the game.
We are two for a while, and then we are more. The rock wall is everywhere, and the light has two modes — red and blue. Rendered clueless by the dark, we rely on our wits, and we watch each other. Monkey see, monkey do. Once I get used to the dark, the disorientation, I slip into myself and the simplicity and the pleasure of the task. I am soothed by the sound and light, and register only edgewise the voices that are coming over the sound system — different voices, some more resonant than others. At some point I become completely absorbed by the task in front of me.
Reassessing values
By the time we are led out of the room, I feel like I’ve just finished a sound healing experience. We sit in a circle facing the two facilitators and two monitors, screened off from the rest of the National Gallery by a sculptural form resembling an intricately folded sheet of paper.
This post-game analysis was also a feature of New York-based artist Risa Puno’s public art project The Privilege of Escape (2019), which was one of the other inspirations for Scarce City. Puno’s escape room used the post-game chat to reveal the differential advantages that groups were given in their games, which drove home the lesson on structural inequality. Scarce City, on the other hand, focuses the discussion on the notion of striving, gathering our thoughts on what we have just felt and experienced. Then, the work’s main inspiration — Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics — is brought into the discussion.
Using a doughnut-shaped ring as a visual aid, Raworth critiques Gross Domestic Product as a primary measure of progress, positing an ideal zone of striving to achieve a state of well-being. When we continue efforts to generate GDP, we leave that zone and move into a state of overconsumption that sees societies breaching the ecological balance that sustains us. How we played and how we behaved in the rooms become part of the analysis: if the game is a microcosm of our wider lives, then our reactions in the room also reveal how we respond to the concept of growth — defined in the narrowest terms — and the consequences now closing in on us.
The efforts we exerted in the room — which didn’t always get us to where we wanted to be — are intended to mirror the collective human striving of Raworth’s theory. The post-game discussion, which saw participants sharing their experiences with overwork and burnout, made a compelling case for slowing down, reassessing individual notions of productivity, and questioning perceptions of scarcity.
But I am left with an uncomfortable question: if doing more doesn’t necessarily translate into success, and can even be counterproductive, does that mean we stop trying? Arguably, battling the ills left behind by a sustained period of overconsumption — such as climate change — takes a lot of work. The concept of scarcity also doesn’t completely explain why we are heating the planet or driving species to extinction; rather, it is the historical trajectory of abundance and excess that has brought us here. Operating under the mindset that Raworth is contending with, many of us in the industrialised world are able to get everything, everywhere, all at once, exerting immense social and environmental pressures elsewhere. And the process of getting ourselves (back) to that narrow band of the doughnut, that sweet spot, is itself a kind of massive effort — an effort of cleaning up, that should by no means be given up.
And so perhaps the task before us is not only to strive less, but also to direct ourselves to efforts of another kind.
Sustainable art
Though there is a big conceptual jump from the lessons of the game to the actions we should take as earth inches ever closer to our climate tipping points, the singularity of the concept is admirable. Scarce City shines in the simplicity of its staging and aesthetics.
The translucent rock face that emitted the light wasn’t Perspex as I first thought, but a material made from recycled PET bottles. It took three months of research and development and collaboration with the Singapore government innovation cluster NAMIC (National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Cluster) and the Singapore Institute of Technology to create a 3D sculptural environment that was biodegradable and served as a lightbox, while shaped to resemble the rock faces of Singapore’s Little Guilin quarry. (Rocks echo through Scarce City, anchoring the experience to place and being.) The production team told me that the project pushed the boundaries of innovative design and collaboration to meet the demands of scale while holding strong to its commitment of creating art with low environmental impact. This sets an important bar for sustainable art.

Creating a sense of a single-minded pursuit, the game experience itself embodies this minimalistic, pared-down ethos and aesthetic even if it doesn’t fully realise the social science that underpins it. Rather, Scarce City gets us to think about the automatic behaviours that we manifest when we try to reach a goal. These automatic behaviours are learnt — they are socially and culturally constructed — and therein lies the gem of the game. As Elizabeth Mak, the game creator, says, you’ll get markedly varying outcomes with audiences from different countries and communities with different approaches to striving. Perhaps this is the real potential of the game: taking Scarce City to communities around the world and seeing how they play the game of life.
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*MICE, a term used in the tourism sector, stands for Meetings, Incentives, Conventions, and Exhibitions. A MICE city is one that welcomes and prioritises such events.
Part of Light to Night 2025, Scarce City runs at the National Gallery Singapore until 2 February 2025. The programme runs for approximately one hour, with tickets starting at $28. Visit scarce-city.rainshadowstudios.org for more.
Header image courtesy of CRISPI.