About this game
AI Policy Builder is a research-grounded policy simulation. Designed and built by Daniel Umana. Created for EDU 280, Social Justice and Urban Education, American University, for Dr. William N. Thomas IV.
What this is
The teaching goal is not to find the right answer. It is to feel the give and take of policymaking under uncertainty, and to see that a policy with no bad intent still distributes harm unevenly when nobody looks at who it lands on.
It is written for two kinds of course at once. In a social justice or foundations course it is about who bears the harm and who was never in the room. In an education policy course it is about what kind of instrument a policy is, whether it could be adopted, how much of it survived implementation, and what the road not taken would have cost. Those are the same mechanic seen from two sides, which is the argument the game is built to make. The instructor page sets that out in full, including what the game does not teach.
The districts and institutions are fictional composites built from real, cited data patterns, so the game can model outcomes honestly without making claims about any real place. Every option traces to something a real system actually did, and every consequence traces to published research, government data, or verified reporting. Numbers the simulation produces itself are labeled as modeled, with the evidence they extrapolate from named. The whole list is public at /sources.
Privacy architecture
Nothing you do here leaves your browser unless you send it somewhere yourself. No accounts, no login, no database, no analytics, no tracking pixels, and no server-side record of any campaign.
What leaves this browser, and when
Three cases, all of themPlaying the game
Nothing
- Every decision, consequence, number and citation is precomputed and shipped with the page. The engine runs in your browser. Loading a page fetches that page, the way any website does, and after that nothing you do produces a request, because there is no endpoint anywhere that records gameplay.
Sharing or exporting
Only what you hand over yourself
- A share link encodes the run’s seed and choices in the URL, and it goes wherever you paste it. All four export documents, Markdown and PDF alike, are built in your browser and saved to your downloads. Nothing is uploaded.
Asking the advisor
The current decision, and your question
- The one outbound request in the product, off unless you open the panel, and only on a deployment that has been given a key. See the paragraph below for exactly what it contains.
What is stored, and where. Campaign progress lives in your browser’s localStorage, along with two other things and nothing else: the optional name you can put on an export, and your light or dark theme preference. None of the three is transmitted anywhere. Sharing a run generates a link that encodes your seed and your choices, never a name and never a device identifier, and because the engine is deterministic that link replays the identical campaign for whoever opens it.
No third party sees the page load. Typefaces, icons and photographs are all served from this site. There is no font CDN, no script CDN, no embedded video, no social widget, and no analytics endpoint. Documents, including the PDFs, are produced by a library bundled into the page and written straight to your downloads; making an export contacts nothing.
The one exception, stated precisely. The optional “ask an advisor” panel is off until you open it, and only works on a deployment that has been given a language-model key. When you send a question, this site forwards the current decision’s title and situation, the option you committed to, the evidence cards the game had already shown you, and your question, and nothing else: no name, no session history, no identifier, no other decision from your campaign. As with any web request, the server sees the originating address; it is held in memory for sixty seconds to rate-limit the endpoint, is never written to disk, and is never joined to anything about your game. The reply is not stored. The model provider handles the forwarded text under its own terms, which is the reason this feature is optional and the reason the deterministic game never needs it.
Erasing everything. Clear this site’s data in your browser settings, or start a new campaign, which overwrites the old one. There is nowhere else for it to be.
Accessibility
Built to WCAG 2.1 AA: full keyboard play, visible focus, screen reader labels on every meter and control, no information conveyed by color alone, AA-verified contrast in both themes, and every animation collapses under your system’s reduced-motion setting, landing in its finished state rather than disappearing. Where the game offers an alternative route through something cinematic, that route carries the same information as the default one, never less. Sound effects are off until you switch them on, and there is no music.
If something blocks you, please report it via dumana.tech so it gets fixed.
Credits
Designed, written and built by Daniel Umana. Created for Dr. William N. Thomas IV, EDU 280, Social Justice and Urban Education, American University.
Every image in the game is drawn in code except a small set of free-license documentary photographs, all of which are credited by photographer and license on the sources page. No image in this game depicts an identifiable minor, and no face appears anywhere in the interface.
In short
No accounts. No tracking. No server-side record of anything you do. Every claim cited, and the citations are public whether or not you ever play.