A speculative ethnography of small hassles, co-regulation, and micro-governance
By the inaugural Governable Spacemakers Fellows: Amanda Nicole Curtis (Speculative Digital Ethnographer), Joanna Rivera-Carlisle (Digital Governance Engineer), and Jenny Liu Zhang (Artist)
This report presents the Small Hassles Court, a conflict resolution minigame, as a speculative infrastructure for micro-governance. Our premise is that the smallest scale of self-governance is emotional co-regulation, and the Small Hassles Court provides a space for exercising this form of governance. Building on the whimsical grammar of the world of Twisterland, this game seeks to foster emotional literacy and support players in finding their way through conflicts with their friends, flatmates, and families. Unlike other courts, this space has no judge or jury: how players negotiate their conflict lies with them. This report reflects our team’s choices in creating this space, our challenges and wins along the way, and a few futures we dare to imagine.
The Small Hassles Court began, as many good ideas do, with a half-serious comment of heightened relatability. The idea of taking a friend to court over an ever-growing pile of dishes grew into serious considerations about the thresholds surrounding confrontation and conflict resolution, and the kinds of principles which govern our everyday, small frustrations. Small hassles make up a notable portion of our interpersonal conflicts, yet they rarely get the attention they deserve. We saw this as an opportunity to create a space in which people can rehearse fairness and self-governance on a level which may seem small, but carries notable implications for how we communicate with each other and make collective decisions.
Our approach was comprised of three core pillars: re-angling this ‘court system,’ valuing play as a means to collectively re-imagine, and treating self-governance as emotional regulation. This ‘court’ system, then, is about alignment between two people, as opposed to judgement or an objective notion of justice. Effective governance is not about finding a perfect solution; rather, we view it as a commitment to respecting diverse perspectives, holding space for disagreements, and building long-term resilience through flexible, playful systems. Therefore, the Small Hassles Court has no judge or jury. Players are instead invited to navigate together towards mutual understanding.
The Small Hassles Court is situated within the broader narrative world of Twisterland*,* a game universe designed by Plot Twisters to foster emotional awareness, personal reflection, and community care. This game adds an opportunity to exercise micro-governance to this exploratory world, which is aimed towards empowering emotional literacy in young adults. The whimsical, often ironic tone of the Small Hassles Court reflects this target group, even though we have designed the game with broader accessibility in mind.
This report documents our process of developing the Small Hassles Court game, but also speculates on its possible futures. Some sections move analytically through design decisions and governance concepts; others stay closer to fieldnotes or imagined futures. Throughout the report, colored text boxes signal moments of speculation: explorations of what might exist, plausible extensions, or future uses of the Small Hassles Court. You do not need to read this report linearly. Like the Court itself, it encourages playful exploration. We encourage you to read slowly and treat this text as an invitation to think alongside us about how systems for emotional self-governance might be designed, practiced, and played with.
What exactly is a small hassle? It can be a single bowl in the sink, or a comment that keeps you up at night, or a slow accumulation of objects out of place, which, by themselves, do not amount to a full-blown conflict. But over time, if left unattended, these details become the pinpoints of discord. They can end friendships and partnerships, and provoke festering resentment which feels entirely out of proportion to how small these issues seemingly are.
In the quiet corridors of shared life, between roommates, friends, collaborators, strangers on the Internet, Metagov fellows, small hassles ripple out. They intrude on the soft infrastructures of feeling — the rhythms of care, attention, reciprocity — which often remain invisible until they are disrupted (Star & Ruhleder, 1994; Star, 1999). In such moments, these relational infrastructures surface as microsites of emotional governance, where the coordination of emotional labor becomes a shared, if often unspoken, protocol sustained through everyday acts of attention and responsibility (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). Here, we focus on a small form of governance: emotional co-regulation between two individuals of comparable power.
The Small Hassles Court emerged a speculative gesture towards these thresholds. Following Dunne and Raby (2013), we approach the Small Hassles Court as a provocation, a deliberately partial design which invites users to imagine interpersonal governance as playful. It asks: what if we treated tiny frictions as sites of inquiry and connection, as opposed to escalation? Governance is often imagined at scale: parliaments, councils, moderation systems, voting protocols. But, what of the granular? The intimate? What of the governance that takes place in a group chat, where the conditions of implicit feudalism can preclude the emergence of self-governance (Schneider, 2024), in the space between two people unsure how to talk about what is bothering them?
The Small Hassles Court invites players into that terrain, co-opting ceremonial structures of the courtroom — rounds, shared records, a bilateral dialogue — and repurposing them towards co-regulation. Games, in particular, are unique spaces primed for such deliberation, offering players ways to surface their values and adapt them to everyday, interpersonal contexts (Nguyen, 2020). Twisterland, its surrounding gameworld, is an arena where the self is the first level of social change. Thus, the Small Hassles Court presents a prototype for emotional infrastructure, offering a format for doing something many of us were never taught: how to notice and address discomfort before it curdles into resentment, how to speak with someone you care about without needing to be right. How do you win the game? You listen to your opponent.
The Small Hassles Court is designed with young adults in mind, when they are entering into a period of their lives marked with increased independence and more equal power structures. In this transitional period, from living at home to connecting with other independent young adults, negotiation decisions are less often governed by specific hierarchies. The Small Hassles Court is designed to support emotional co-regulation during this life stage, but aspires to nurture self-governance for anyone who chooses to play.
To compliment other Metagov projects focused on collective-scale tooling (including Telescope, ModPol, D20, CommunityRule), we deliberately zoomed in on this small form of governance. We see the Small Hassles Court as sitting alongside late-night phone calls and Discord channels, as a space where people can express what they may struggle to say directly. We have striven to make this space comfortable, well-lit, and emulating the mutual respect which we deem essential to good governance.