In my consulting work I keep explaining the FAIR principles—data should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable—and I keep noticing the same thing: slides don’t hurt. Everyone nods at “your data should be findable,” but nobody feels what it means that it isn’t. So for a lab digitalization webinar, I built an arcade where the audience gets to suffer through their own daily reality, with a stopwatch running.

FAIR PLAY is a retro CRT arcade in the browser with four neon cabinets, one per principle:

• The 5-Year Dig (Findable) — find one signed result from 2021 in a procedurally generated mess of network drives, naming chaos, locked files and colleagues on vacation. Your wasted time is the score, contrasted at the end with a 3-second search in a FAIR lab.
• The Silo Gauntlet (Accessible) — escort one experiment’s data from order to report through nine disconnected systems, clearing a fresh access friction at each: logins, expired passwords, 2FA, a dropping VPN, an IT ticket.
• You Are The Middleware (Interoperable) — a conveyor belt delivers results as XLS, DOC, PDF, PPT and paper; the target system accepts exactly one format, so you hand-retype everything while the belt speeds up and unprocessed packets drop off as silent errors.
• Provenance Detective (Reusable) — a mystery result lands on your desk and you reconstruct who produced it, on which instrument, with which batch and calibration — and watch how much of that context is simply gone.

Every mechanic is lifted from real client stories: the employee who told us it’s easier to redo an experiment than to find its results, the double-digit login counts, the fourteen Excel templates for the same table. The games just compress that pain into two minutes and put a number on it.

Technically it’s deliberately minimal: vanilla HTML, CSS and ES modules with zero dependencies and no build step. Canvas draws the animated background, WebAudio synthesizes the chiptune soundtrack and sound effects without any audio files or frameworks. The chaotic file system in the Findable game is generated fresh each playthrough, so no two digs are the same. The whole thing was vibe-coded with Claude Code in a single evening.