InteractiveCato Institute
The Green Card Game
An interactive explainer of U.S. immigration law for the Cato Institute — plus the visual programming tool that made it editable.
How a graph database and a node editor replaced hardcoded policy logic.
What it is
US immigration law is a branching maze of conditions. The Green Card Game turns that maze into something a person can walk through. Behind it sits an authoring system built with React Flow and Neo4j so that policy researchers, not engineers, could edit the experience.
The hard part
The experience spans 800+ screens of conditional policy logic. Encoding that by hand in application code would have made it unmaintainable, and the people who understood the law were not the people who could write code.
How it works
Model the whole experience as a graph in Neo4j, then build a node-based visual editor on React Flow so nontechnical authors could see, edit and reason about the flow directly. The player is a thin renderer over that graph.
800+ screens editable by nontechnical authors
Technology
ReactTypeScriptReact FlowNeo4jGraph modellingFrontend architecture
More video
NewsNation segment
The project covered on national television.
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