Celebrated on March 22 every year, World Water Day is about focusing our attention on the importance of water.

This year’s theme is ‘‘Leaving no one behind’. While Sustainable Development Goal 6 focuses on the task to “ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all”, the 2018’s The Sustainable Development Goals Report proves that around 183 million of the global population lacks basic drinking water services. The most vulnerable groups are at the same time often overlooked by society. Each day, around 800 women die from poor sanitation-related complications in pregnancy and childbirth. Hundreds of refugees from war-stricken regions, people with disabilities,, indigenous peoples and many more are in danger because of the lack of safe water.

Though it is impossible to solve every water-related social issue this year, it is a good opportunity to raise awareness and help develop empathy towards the discriminated.

Water Games for WWD 2019

Like every year, we invite you to enjoy Water Games – a joint initiative of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) and the Centre for Systems Solutions to celebrate World Water Day and the Sustainable Development Goal no 6 – Clean Water and Sanitation.

Year after year, we’ve been collecting and describing games which address different water challenges, related to the marginalization of basic needs of vulnerable groups. Join us, play one of the serious games presented on the Water Games website and let us know what you think about them! Don’t forget to leave comments here and on our social media!

We’ve also rounded up all our water-related posts for you to learn how games can change people’s perception of many water-related issues.

To get a better understanding of what “green” infrastructure and nature-based solutions are and how they relate to other Sustainable Development Goals, we encourage you to visit the WWD’s official website and the Fact Sheet.

And remember – “Whoever you are, wherever you are, water is your human right”.

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For more games about tap water issues and water visit our Blog and Gamepedia!

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Learning outcomes are not only dependant on the idea behind the game but also on the principles of game design incorporated into the design process. Modern game designers are making the best out of it.

For example, Papers, Please, one of the socially conscious indie games that gathered a lot of attention for giving players a glimpse into a life under communist dictatorship, was often praised for immersive storytelling and ”incredibly minimal, strikingly stark art and sound design”. The design was part of the experience where “[it] does an excellent job of bringing Arstotzka to life – in a suffocatingly uncomfortable sort of way” and adds another layer to the in-game world. This immersive aspect of the game is why mainstream games are very often seen as more compelling than their “serious” counterparts.

Thankfully, there are plenty of studios, designers, and creators that take on serious issues with more design-oriented attitude. And people from the serious games industry are starting to notice that good graphic design and storytelling are aiding player’s learning circle.

Looking at the final projects of the MGIEP Gaming Challenge, the people behind this particular contest also noticed the importance of the factors mentioned above. We already wrote extensive texts about the World Rescue and even talked with Sandhya Nankani from Literary Safari about how this children-friendly and accessible game came to be.

Now we took an opportunity to talk with the We Are Müesli game studio team, Claudia Molinari-Ivanović and Matteo Pozzi, co-authors of Once Upon A Tile (shortened as OUT)—a finalist in the MGIEP Gaming Challenge.

OUT has been developed in cooperation with Daniele Giardini and Pietro Polsinelli. Daniele Giardini is an artist and founder of now-closed Holoville and DEMIGIANT. While living in (how he describes it himself) a supersecret hidden cave between Rome (Italy) and Niš (Serbia), he is dealing with game design, coding and storytelling, art,unity assets, comics and interactive stuff, projects for museums/exhibitions, apps and websites, and a lot more. Meanwhile Pietro Polsinelli, a member of Suppagumma ensemble, is a game designer and developer mostly working on applied (a.k.a. educational) games.

Once Upon A Tile creative team is a prime example of a group of people that has it all to create a really immersive sustainability game—a great sense of graphic design and ability to tell any story in a way that sucks a player into the game. The stories they explore through games, be it history, art or human wellbeing and sustainable development, are consistent and immersive. We asked Claudia and Matteo about their designing process and how it was affected by the MGIEP Gaming Challenge.

Many of your games dive into serious topics related to the culture, society and its problems. What is important for you in choosing projects?

We leverage the videogame medium to explore unconventional themes and stories that, for different reasons, could sound unpopular, be forgotten, or just never be explored by means of a game – like, for instance, Italian Resistance against Nazi-Fascism in “Venti Mesi“, a topic we feel still urgent today, but too often relegated as something “distant in the past”, or “The Great Palermo”, a free interactive ballad about street food, folklore and culture of the city of Palermo, Sicily, or “SIHEYUAN”, a cooperative action-puzzle game for 4 players of all ages and types, conceived as a multiplayer variation on classic falling-block mechanics and inspired by the architectural tradition of “siheyuan”, historical courtyards of Beijing, China. We actively try to produce inclusive and meaningful experiences focused on such cultural and empathic themes, basing them on the three main pillars: storytelling (narrative games), design (simple, intuitive, visually stylish and interactive) and collaboration (including partners and players from outside the traditional “gaming” boundaries).

Why and how, in your opinion, can a game serve as a tool to talk about these topics?

We believe in the power of good design. A great design experience, being a product or a service or an advertisement campaign, is more than just a communication tool: its purpose it to create a memory, something that stays in time. Our approach to video games is rooted in the Italian tradition of design: we see games as digital artefacts to bring meaningfulness, culture and beauty to the global market.

The artwork in all of your games is quite simple but very eye-catching. How important are the visual aspects in the process of conveying a game’s message to the players?

The art style in our work varies according to its purpose. Our projects can be considered experimental. So is their art. Working with a design approach in mind, the art style must serve the objective of the game. That is why it is always different but still interconnected across all the games. In the majority of the cases, players will grasp less than half of the reasons why the game has been designed in that shape, but designing speaking everything has a reason to exist, everything has a meaning, being colours chosen or overall composition.

What are, for you, the main challenges of designing games?

There are many different challenges when making a game. Understanding how to convey an “important” message through the game mechanics’ logic, for example, but also finding possible working partners from outside the game industry or scene, people who work in foundations, city councils, museums, tourism and historical archives and who never thought about adopting a video game to promote their content. In the case of OUT our creative solution was to adopt a plurality of points of view on the topic, trying to tell multiple short interactive stories (hence engaging possible multiple audiences) instead of dealing with the issues from a single perspective.

Speaking about the game Once Upon A Tile—What is it about? How does it work?

“Once Upon a Tile” is a prototype for a mobile game about peace and sustainable development where players manage an evolving world by matching resource tiles and generating new results and products. The game board is divided into two main parts: an upper part (“life on the surface”) and a lower one (the “generative underground”). The surface is inhabited by little human beings, as in a “life simulation game” à la Sims (or Little Computer People). The underground is filled with matchable tiles (as in casual puzzle games like Candy Crush) that represent resources for human activities, either tangible or intangible. The player’s goal is to evolve and preserve life and universal wellbeing on the surface (from the establishment of buildings to the development of social relationships) by generating appropriate elements in the underground and dealing with the complex consequences of her/his actions. For example, matching three coal tiles in the underground lights up a fire on the surface that keeps humans heated, but also produces pollution. And of course, matching coal tiles also makes them rarer… The game has a simple structure but players are required to think carefully about their matches.

Why did you take an interest in creating a game about peace and sustainable development? What was your starting point in the designing process?

Our proposal was to create a game that leverages the wide reach of casual mobile games to ease the approach to the theme of sustainable development and its social consequences. The game, in fact, comprises classic tile-matching mechanics feeding an evolving world simulation: a casual game that narrates an important story our generation has the responsibility to narrate, the story of a peaceful and sustainable future for all. Hence the ironic title, Once Upon a Tile (OUT). With OUT we wanted to surprise the player by applying simple and highly-engaging “match-three” puzzle mechanics to the complex emergent generation of a “better world” within the game itself. The resulting hybrid genre may be called a “puzzle life-simulation” game.

How did you get involved in the UNESCO Gaming Challenge? Did this experience change anything in the way you look at games, yourself and our world?

When we saw the UNESCO MGIEP Gaming Challenge we were surprised to finally see a big corporation getting closer to the video game industry, not just like to make an entertaining game and promote their mission, but mostly to use it like a communication and social tool to change human behaviours. We found ourselves pretty close to this view as, before this challenge, we had the chance to work on other projects with similar missions (being cultural or artistic ones), and work with other people that share our gaming values. In fact, OUT has been developed in collaboration with other two amazing developers: Pietro Polsinelli, a developer with 25 years of experience in modelling and application development for corporations and institutions. As a game designer and developer he works mainly in applied games in the fields of health, social impact, education for the European Union, universities and research centres; and Daniele Giardini, a programmer, designer, artist and writer, with 15+ years of experience with digital applications for institutions, museums, exhibitions, movies and TV shows. As a game developer, he worked on more than a dozen of games, won various independent awards, is featured on Steam, and developed some widely popular plugins for the Unity engine (HOTween/DOTween).

Was there any particular reason for choosing a mobile platform for this project?

The game was initially designed for smartphones, with an adaptive layout that makes it playable also on tablets and desktops, so to reach the largest possible audience. The reason behind it is linked to the fact that we wanted to spread the sustainable development goals as much as possible to Western Society. This could be achieved by using a worldwide technology. This was an opportunity not to miss, from a psychological and social perspective, use a tool of consumption with a casual mechanic to divulge a vital topic.

Let’s talk about playing the game OUT—What skills are needed?

No special requirements are needed to play OUT: you just need a smart device. We intentionally designed the game to be as accessible as possible to a variety of audience.

What, in your opinion, can be learned from playing the game? What would you like players to learn from it or experience through it?

We conceive OUT’s player as a “learner as producer” [Gee, 2013]: The core of the gameplay tells a story of the relationship between resources, production, growth, knowledge and communities, and how the story ends is partially constructed by the user, not in a book-like linear way. In other words, OUT was not designed as an “educational game” in the traditional, sometimes pejorative, sense; it was designed as a game to be played, and what it teaches is built in the gameplay experience, not as a secondary narrative. An instrument where different themes can be “played” [Devlin, 2013], a tool of “situated learning” through exploration and experience: this is the design goal we wanted to reach with OUT. We think the real learning challenge we wanted to undertake was to design a meaningful connection between becoming a proficient player and getting a functional grasp of the concept referred to by the game [Koster, 2013].

What do you think are advantages of game-based learning?

Game-based learning is defined by nature as lessons which can be competitive, interactive, and allow the learner to have fun while gaining knowledge. With OUT, we designed the game covering 7 learning steps: learning the matching logic and its immediate effect of generating products of different kinds; learning about the effects of such products on the simulated community; learning about the community’s dynamics in different contexts of abundance vs scarcity; at critical in-game moments, discovering actual points of contact with the real world, potentially connected with contextual content of UNESCO MGIEP‘s real initiatives and/or in-app donations to real projects; learning about the intra-community (i.e. social) dynamics, the emergence of diversity, the spectrum of possibilities; via gameplay repetition, developing familiarity with the diverse situations and effects of her/his choices. In particular, gameplay that leads the simulated community to thrive or towards extinction should induce a transformative process that makes the player more aware of diversity, context and relationship between seemingly-unrelated causes and effects; experiencing the complexity and superficially- unexpected consequences. This model was shaped to affect the player’s sensitivity towards the whole set of peace and sustainable development issues.

Can games promote sustainability? If so, how?

Games are a great medium to promote anything. They have two huge drivers: immersivity and identification. With the right storytelling and gameplay, everything can become an experience of growth. What is missing are big corporations and institutions willing to invest budgets to this new forms of interactivity. The majority uses contest programs (OUT was developed thanks to one of those) with restrictions and winning criteria that, at times, can kill more sophisticated ideas.

Our final, more personal question: If you had to choose one favourite game with serious topic, what would it be?

Dys4ia

The questions were answered with the contribution from Daniele Giardini and Pietro Polsinelli.

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Plexopolis: a compendium of place games for making decisions together is a useful tool for decision making and placing said decisions in a wider urban context. How the compendium came to be? We have had a chance to ask Dr Jamie O’Brien from the Cimplex project about the role Plexopolis and other gaming activities play in research and educational projects.

Could you briefly describe the games you have prepared for the project?

The games in Plexopolis offer a chance to learn about how small, everyday decisions can have big consequences for the cities, towns and villages that make up our home environments. The pack of games comprises a design-led response to a broader project called Cimplex, which was funded by Horizon2020 to investigate how contagion is effected by people, either through personal contact, travel or influences on a global scale. The games were designed as we wanted to complement the quantitative social science on which the research was based with a creatively inspired approach to these themes. The games are also designed to engage interactive and adaptive learning.

What inspired you to create the games as a part of the Cimplex project?

At University College London the Cimplex project was lead by Professor Steven Bishop who is a mathematician. For some time, Steve has tried to consider ways to improve the narrative surrounding his science. Approaching a problem from an artistic viewpoint allows different avenues of understanding to be explored. The idea in Plexopolis was to draw on these notions of visual narrative but to create an evolving framework, to explore how our decision-making affects others as well as long-term outcomes. I have a background in visual art and urbanism research. Focusing on urban environments is important as many people depend on these for their everyday needs. Understanding how complexity is built into our urban environments is key to securing their resilience and sustainability.

How are they linked to your research and real-life systems?

The Plexopolis games reflect our interests in decision-making processes, from different points of view. My research responds to themes of a design principal called ‘affordance’, which is used to describe ways in which things in our everyday environments are made useful for living successfully. I am particularly interested in the notion that affordances are emergent properties: they have not been made deliberately and they happen accidentally. In other words, design affordances are latent properties of our everyday environments, and require our social interactions with them to bring them into reality. Steve’s pioneering research has related to the use of mathematical models to predict dynamical behaviour of physical and social systems. He considers a wide range of applications: how burglaries are clustered; migration of people; where people choose to loot in a riot; and how people arrive at their perception of security in comparison with actual crime rates. In each case the underlying mathematics has strong similarities with individuals making a choice of their initial response, which then goes on to have consequences for other people.

What problems/topics did you choose to showcase through the games?

In designing the games I drew from a variety of problems in urban development. I wanted to explore how, for example, different business models seek to tap into different kinds of city experiences, or how transportation policies can create winners and losers in terms of accessibility to services. I was also interested in playing with the impacts of random events, such as a sudden drought or flood. Conversely, I wanted to show how sustainable urbanism can be achieved through optimization, as in the example of a refuse-collection game. We also wanted to leave the games ‘open’, so that players could make their own rules or use the materials differently. We are very interested to know whether players adapted the games to their own learning environments.

How did you manage to translate the complexity of a decision-making process into games? What was your starting point in this process?

We were particularly interested in the notion that urban sustainability can be promoted through beneficial social cooperation or competition, and we designed the games with this in mind. Game theory is often described as the science of interactive decision-making, and gameplay is intrinsically complex in this regard. As players advance or fall back in the games, so they must change their gameplay behaviours, either to stay ahead or get ahead. It is adaptive behaviour in action! We designed the games so that the themes of play, and the potential outcomes, might reflect some current issues in urban development.

Is the game only for students? Who can play this game?

We developed the games with the participation of urban planning students, but anyone could enjoy them. We hope that urban planners, designers and policy-makers may find them particularly interesting. We have offered Plexopolis as a starting point for people to adapt and change the games to suit their own niche interests. It would be great to learn how people worked together to adapt the games, as this social interaction could itself be considered as a contagion process.

Do you think “Cimplex” games are or could be used to develop new skills in players?

Playing the games, and engaging with their development, would enhance skills in dealing with issues of urban complexity. We believe the games would also enhance so-called ‘design thinking’, which we believe everyone makes use to deal with the challenges of living successfully. We also hope that engaging with the games helps to develop insight into the ways in which affordances for everyday life emerge from our interactions in our lived urban environments.

Can the games influence the mindset or world complexity perception of the players? How?

Game-players can configure their own learning environments in many ways, to help develop insight about complexity in the urban environment. We would be very interested to help frame some learning strategies based on the games around questions of world complexity. We could perhaps look at ways in which local-scale interactions, such as those involving decisions to distribute water, have an effect at the planetary scale

Is there anything that surprised you while creating the game or observing players?

The main thing that comes from studying complex systems, as well as systems that display chaos (which is another mathematical description of complicated outcomes from apparently simple systems) is that nothing surprises us. Almost any outcome is possible. The key point in design is being able to foresee possible outcomes since, if we can imagine a possible, even if not likely outcome, then we can create a design that alleviates the downside of such an outcome or ignore it if we consider it too unlikely (although sometimes we do this at our peril). Certainly once you have seen something once, then you can use this to create metaphors for future behaviour which help us to make decisions in uncertain environments even if the outcomes do not follow the same path. Sometimes the option of doing nothing is not available to us and we simply have to make a decision.

What, in your opinion, are the key elements of an educational game?

All games have positive aspects to them. The fact that they are a game means that it entices people to engage with the material. All games have an educational aspect to them in one way or another, it is just that some are structured specifically to explore particular aspects. If the “learning outcome” is too opaque then players may still enjoy the game but may fail to see the connectivity with various elements that would be useful. But, on the other hand, if the games are too transparent then the game might appear too forced. The best lessons are those learned for yourself.

Do you think that serious games and similar interactive tools are the future of education? Should such tools be more often used also in higher education?

As for serious games – is there anything more serious than our own sustainability? The advantage of Plexopolis is that it allows various aspects of science and humanities to come together. However, we also see Plexopolis as a way to engage with adult learners and so there is scope to broaden the scope for different kinds of learning. In higher education the emphasis is typically, quite rightly, on the core elements, but this does not exclude the use of gameplay tools to enhance learning outcomes. While online games can be fun and informative, they do not always gather people together. The idea here is that people will make decisions together, in physical contact as a social group, and the outcomes may be more than just the sum of the games themselves.

What do you think are the benefits of game-based learning?

To answer this question meaningfully we would need to engage experts in educational psychology, which we are not. We would very much welcome the involvement of expert researchers in this field. Generally speaking, we see games are helping to engage in problem-based learning, which draws on role-play and lived experience. Some of the games also pose ethical dilemmas, such as who takes priority when resources become scarce. Gameplay offers a safe environment to explore and learn about these critical issues. Again, the benefits to learning depend very much on the configuration of the learning environment and the adaptation of the games to intended learning outcomes.

Can games promote and support sustainable development? If so, how?

The games are intended to help develop thinking around sustainable urban development. This means that players have the opportunity to focus on problems that are emergent, stemming from complex interactions between people and things within a range of urban environments. People’s decisions are reflected in different ways, and the games also seek to demonstrate how ‘key’ decision makers, perhaps in positions of power, shape the spaces in which people on the ground go about their everyday lives. So ‘everyday’ decision-makers make their decisions through their movements or gestures. What they ‘think’ on the everyday level is not always expressed verbally, and hardly ever formulated into a formal policy. Yet everyday interactions are powerful drivers in urban sustainability, so we hope that playing the games will help learners understand how interactions between ‘key’ and ‘everyday’ decision-makers is critical for sustainable development.

What do you consider the biggest challenges in designing such games?

We faced a challenge in designing games that helped to learn about complexity without them becoming too complex to play. We sought advice from leading colleagues in the field, including Professor Jeff Johnson and the Open University’s Centre for Complexity and Design. Prof Johnson advised us to deal with complexity by focusing the game themes on tangible learning outcomes. In this way, the development of the games was part of a collaborative decision-making process, and we hope they continue to evolve as players’ experiences and insights develop.

This compendium is a design-led response to a broader research project, Cimplex (funded by Horizon2020), which studies complexity in relation to global challenges. The photos courtesy of Uniform, design studio behind simple but immersive graphic design.

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Not long ago, the Cape Town’s public administration stated that by April 2018 the city would run out of drinking water. And according to the city’s mayor, Ian Neilson, at this point the question is not how to prevent Day Zero but how to postpone it.

But the problem of the water scarcity runs much deeper than that. While focusing our attention on the shortage of drinking water, we often forget that there are many other areas completely dependent on regular water supply.
In the end, the today’s water crisis can evolve into energy shortage or food shortage crisis, and we won’t be able to do anything about it. Lack of communication and understanding between different sectors seem to be the biggest issues here. Can we do anything to dodge the bullet?

There is a variety of tools that can be used to increase the awareness of the complexity behind the food-water-energy nexus. Unfortunately, we are way past the point where just consciousness-raising would better the situation. What we need is a root solution of such issues.

And games seem to fill that void perfectly. Why? We addressed this question to Herman van der Meyden from The Perspectivity Challenge. Read the interview to check what one of the developers of the Nexus! Challenge game thinks about the potential of games to tackle urgent global challenges.

Could you briefly describe what the game Nexus! Challenge is about?

The Nexus! Challenge lets its participants stand in the shoes of politicians and CEOs who jointly shape an economy that has to provide energy, water and food to its cities. From trade boycotts and bad harvests, to water shortages and plant viruses: the players face turbulence just like in the real world. They have to find ways to become resilient, either alone or in collaboration with others.

How did you or your team get the idea of creating such a game?

The lead developer works for a multinational that co-founded the Resilience Action Initiative (RAI), a partnership aimed at solving those issues that can be found around the interlinkages of the stress nexus of energy, water and food systems. The RAI team faced the challenge of getting across to future partners. As collaboration between different stakeholders is a pre-requisite to solving issues,hence the idea to let people discover this themselves in a serious game was born.

Why did you and your team choose a serious board game as a medium to talk about the nexus of water, food and energy?

Because a serious game allows you to move from simply explaining something to experiencing it yourself, which we believe is a more powerful learning instrument when designed right.

Who can play this game? Are particular skills needed to play it?

Anyone from early grade high school students to CEOs can play. A basic (high school) level of conceptual thinking is needed to pick up the learnings of the debrief and to make sense of what happens during the game. Obviously, the level of prior knowledge does make a difference on the depth of insights people take away from the game.

Do you think the Nexus! Challenge is or could be used to develop new skills in players?

The Nexus! Challenge provides a crash course in identifying when collaboration is required and shows the value of understanding the systems in which you operate.

What psychological and social processes may happen in and between the players? Is there anything that surprised you in players’ behavior?

Nexus! is a highly interactive game, which by design presents participants with a dilemma between the individual objective and the common good, and between short-term and long-term. The game outcome is shaped purely by how the players respond to one another in the face of these dilemmas. So we see denial, short-termism, anger, trust breaking, taking the moral high ground, social exclusion, coercion, cheating and anything else that people can show when put under stress. What has surprised me is that even the people who theoretically know very well how they should play the game find it very hard to overcome their own social dynamics.

Can it influence the mindset or world complexity perception of the players? How?

Yes, it can and it does. By showing how your individually logical and rational short-term strategies translate into long-term group outcomes that you would not necessarily chose when knowing the full impact of your actions.

Do you think it is possible that playing this game could change something in policy making with regard to nexus challenges? In what way?

I think the experience with the Nexus! Challenge will make people in real life situations more eager to invest in foresight, systems understanding and involving all stakeholders in the room when they recognize they are in a complex system.

What is the role of the debriefing in the Nexus! Challenge? How important it for players to be able to link the experience from the game to the real life examples?

The debrief is an essential element and the game should not be run without it. The game itself is relatively short with one hour playing time. The experience is typically quite overwhelming to people. So we then use the debrief to “peel the onion” and makes sense of what happened. What were the issues that you were facing? What were the interdependencies with the other players? How did you respond to them? Why? And then we go onwards to the “so what” questions and we discuss the links with reality. Players sometimes dismiss the game as an oversimplification, which it of course is. So then we have to bring in stories from participants to show what part of the dynamic is real. Such as the story of the Brazilian government water basin manager who told me after a session at World Water Week in Stockholm that the conversations at his game table were almost a mirror image of his daily work in his river basin.

I noticed that apart from the Nexus! Challenge, Perspectivity created a few more games about important, global sustainability challenges – What motivates your team to focus on such topics?

Over the last two centuries, humanity has seen unparalleled technological progress. We can put people on the moon and billions of electronic circuits on a chip. Yet our social ability to protect our public goods has not kept pace. Hence, we believe that sustainability challenges are the defining challenges for the 21st century. We are keen to make a small contribution by enabling people to experience and reflect upon better ways of dealing with these challenges, through playing the Nexus! Challenge or our other games around themes such as climate change, food, security, public health and decision-making, or through our other work at Perspectivity.

What key elements did your team consider as most important when developing the games?

Most important for the games is that it is fun, that the game confronts players with dilemmas and that the way they respond to these dilemmas, in interaction with others around the table, shapes the group outcome.

What were the main challenges of designing these games?

It is always a very big challenge to keep it simple. On the one hand you want to accurately model reality and on the other hand it needs to be playable in as little time as possible and easy to understand when you explain the rules. So the art is finding the minimum complexity that just feels reflective enough of the chosen topic.

One last, more personal question: If you had to choose one favorite serious game, which would it be?

The XY game, a pure prisoner’s dilemma. The lessons from this simple game had a profound impact on my life and inspired me to create the Perspectivity Challenges later on.

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What is the World Wildlife Day?

When in 2013 United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) decided to proclaim March 3rd, the day of signature of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), as the UN World Wildlife Day, we were already dreading the future of our flora and fauna.

Now, 5 years later, the WWD has become even more important global event, as it correlates with the Sustainable Development Goal no 15 to protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial species and ecosystems.

Nevertheless, although effort has been made to face the threat we pose to the Earth, we still cannot take pride in our activities. The last untouched habitats are being destroyed at this very moment. For example, while the deep ocean floor of Papua New Guinea is being transformed into a mining site of Solwara 1, the primeval forest of Bialowieza’s ecosystem is passing ‘the point of no return’. And these are only a few examples.

Even the population of natural predators such as big cats, which are the focus of this year World Wildlife Day, is declining due to the loss of habitat, prey, poaching and illegal trade.

Why do we need the World Wildlife Day?

Though more people than ever are aware of those environmental issues, some still fail to acknowledge their effect on our lives. What many people do not realize is that nothing exists in the vacuum. All species of flora and fauna are part of complex systems like, for example, the food chain. While destroying natural areas with pollution, mass deforestation or poaching, we may deprive ourselves of many ‘ecosystems services’ we normally do not think about.

To fully understand how complex interdependencies work, it would be a good idea to use a practical example. Minecraft will come in handy here, as this mainstream game incorporates the elements of biodiversity and ecosystems services on a very basic level. Each world in Minecraft offers only limited amount of resources, e.g. wood, thus by overrelying on it, player can easily lose building material and get prematurely devoid of possibilities to create and expand the game’s world.

Also, Eco – a minecraftesque game from Strange Loop Game enables players to learn from their mistakes. Even the simplest card game like EcoChains can easily illustrate the extinction domino effect.

There are many other tools to make people realize that they should care. And with the priorities of many world’s leaders shifting from pro-environmental to strictly political or business solutions, we shouldn’t stay idle but take things into our hands!

Visit our gamepedia for more games connected to the Sustainable Development Goal no 15!

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And though the scale is smaller, the same goes for each group and organization – there is not much one can do by himself.
The teamwork is one of the key elements of development and progress. With a strong, close-knit team come people who are more effective and engaged in the group’s activities. And also more successful.

Just imagine a group of researchers working on a cure for an unknown disease. The clock is ticking and many lives are at stake. Each of the group members excels in the topic. It should be thus obvious that they will achieve their goal more effectively together. However, they will most likely fail. Why? It’s not only about the pressure of time. It is because they lack the sense of community. Simple things, such as mutual trust, good division of tasks or a positive comment, could enhance their collaboration.

That’s why teamwork is also an important aspect of corporate business management. It takes more than one employee to finish any project or change the organizational culture in a corporation. But how to build the trust between employees? How to bring them together to create something more than a loose group of people?

There is a lot of Corporate Social Responsibility tools and activities that are widely used by many corporations all around the world. One of such tools is Akeakami Quest – a multiplayer game by Agile Literacy, a US-based Agile coaching, and training firm.

We sat down with Leonor Urena, the founder of Agile Literacy, to talk about the game and the complexity of teamwork.

Could you briefly describe what the game is about?

This is a survival game set on a fictitious island called Pumaka. Pumaka is one of the disappointment islands, known for its erratic and harsh terrain. To survive under these conditions, the tribe must select the very best of its champion warriors to find the nine crystals of life; earth, fire, water, air, wood, wind, spirit, light, and shadow hidden by the trickster god. The nine crystals balances the islands atmosphere, making it habitable again.

How did you get the idea of creating a game about sustainable teamwork/team building?

I work with teams every day and wanted to create something that they would be able to learn from but also have an impact on their quality of work and workday. Many of the teams I’ve work with aren’t given time to learn the soft skills necessary to work as a cohesive team. They are simply thrown in together and expected to perform. Companies realize they have an issue with their teams but fail to understand what teams need. People are complex as is. Now put them together and tell them you need to work together, and by the way we changed our software development practice to Scrum, so you will need to execute in this framework, and the project needs to be completed in six months. It just makes things more complicated for the team to have all these things thrown at them.

Why did you choose a serious game as a medium to talk about this issue?

People tend to open up and set aside their guard in play mode. I wanted an approach that would hit home without rattling cages. I wanted something that would make a lasting change in corporate culture. It needed to be incremental change to be sustainable and fun.

Are there skills needed to play the Akeakami Quest?

No skills required, just a keyboard and a willingness to have fun.

What are the most important lessons that can be learned from playing your game?

Teams get to learn continuous improvement. They will learn to embrace failure and learn to quickly adapt.

What educational goals can be achieved by using your game?

Game is designed to teach teams to problem solve, collaborate, coordinate, and communicate.

What psychological and social processes can be observed during the game?

You will find the more teams play the better bonding and synergy they will have. You’ll notice more laughter, and less stress. For those with team members across the world, the game seems to “gell” them in such a way they remember that person and ensures they’re not left out.

What, in your opinion, are the key elements of a serious game?

For me a serious game needs to have, firstly, a theme that absorbs the learners interest and keeps them coming back for more. Secondly, the game needs to have a mechanism that reinforces the skills taught. So each time they go back in, the skills learned previously are reinforced.

What do you think are advantages of game-based learning?

Game based learning has proven to have higher retention rates and completion rates. In addition, it tends to be more cost effective.

What were/are the main challenges of designing a serious game?

The main challenge for me in designing a serious game was keeping to the minimal viable product. My creative juices went on overdrive.

If you had to choose one favorite serious game, which would it be?

Prune the Product Tree from Tastycupcakes. It forces product managers to think out what the product roadmap will be.

The Orgin story of Gelling Akeakami Quest:

How did you like this interview? Let us know in the comment section or on our social media!

The post The Quest for Teamwork appeared first on Games4Sustainability.

As the ecosystems can help us with regulating climate or cleaning water, The Natural Capital strives “to shine a light on the intimate connections between people and nature, and to reveal, test, and scale ways of securing the well-being of both.”.

The Natural Capital Project works in many areas, including resilience to climate and coastal hazards in Belize and development planning in British Columbia, The Bahamas, and Myanmar. All that supported by the extensive software and mapping techniques used during meetings with local administration and planners.

But as “the process of preparing spatial data, running software tools, and appropriately interpreting results can be challenging”, The Natural Capital decided to prepare a more accessible tool – a serious game.

The Tradeoff! is a series of “mapping games that simply introduce concepts related to nature’s benefits to people”. With 3 versions of the game already available, Tradeoff! is a complex but easy tool which supports understanding of t coastal zone management, terrestrial/freshwater services and arctic development.

Why did the Natural Capital decide to create a new game rather than to focus on software’s development? What are the benefits of using the game, and how can it affect the attitude toward sustainable development? We discussed those and more questions with Henry Borrebach, the leader of the Natural Capital Project’s training team.

What, in your opinion, are the key elements of a serious game?

When the Natural Capital Project (NatCap) and our partners look into creating a new training game, we often have similar objectives, which tie directly to the elements of the games we develop: 1) Engage our learners in an interactive way, 2) Create ways for learners to come to key points themselves through their actions in the game, rather than through presentations or lecture, and 3) Try to simulate real-world circumstances within the game (e.g. the challenges of simplifying real-world data for various audiences, interacting with stakeholders with different values, etc.).

What do you think are advantages of game-based learning?

People learn in a lot of different ways, and teaching with games is a way to utilize different modalities simultaneously, combining, for example, visual, auditory, and experiential learning. It also gets people up and moving around (in the case of our games), and in workshops where all of the learners don’t know each other, it helps break the ice and get everyone talking to each other and talking about the concepts.

Could you briefly describe what the game(s) is about?

The Tradeoff! game series is about nature’s benefit to people, and about how development and planning decisions affect the value of those benefits.

Through the game, participants try to make decisions that strike a balance between the gains derived from things like agricultural or infrastructural development and the potential losses of natural value caused by that development. It’s also about how gathering spatially-explicit data about nature’s value can help inform better planning decisions. There are four version of Tradeoff! that cover different environments and decision contexts: 1) Best Coast Belize (coastal zone management), 2) Tradeoff! Agriculture Edition (farming, ranching, and terrestrial/freshwater ecosystem services), 3) Northland: Arctic Choices (Arctic-region development expansion), and 4) Roads to a Resilient Future (linear infrastructure and terrestrial/freshwater services).

What were/are the main challenges for the designing the games?

One of the biggest challenges we face is finding the balance between detail and abstraction. For a game to run well, we often need to simplify the circumstances, data, and decisions involved, but we’re also teaching science-based approaches and tools, so if we abstract too far away from empirical details, we’ll either lose our credibility, or fail to actually teach what we’re trying to get across in the game. Another big challenge is that, because NatCap runs trainings and workshops, and plays these games around the world, we have to build games that will not only reach audiences of very diverse technical/educational backgrounds and skillsets, but will also translate across cultures, languages, and contexts.

Are there skills needed to play the game(s)?

The Tradeoff! games have been designed to be playable by people who are completely new to the concepts entailed, but also to still be engaging for practitioners and experts in the field.

What are the most important lessons that can be learned from playing the game?

One of the most important lessons is that there are already data and tools available that can help people make better, more informed decisions, to improve the sustainability and resilience of development, spatial planning, or other similar projects. Another key takeaway is that it’s not a binary choice between development and conservation, but that there are many co-benefits and synergies to be found, and that oftentimes, sustainable solutions are win-wins for both people and nature.

Do you think that serious games can promote sustainability? If so, how?

I certainly think they can. The games that we work on at NatCap are designed to help train practitioners working around the globe learn the skills they need to do work that directly links to many aspects of sustainability, from coastal zone management and hazard mitigation, to sustainable development planning and best agricultural practices. The better we’re able to teach our learners, the more likely they’ll be able to put what they’ve learned into immediate action. For broader audiences, games can make big ideas more approachable, and can make facts that will seem tedious in non-interactive settings much more engaging. And people who are more engaged by these ideas about sustainability, I think, are much better positioned to take action in the world.

What sustainability goals can be achieved by using your games?

We’ve designed multiple games to be able to reach into different environments and planning/development decisions, so we’re certainly trying to have a wide reach in impacting sustainability goals in a variety of places. Primarily, though, I think the Tradeoff! games are about teaching both practitioners and decision-makers that we can make these sustainable and resilient decisions now—we don’t have to wait for some future technology to push toward sustainability; it’s achievable already.

One last, more personal question. If you had to choose, what would you say your three favorite serious games are?

I had a great experience playing a game with a collaborative project called Seeds of a Good Anthropocene, in which everyone had to first come up with their own seed. But then form teams and alliances to pitch imaginary projects to a panel of judges. It was a great way to learn about other cool initiatives in the world. It was great for the organizers as a way to collect a whole bunch of “seeds” for their collection all at once.

Another great game is from WWF, called Get the Grade. It combines a bunch of great elements: it’s a role-playing game, with competition and alliances at your own table, but each tables is also competing as a team against the other tables/teams in the room.

And, one more: It’s actually a kids game, but I’m a big fan of Don’t Flood the Fidgits, an online game from PBS Kids. Kids (or adults, really) have fixed budget and different options for what to build, in order to make towns for the Fidgits that will survive flooding events.

How did you like this interview? Let us know in the comment section or on our social media!

The post Natural capital with Henry Borrebach appeared first on Games4Sustainability.

The Best Festival Ever was a culmination of 3.5 years of research and development between the UK and Australia. The show explores concepts from Systems Science and Climate Modelling, and already has been used in many venues, including theatres, museums, classrooms and board rooms.

The history of the whole project began in 2006 when Boho Interactive, one of Australia’s leading science-arts ensembles, introduced their audience to the first interactive performance that implemented some elements from Game Theory and Complex Systems Science. Drawing from this experience, Boho – led by David Finningan – created a prototype of the Best Festival Ever show, and the rest is a history.

What was the idea behind the festival and how sustainability fits in all that? We talked with Nikki Kennedy from Boho Interactive.

What sustainability goals can be achieved using serious games?

With BFE we set out to create a game that helped simulate a system to display some of the elements of systems thinking and resilience.

Our aim in regard to sustainability was to create something that allowed a more educated conversation around sustainability – instead of addressing it head on, we attempted to create something that showed what sustainability is reliant upon – a resilient system. In doing so, we have made something that allows our audience to come to their own understanding of why sustainability might be important, why it is currently in a precarious position, and how we can approach making it more realistic.

We have found, from previous experience in interactive theatre, that controversial information is often best realised rather than told implicitly. We also don’t set out to demand that our audience define their stance on climate change or sustainability in the show. Provided an understanding of how systems work and what might make a system more or less resilient is come to then we are content that we have achieved our goal.

What are the challenges for the educator who uses games?

– Creating a game that the players emotionally connect to, something that they can relate to and personalise or feel a sense of ownership over even when the world of the game is ridiculous.

– Explanation of rules, finding a clear explanation of rules for the game that cover the possible outcomes and focus the players on an outcome, while keeping the flow of the presentation or show going/ not losing the players attention or investment in the system

– Identifying the boundaries of the game and the system, and finding a way for the two to correlate – this can be very difficult as natural and real life systems do not naturally fit to boundaries.

– Finding a balance between education and scientific explanation, and maintaining the momentum of game play. Too much science and education, and the games become superficial and demonstrative; too little, and the games have no science to be related back to.

How to provide psychological safety for games participants?

We try to provide psychological safety to our audience through the use of familiar and easily comprehended examples and stories, and the principle of loveliness in the game and participation. We use genre based storylines – simple, familiar, instantly rewarding and gratifying, and give the audience a sense of knowing something – even if they don’t know everything.

The storyline of our show is rooted in the principle of a three act ‘well made play’ form, in terms of at which point the story and the games need to create an introduction, complication, climax, conclusion. We try to work on the principle of ‘loveliness’ (a term lifted from Coney, UK) which refers to giving the audience a lovely experience. We try to do this at all levels, from the way we introduce them to the ways we will ask them to interact and participate in the game, the level of complexity and stress we include in the games and interactions.

To make sure that, while the outcomes of each of our games may not be positive (you have to win or lose a game, mostly), we try to buffer this by giving fun and funny story outcomes to the games. This gives the effect of a reward, even when the audience/players are ‘losing’ the game. We also make sure that while the game can be lost – the festival can be a disaster – the audience do not feel like they are losers, or that they are totally responsible for this. We give the audience some power, but the big and difficult decisions are made as part of the storyline.

The game then is played in response to a series of events that they cannot control. This is not unlike how we individually interact with systems on an everyday basis, we can’t control everything in a system, we can only attempt to manage the parts that we have control over.

What skills are needed to use games for education?

There are skills that are needed for creating the games and then there are skills that are needed for presenting/facilitating the games.

To make games for education, you need skills in observing and comprehending different complex concepts. There is another skill in finding how much of the concept can be explained in order to ensure comprehension at a complex (interesting and not patronisingly simple) but not complicated.

Making the games themselves is a process rather than a skill. Often we use mechanisms from the many games we have played that have some relationship to the concept we are trying to communicate. We then adapt the mechanism and colour it with the example that fits with the rest of the show/games. It is then a process of testing with an audience many many times. We test and retest with various audiences to make sure that what we are doing is accurate scientifically, but also accessible and enjoyable to an audience.

The skills you need for presenting/facilitating the games are being clear and concise, quickly developing and maintaining a relationship with your audience and developing an environment where they’re allowed to play (something that is underrated but very important) whilst also maintaining control and leading the game.

What is the role of game debriefing and how it should be done?

In making Best Festival Ever we imagined the show/game itself as being a communication tool to be used in conjunction with an after game debriefing.

We intended to teach the different terms and concepts in basic systems thinking in order to give audiences confidence in participating in a conversation with a professional systems thinker, scientist, or otherwise.

We found that by giving the audience and scientist (or others) a shared language, the discussion and debrief was richer and the questions more specific. Instead of being caught up in explaining language around concepts that are sometimes difficult to communicate, the conversation could progress further, and explanations about real world research and application could be made.

The debriefing seems to work best when there is some time for reflection on the participation and games. It can start with a short informal presentation by a scientist or someone who applies systems thinking at a professional level that links the games to what they do in the real world. Then he or she allows the participants to ask questions and discuss their experience more freely. There is also the possibility of holding an assisted simple systems modelling session using a pencil and paper diagram around a system familiar to the participants. This kind of debrief is best held in small groups. It helps participants employ some of the concepts they have recently learnt.

What psychological and social processes may happen in and between game participants?

The psychological and social processes that happen in and between game participants roughly mirror the benefits of a participatory systems co-modelling. When participants seek to understand the big picture, observe how elements within systems change over time, and generate patterns and trends, they consequently create an environment where they can test their assumptions. As a result, they are allowed to consider an issue fully and may resist the urge to come to a quick conclusion, taking into account short term, long term and unintended consequences of their actions.

We aim to allow audiences to be presented with the elements of systems thinking and modelling practices. And then allow them to form their own application of this onto systems familiar to them. We don’t seek to change minds but provide a different way of thinking in a fun and engaging environment. Another social process that occurs during these kinds of games is that it becomes difficult to victimise or blame any one party for the collapse or pressure placed on a system.

What are the benefits of games as a method from the trainer’s perspective?

Games are almost always fun. Any teacher will tell you that learning and true comprehension is so much easier and more effective when those that are learning are having fun. Therefore they are very useful in explaining complex or typically dry subject matter. Games provide a way of learning that can (if designed carefully) engage different kinds of learners; those that learn through listening, those that learn through observing, those that learn through talking or discussion and those who learn through doing or having a tactile engagement.

The interview was held in 2015 and was part of the Games for Sustainability publication. For more info on Best Festival Ever: How To Manage a Disaster visit Boho Interactive website! Let us know if you liked this post! Would you like to see more of interviews on our webiste?

The post Best Festival Ever with Nikki Kennedy appeared first on Games4Sustainability.

What is World Water Day?

World Water Day was established as “an opportunity to learn more about water related issues”. It was first celebrated on March 22nd 1993, and since then it has been held annually. Each year, UN-Water sets different theme for World Water Day which is usually related to the world’s most urgent current affairs.
According to the UN-Water website:

Globally, the vast majority of all the wastewater from our homes, cities, industry and agriculture flows back to nature without being treated or reused – polluting the environment, and losing valuable nutrients and other recoverable materials.

Why Water Games?

It is enough to take a quick glimpse at contemporary mass media to realise that gaming is becoming part of its mainstream. But at the same time, new ways to apply games to real life are being invented – more and more often they are used to solve complex problems. The so-called serious games are meant not to offer escape from reality as to improve it.

The world around us is constantly evolving, making our future even less certain. Meanwhile serious games emerge as innovative tools for learning, decision making, improving effective collaboration and developing successful strategies. The question is how can we benefit from their potential? The list of things we can learn from them is endless. We may move around some complex realities and make decisions without bearing the real costs of our mistakes. Moreover, in order to address people’s need of challenge, the games offer a possibility for collaboration and competition, allow players to alter their habits or even motivate them to adopt sustainable behaviors.

Games draw people’s attention to serious problems, such as i.a. water issues. Let’s go back to the initiative that promotes active attitude towards water management and inspires positive change in this respect – World Water Day.

Join us in celebrations, for example, by playing some serious games you find on the Water Games website. Let us know what you think about them! Don’t forget to leave comments here and on our social media!

The post WWD17 is all about wastewater appeared first on Games4Sustainability.

PreventionWEB – web platform created by the UNISDR.

As stated on the website, the PreventionWeb primary goal of the PreventionWeb is to spread knowledge about DRR. The platform provides current news related to the topic and is equipped with o tools facilitating exchange and collaboration.

The users may also find here a number of useful resources, including maps, multimedia and games related to DRR (i.e. Flood Resilience Game which we have already written about).

On the PreventionWeb platform you can search content by region.

PreventionWeb is also a participatory website for connecting the DRR community.

Everyone can easily become a member of PreventionWEB community.

All you need to do is create your own account and start submitting material. We highly recommend joining the platform since it offers DRR professionals possibility to share their knowledge with a wide range of people.
Have you already tested PreventionWEB? Share your opinions with us in comments and on our social media.

The post PreventionWeb for DRR professionals appeared first on Games4Sustainability.

Games with a theme of the tragedy of the commons are frequent guests on our blog and in our gamepedia . Previously, we posted about CRS games such as A Common Dilemma which you can play on our Games Platform. Now we are presenting a different game on the subject of common goods – Catan: Oil Springs.

The Catan: Oil Springs is the old good Catan with a little environmental twist. Players, besides other resources such as wood or stone, can also use oil to develop their cities and roads.

But using too much oil has its consequences for whole Catan.

The game was a part of the Green Games project.

For more info read this interesting article about Catan:

Official Catan: Oil Spring page

IO9 – Oil Springs of Catan explores the tragedy of the commons

Andrew David Thaler’s blog – in which four environmental scientists play Oil Springs of Catan, destroy world

Did you play it? Would you like to play it? Let us know what you think about Catan: Oil Springs!

The post Link for today: Catan: Oil Springs appeared first on Games4Sustainability.

Life-action role-playing, or, in short LARP, is a form of role-playing where participants physically act out the actions of their characters. The most people associate LARP with fantasy role-playing game. There, players wear special costumes inspired by fantasy world with warriors and monstrous beasts. But LARPs can deal with a much wider range of themes.

In the article Great pretenders, you can read:

In addition to the traditional Viking, vampire and zombie scenarios, larps have been designed around serious themes – refugee crisis, gender, homelessness, HIV/AIDS, imprisonment.

LARP scenarios with social, environmental topics or those connected to the sustainability and Sustainable Development Goals can help experiencing a specific situation and explore the point of view of others. With that, players not only can better understand the realities of the problem that they face as a character in the game but, thanks to creating environment driven by the creativity, they may also think about a solution to the given problem and reflect on how this solution could work in real life.

LARP is great tool for experimenting with decisions and solutions.

Players immerse themselves into the world of the game, start to care about the game-world and about their characters:

The social framework of the game seems to encourage an organised and sustained form of empathy.

LARPs can be very useful when you know how to use them. Even most ridiculous scenarios can help with communication issues and with the development of emotional intelligence. Let’s How many interesting results you could see when creating special scenario about a problem which is particularly important to you:

What if we had used role-playing games to model different approaches to banking and finance after the financial crisis? Or experiment with the use of crypto-currencies? What if we used pop-up temporary realities to explore the redistribution of resources or alternatives to the welfare state? At a time of growing alienation, larps can help us explore communitarian possibilities. Not ready to open your relationship, but interested in dabbling in non-monogamy?

 

When larping, you can freely explore possible outcomes and try out new strategies.

You can learn more about yourself and the person you become, when put in someone else’s shoes:

Rather than acting out the robotics of your personal identity, role-play allows you to discover hidden capacities.

The LARP is a surprisingly complex platform for discussing complex problems and issues. Next time when you see adult men and women playing LARP, don’t laugh. There is high chance they are now solving political issues or creating new ideas for policies you wouldn’t ever dream of.

And this is the great irony of these games: as much as you are escaping your ordinary existence, in many ways you are actually coming closer to truths about yourself and your society.

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