The reality of simulation

The activity can be described as social simulation, as participants assume roles of different stakeholders, becoming departments of the government, energy producers, technology start-ups, energy providers as well as representatives of NGOs. They do not only have to deal with the technical complexity of the transition but also navigate through social, environmental issues and explore complicated relations between each other’s conflicting ideas and agendas. For example, it often happens in the game that people acting on behalf of energy producers try to maximize their profits at the expense of the environment. Such attitude usually meets with severe public censure from the citizens and NGOs’ representatives, who demand such practices being financially sanctioned and more sustainable technologies being introduced. However, innovations proposed by technology start-ups are often counter-effective, as they still depend on outdated infrastructure, which has to be modernized by the underfinanced government. Players acting as governmental officials often try to save the situation by introducing new policies that may not arouse public enthusiasm. And the vicious circle of misunderstanding continues.

Looking for solutions

The Energy Transition Game is a great testing ground when it comes to dealing with complicated issues involving multiple stakeholders whose decisions can have a profound effect on the socio-economic environment. The activity mirrors most important features of real world system and highlights the need of collaboration and communication. It also emphasizes that, in many cases, decision makers have to evaluate the trade-offs, as there are no simple solutions that will accomodate economy, ecology and social welfare. Faced with such dilemmas, the participants may try out different strategies, and almost immediately experience their consequences either through the games’ mechanics or through other participants’ feedback. Unlike in real life, however, testing takes places in a safe, controlled environment, and any fatal repercussions stay within in-game reality. In this context, it can be used to chart best development pathways and anticipate different real-life scenarios. For this purpose, the Energy Transition Game has been used at multiple workshops organized, among others, with Estonian Ministry of Environment, German Environment Ministry, Wuppertal Institute, Climate-KIC, Systems Innovation Lab.

Real experience from simulated realities

Although the simulation was designed to depict the problem of energy transition, it can be used in other contexts that require taking into consideration both the social and technical aspects of the complex systems as well as the need for creating multilateral agreements and coordination of actions between various stakeholders. This Energy Transition Game encourages ‘out-of-the-box’ thinking as well as negotiation and mediation skills. By and large, it is a great tool to display problems and dilemmas emerging from complex, coupled systems that encompass environmental, social, economic and technical elements and interactions between them. Taking into account its general applicability, we decided to submit the Energy Transition Game for the Best Climate Solutions 2018 Award.

Can a game become the Best Climate Solution?

Through an annual open call, Best Climate Solutions invites and selects innovative projects and actionable ideas from across the world that provide solutions to targeted climate change challenges. In the previous years, the call has gathered over 180 projects from Europe, Asia, Africa, America, and Oceania, and a community of over 14000 users.

This year’s edition is the fifth in the history of the competition. It is focused on the challenge of “Communicating Climate Change Threats and Opportunities”, and it is organized by the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change in partnership with the Festival for the Earth. It collects innovative ideas, methods and tools to communicate climate change in education, advocacy, media production and social engagement activities.

The Energy Transition Game has been successfully accepted in the first round of the proposal assessment and is now being published on the Best Climate Solutions platform at www.bestclimatesolutions.eu/solution/energy-transition-game/.

Staring from September 24, all registered users can vote for Energy Transition Game and increase its chance of winning. The online voting procedure finishes on October 15, 2018 (5.00 pm CEST).

If you want to assist the world in the transition process, Sign up or log in to the Best Climate Solutions website and vote for the Energy Transition Game!

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For more games about energy transition, renewable energy soutions, climate change and SDGs visit our Blog and Gamepedia!

The post The future starts now: experiencing scenarios for energy transition through social simulation appeared first on Games4Sustainability.

As the person in charge of safety and lives of all citizens, you are provided with two potential options. The first one is to wait for an experimental drug that may cure the disease. Unfortunately, there is only a 10% probability that it will work. If it works, everyone will recover. If not, all 1000 people will die. So there is the second option: Right now you can evacuate 100 people that are definitely not ill. It means that 900 people left in the city will get no medical help and will certainly succumb to the illness and die.

It’s high time you made a decision. You can take a chance and try to save everyone with a 90% probability of failure or save 100 individuals from the group of 1000. What would you do?

A cold calculation

If you think that one of those options makes more sense than the other – congratulations, you are probably a human. From the mathematical and rational point of view, it does not matter what you choose. Both options are completely equivalent. The expected utility, however heartless it may sound in this context, of treating 1000 people with a 10% probability of success equals 100. This is the exact number of people saved when you choose the second option.

This approach, when used to make decision about human lives, may make you feel a little bit uncomfortable. If is perfectly fine. We, as people, always add something to this equation – our values, ideals, preconceptions, feelings and experiences. And, it has to be repeated, this is perfectly fine because these are the very elements that make us human.

The sharing dilemma

But how it is this story connected with games? Let us think about another example. Imagine that you play a game similar to A Common Dilemma, Forest Rules or Laudato Si. You and other participants act as a community extracting common-pool resources. Let us assume that you want to work together for the benefit of the whole group and decide to exploit reserves in a sustainable way. In the context of these games, such a solution is described as the social optimum. But then you may face a dilemma: How will you divide the payoff? Equally? According to the contribution of the participants? Or maybe in a way that it will be profitable to “the poor” in the game’s world?

A social optimum

These are all excellent questions that, from the mathematical point of view, completely do not matter. In the common-pool resource dilemma, any distribution of the payoff is socially optimal as long as a total group decision maximizes the long term yield of the given resource. So if one person gets all, and all the rest live in in-game poverty, this solution is 100% socially optimal. Again, if it makes you feel uneasy, it is perfectly fine.

This uneasiness is what distinguishes us from robots or decision-making algorithms. And it lies at the core of the concept of using games as social simulations. Even if there is some kind of an optimal solution, and even if this solution is known to the players, it may not be so obvious. Not because of our fallibility or tendency to use heuristics that are prone to errors. Just because even in a conscious decision-making process, we still apply our broadly defined values and experiences. Individual differences in these areas may cause tensions. One person can tend towards rewarding participants according to their input, while other towards unequal distribution that benefits the “less privileged”. Such tensions, as presented before, can emerge even if both parties do present the optimal solution.

Learning from decisions

And that is why adding word “social” to simulations is so important. Artificial worlds may incorporate strategies or actions that are the best. But when they become inhabited with real humans, these solutions may become fuzzy. Therefore, we, as participants, not only learn about this specific simulated section of the reality, but also about ourselves – the drivers behind our decisions and decisions of other players. These lessons may be extremely important for experts who already know the “optimal” solutions, as they can learn why they are not regarded as such by others. For others, they provide a safe environment to experience and reflect on how norms, values, emotions and ideologies shape the world we live in. And they, in fact, do shape world around us, as we are human.

If you find the issue interesting, browse more games on the topic in the Gamepedia, and share your experience in comments below the post!

The post Beyond rationality: When math and logic fail? appeared first on Games4Sustainability.

Check new groundwater research conducted in India with the use of dynamic experimental design.

The post Groundwater governance appeared first on Games4Sustainability.

I start the classes by explaining to the students the dilemma presented in the original paper by Hardin. Next, I show them some basic values of the production function. The purpose of this introduction is to give them a clear understanding of their situation, possible actions, and their outcomes, both on individual and group level. It is also necessary to tell them how much they can earn if they work together as a community.

When I’m quite certain they understand the rules we begin the game.

I inform them that they can’t communicate during the exercise and we play five rounds. Then I pause the game and give them an opportunity to talk. I say that for 10 minutes they can discuss their outcomes. Usually, they use this time to complain about actions of others, but in the end, they always come up with some idea about how to act to earn the most as a community. After this discussion, they play 5 rounds without any communication. Then I pause game once again and tell them that for the last five rounds of the game they can communicate freely.

The most important element of the class is the discussion after the exercise. First, we talk about their results and how they differ from the optimal outcomes. Reports created by the platform come in handy to present their decisions and outcomes. Then we go on to the part where we want to summarize lessons learned from the game. During it I want my students to realize that:

1. Communication is crucial in CPR dilemmas.

   Usually, after the first discussion most people follow the rules that they agreed on. In most cases, communication in the last 5 rounds of the game makes them perform better as a community.

2. Trust can easily erode.

   In every game that even if most of the people followed the established rules there were some defectors. Their actions made other also resign from following the agreement. Even few of them can destroy the cooperation. Furthermore in some games erosion of trust was so intensive that students weren’t even interested in creating any more rules when it was possible.

    

    

   

3. Sanctioning and monitoring are crucial to effectively manage CPRs.

   It is interesting that in discussion students usually forget about the latter element. They really want to punish ‘wrong-doers’, players who did not follow the established rules, but they tend to forget that then also need some kind of mechanism to check who belongs to this category.

Apart from that, the discussion brings out many interesting topics connected with the environment and how the ‘tragedy of the commons‘ apply to their everyday life.

All in all, I think that A Common Dilemma is a great game that can be used in the classroom. It’s quite simple and short – the whole exercise with introduction and discussion shouldn’t take longer than 90 minutes. Still, it engages students and gives them an opportunity to get down to the bottom of this dilemma.

The post Few lessons from A Common Dilemma appeared first on Games4Sustainability.

Some may say that its mechanisms aren’t realistic and too game-like. It is obviously true as Oil Springs is just a scenario for the actual Catan game created for entertainment, not for education in sustainability.

Still, I think that Catan: Oil Springs clearly shows the problems connected with the extensive use of natural resources. Such as titular oil.

For example, players who use them are able to develop and expand faster. Still extraction of oil bares it consequences, but not necessarily to the person who did it. Environmental damages are distributed randomly, so everyone can suffer. I remember one game where some players were using lots of oil while one, unfortunate participant took all the hits. This was a great opportunity to talk about how western countries benefit from extracting oil while resource-rich developing countries have to deal with environmental damages resulting from the drills.

On the other hand, using the disaster track creates an interesting psychological mechanism of blaming one person for the disaster. After players use five units of oils, some kind of catastrophe happens. It means that everyone who does it takes part creating the disaster. Still, in most cases, players blame for the catastrophe the person who actually triggers it by using the fifth unit of oil. This reaction may seem a little bit short-sighted but isn’t it similar to what we do every day?

We tend to get outraged when some disaster happens while turning the blind eye when everything seems to be fine.

Another interesting situation that can occur in the game is ‘greenwashing’. As you can both use and sequestrate oil, it is possible to receive scores for being the most environmentally friendly player and still be the most responsible for environmental damages. We know that some companies in real-life tend to do so – use ‘green’ projects to gain positive PR while engaging in harmful activities on daily basis.

To summarize, I think that Catan: Oil Springs is quite nice game to play. It can be the starting point for many interesting discussions about the current state of affairs in the real world. As it is highly entertaining we can certainly use it to engage teens in a discussion about the role that we, as a society, play in the context of environmental issues.

The post A few lessons from Catan: Oil Springs appeared first on Games4Sustainability.

Why is it interesting from the sustainability point of view?

The basic idea behind Prisoner’s Dilemma is the conflict between individual and group rationality.

This struggle is also the base for the tragedy of the commons. Prisoner’s Dilemma is one of the simplest conceptualizations of this problem, and that is why it is very popular among researchers.²

But, what if we think it may be too simplified?

What if we make the model of common-pool resource more complex and involve more stakeholders?

We put this idea to test on one of the workshops during Summer Institute on Bounded Rationality in Max Planck Institute for Human Development. It was conducted by Piotr Magnuszewski from Centre For Systems Solutions and Peter Todd from Indiana University. Participants were asked to create and program algorithms designed to play one of the versions of About that Forest game. They competed with randomly chosen opponents and with copies of itself.

The idea was to test out the multi-agent tournament as a research tool and work out the methods of analyzing data.

Such investigations may give more insight into how people make decisions in the context of common-pool goods problem and how it affects the state of the resource. Consequently, it enables us to check which properties of decision heuristic give it a competitive edge against others. It makes it cooperate more or guides it towards the conservation of the commons. We can try to assess how the complexity of the algorithm and type of data it processes influence its performance in all of these categories. Furthermore, virtual nature of the tournament enables us to run multiple simulations with different decision heuristics to check how the composition of the community affects the individual, group and resource outcomes.

More rigorous scientific investigations in this area are still needed. Even though this workshop was just a test of the tool and methodology, it shows us wide range of research opportunities and establishes the framework for further explorations.

The post Let the Tournament Begin appeared first on Games4Sustainability.

How did it go?

What were your decisions?

Were you maximizing your individual profit or outcome for the whole group?

What about others?

In A Common Dilemma Nash equilibrium is connected with maximizing individual profit, but do not have to mean maximizing player’s decision. In most cases, it is a situation when all participants harvest the same amount and none of them have the incentive to deviate. If they make a lower decision, they get less profit. On the other hand, higher decision means that the costs increase so much, that new profit is not able to cover them. Therefore, all players should stay with their harvest. Still this set of decisions is always higher than social optimum that represents the maximum production of the resource. If all the players make decisions that sums up to this value they earn the most as a community.

Let’s quickly go through the main results that were obtained from experimental research conducted using this and similar design¹:

1. People, generally, do not follow the Nash equilibrium, but in the same are not so good at cooperating to reach the social optimum.

2. Open communication enables members of a community to create their own rules and norms. These regulations increase probability of using joint CPR management strategies.

3. Monitoring is an important factor in establishing cooperation. It enables players to check if other people follow the established rules.

4. Sanctioning further improves cooperation as it is a method of punishing players who do not adhere to the norms formulated.

These are most important findings from the experimental research. Still, they hold up when checked against the reality. There are many communities across the world that are able to sustain their common-pool resources. More information about the topic can be found in the book dedicated to this very subject written by Ostrom, Gardner and Walker.

Still, there are many differences between experimental designs as presented in this post and reality. The complexity of actual ecosystems has to be reduced to create simple models used in research.

But isn’t this approach too simplified? Maybe researchers miss some aspects of ecosystems that may be crucial for understanding the dynamics of behind the problem of common pool resources.

The post Come get some (share of this common-pool resource)! part 2 appeared first on Games4Sustainability.

Imagine that you and your friends live in some remote area and use common fishery.

The situation is the same as in Hardin’s pasture. Each of you has the incentive to earn more money by increasing your fishing effort. But would you actually do it?

I really dare you to think about it and to try. Go to https://play.games4sustainability.com, create moderator account and try A Common Dilemma game with your friends, acquaintances or coworkers. The model behind this simple simulation is based on experimental design created presented by Ostrom, Gardner and Walker¹. Both, original game as its online counterpart are the exact representation of problem described in Hardin’s article².

Each player’s revenue is proportional to his or hers investment into the resource:

revenue = harvest * price of the resource

Costs, on the other hand, depend both on decision of the player and on the joint harvesting effort of the whole community:

cost = cost parameter * harvest * harvest of the whole community

This creates the situation presented in following plot:

As you can see, at the beginning, the more group use the common-pool resource the more they earn. But after reaching the maximum value of production function increasing the harvest brings more costs to the whole community than additional income. It may even cause the situation where the income of all participants will be negative, costs will be higher than the income. Still, when most members of the group tend to restrict their use of the resource, the ones who would increase their harvest will be able to boost their profit.

So are we dealing here with tragedy in a making? I really dare you to try it and check our next post.

The post Come get some (share of this common-pool resource)! part 1 appeared first on Games4Sustainability.

Now imagine that you are herdsman owning few animals feeding on local pasture.

You earn some amount of money from each of them – this is your profit. On the other hand your costs are connected with overgrazing the pasture. More animals eat more grass so there is less food left for others.

Let’s add other people into equation by assuming that the pasture is commonly owned. Other users are also herdsmen who have their own interest in mind. In this case they also get all profit from expanding their herds. All costs are shared equally among all community as animals can roam freely around the pasture.

So what should we do?

Our best interest is our profit.

In this situation our best interest is our profit. It can be increased by adding a new animal to the herd. We receive profit from this one animal and only the fraction of the costs that it generates. Therefore we should add more and more of them until we get to the place where potential costs connected with introducing new animal into herd are higher than additional profit. We also have to keep in mind that others, being as rational as we are, should do exactly the same. The result is obvious – overgrazing and destruction of the pasture.

You think that you shouldn’t take part `in this ‘rat race’? Think again. Even if you only want to secure your profit you should follow the same strategy. Keeping your own herd small doesn’t help you. As others introduce new animals into the pasture your profit doesn’t change but costs become higher and higher. Therefore you lose your income. To secure it you should expand your herd with others. We’ve seen that it leads to overgrazing and the destruction of the pasture.

This is the exact example used by Garrett Hardin in his landmark article ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’. He argued that rational decision making always lead to overharvesting of the common pool resources (CPRs). Whenever people actually use their reason this collapse is  inevitable. As in ancient tragedy, the fate of the CPRs is sealed.

Pasture owned by the community is only one example of the CPR.

Such resources have two distinct qualities. First one is subtractability. It means that when one unit of resource is removed from the pool it is no longer available to other users. If you cut a tree in the forest or catch the fish from the pond it is yours and others can’t use it anymore. Second one is that it is non-excludable. It is impossible or hard to ban someone from using it. It may be for various reasons. For example their rights to use it may be guaranteed by law. In other cases, for example some large CPRs can be too costly to monitor and it would be close to impossible to force someone not to use them[1].

This leads us to the core of the problem. There are many large CPRs that are key to our long-term survival. For example oceans or tropical forests with all their biodiversity. They fall into category of CPRs because they are not easy to protect. And they are being overharvested right now. Some argue that our atmosphere can be treated as CPR and tonnes of CO2 is being emitted into it in this very moment. We all face the problem and we will have to bear its consequences.

But are we really doomed? Is the tragedy of the commons really inevitable and how we can look into this problem?

The future may not be so grim as the theory states. The experimental research in this area shows that there may be hope for us after all. And the solution can be found using games.

The post All hail the rationality. Down with the sustainability. appeared first on Games4Sustainability.

Undoubtedly, this document is a clear signal that all involved parties recognize global warming as a pressing issue. Furthermore,  they are ready to, at least, agree that radical actions have to be undertaken. As such, it can be considered a success –

almost 200 countries are ready to work together to limit the global emission of greenhouse gases (GHG).

But will it last? Some insights into this matter can be given by research on management of common-pool resources (CPRs).

It can be argued that atmosphere of our planet fulfills the definition of CPR. Basically, all of us have access to it. Furthermore, it is susceptible to our actions – greenhouse emissions – and we all bear costs of climate change. Our situation clearly reflects the dilemma described as Tragedy of the Commons. One country can benefit from using fossil fuels by gaining access to relatively cheap energy while costs connected with the excess emission of GHG are spread throughout the globe. This somewhat ‘egoistic’ rationale should, in theory, guide all nations in the world. Does it mean that this agreement is bound to fail?

The good news is that we have strong reasons to believe that it may not be the case.

Research in the area of management of CPRs has proven that communication is one of the factors improving the cooperation between the users.

It means that even some act of discussion may help to reduce the GHG emissions. But will it be sufficient?

COP21 agreement definitely urges involved parties to report their goals and puts forward ideas how actual progress should be reviewed. This creates a set of rules that should lead to achieving the main goal of lower emissions and monitoring mechanism.

Experimental research has shown that efficiency of the cooperation is even higher when there are strict regulations about the use of the CPR and possibility of sanctioning user that do not comply with rules. Monitoring alone might be insufficient, as showed in, for example, A Common Dilemma or Forest Rules, games regarding CPRs.

Furthermore, current action plans submitted by the parties suggest even more problems with coordination. It is argued that when all these commitments are put together the temperature will still rise up to 3.5 degrees, which is clearly not consistent with the “2 degrees” goal. This will create problems on the global scale which magnitude cannot even be determined.

Even though experimental research suggests weaknesses of the Paris agreement, its failure is not inevitable. Involvement of numerous parties and clear message about the climate change may pave the way for further actions to lower the GHG emissions worldwide.

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