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Serious games in communities Peter Edwards, Lisa Sharma-Wallace, Lania Holt, Sandra J Velarde & Simon Wegner September 2018

Serious Games  Use of serious games • Research & analysis • Provide strategic advice • Mediate • Learning • Design and recommend • Democratise • Clarify values and arguments  General principles • Reality • Meaning • Play

Games – not just for land-use challenges!  Already used in climate adaptation  Extension and technology transfer happen in a very ‘messy’, nonlinear, non-straightforward way  Introduction of new technologies  Engaging with community to gain their assessment, attitudes and perceptions  Self-assessment of participants  Across many areas, to make learning enjoyable

Serious games – adaptive and anticipatory  Agile approach to wicked problems • Need collaborative methods  Support and empowerment of communities  Players exposed to different views and approaches  Opens up space for inclusion of diverse views and values  Developing mutual understanding and shared language for continuing collaboration  Enables experimentation, innovation and contemplation of new management methods  Uncertainty and long-term resource/ information constraints  Not just a single tool; needs to be used in conjunction with other tools

Serious games – our objectives  Building up ‘brokers’  Not about problem solving  Realistic, but not reifying  Complexity and the big picture  Understanding others’ positions, interests, lived realities  Trial new ideas in a safe environment  Understand our own values and beliefs  Change our own behaviours and attitudes

Why design a new game?  Our game deals with the big and complex socio-economic, and environmental, across scale, power and time!  Deals with forestry – planting for erosion, but forestry isn’t just about forestry  Underlying theories • Role-playing games • Organisational change theory • Complex systems  Empathy, values and people recognising the need to change to new ways of thinking and doing

Catchment 2030  Fictionalised catchment, set 12 years in the future  Variable number of characters placed within 1 of 6-8 ‘groupings’  Each group negotiates goals, strategies and key organisations to help achieve their goals  Different characters bring different resources to the simulation – funding, human resources, ideas …  Characters/ groups go around meeting with others to negotiate resources they need to achieve their goals  “Success” happens when groups have negotiated and secured the resources they need to achieve their goals  Detailed feedback and debriefing session at the end  Session is video taped with facilitators taking notes during the event

Serious games – potential for…  1 Billion trees  Biosecurity  Climate change  Waste Management  Social licence  Regional development

Serious games: onwards!  Internally exploring ways to potentially carry on this work • Avenues to explore – adaptation for schools, knowledge, scale, governance • Funding avenues – Curious minds, Enviro schools, National Science Challenges  Work with Te Tumu Paeroa to develop games they can use with landowners – mix of our concepts and Matrix Games  Early scoping work with AgResearch and Te Tumu Paeroa to include games in land-use choices/ decision-making project  Slowly working with several teachers to test out the feasibility of adapting it for schools  “App-ifying” possibilities

Acknowledgements Pia Pohatu and Tui Warmenhoven Community in Ruatoria Gisborne District Council School of Government, Victoria University of Wellington University of Canterbury (Ann Brower) Auckland University of Technology (Dave Moore) Rest of the Weaving the Korowai team

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