Serious Gaming for Water Systems Planning and Management

Modern day challenges of water resource management involve difficult decision-making in the face of increasing complexity and uncertainty. However, even if all decision-makers possessed perfect knowledge, water management decisions ultimately involve competing values, which will only get more prominent with increasing scarcity and competition over resources. Therefore, an important normative goal for water management is long-term cooperation between stakeholders. According to the principles of integrated water resource management (IWRM), this necessitates that managerial decisions support social equity and intergenerational equity (social equity that spans generations). The purpose of this discussion is to formulate preliminary recommendations for the design of serious games (SGs), a potential learning tool that may give rise to shared values and engage stakeholders with conflicting interests to cooperate towards a common goal. Specifically, this discussion explores whether SGs could promote values that transcend self-interest (transcendental values), based on the contributions of social psychology. The discussion is organized in the following way. First, an introduction is provided as to why understanding values from psychological perspectives is both important for water management and a potential avenue for learning in SGs. Second, a review of the description of values and mechanisms of value change from the field of social psychology is presented. This review highlights key psychological constraints to learning or applying values. Based on this review, recommendations are made for SGs designers to consider when developing games for water management, in order to promote transcendental values. Overall, the main conclusions from exploring the potential of value change for IWRM through SGs design are as follows: 1-SGs design needs to consider how all values change systematically; 2-SGs design should incorporate the many value conflicts that are faced in real life water management, 3-SGs could potentially promote learning by having players reflect on the reasoning behind value priorities across water management situations, and 4-value change ought to be tested in an iterative SGs design process using the Schwartz's Value Survey (SVS) (or something akin to it).

Section: ) Therementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: ) Therementioning

confidence: 99%

Socio-Psychological Perspectives on the Potential for Serious Games to Promote Transcendental Values in IWRM Decision-Making

Marini

Medema

Adamowski

et al. 2018

“…A serious gaming approach combines a learning objective with a fun activity in an attempt to increase the potential for learning uptake [20,21]. Perhaps one of the best-known applications of an electronic-based serious "game" is that of flight simulators used in pilot training.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The internalisation of actions and reactions stimulates learning, often resulting in an increase in self-learning and knowledge retention. Serious games, or games used for purposes other than mere entertainment [21], are often used for education, decision making and for public policy making. Since [23] introduced the notion of serious games, various applications have been developed, including, but not limited to, educational [24], science [25], training, psychology [26], military [27], government, Water 2018, 10, 139 3 of 21 corporate, healthcare [28] and water management domains [29].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multi-Stakeholder Development of a Serious Game to Explore the Water-Energy-Food-Land-Climate Nexus: The SIM4NEXUS Approach

Sušnik

Chew

Domingo³

et al. 2018

Self Cite

Water, energy, food, land and climate form a tightly-connected nexus in which actions on one sector impact other sectors, creating feedbacks and unanticipated consequences. This is especially because at present, much scientific research and many policies are constrained to single discipline/sector silos that are often not interacting (e.g., water-related research/policy). However, experimenting with the interaction and determining how a change in one sector could impact another may require unreasonable time frames, be very difficult in practice and may be potentially dangerous, triggering any one of a number of unanticipated side-effects. Current modelling often neglects knowledge from practice. Therefore, a safe environment is required to test the potential cross-sectoral implications of policy decisions in one sector on other sectors. Serious games offer such an environment by creating realistic 'simulations', where long-term impacts of policies may be tested and rated. This paper describes how the ongoing (2016-2020) Horizon2020 project SIM4NEXUS will develop serious games investigating potential plausible cross-nexus implications and synergies due to policy interventions for 12 multi-scale case studies ranging from regional to global. What sets these games apart is that stakeholders and partners are involved in all aspects of the modelling definition and process, from case study conceptualisation, quantitative model development including the implementation and validation of each serious game. Learning from playing a serious game is justified by adopting a proof-of-concept for a specific regional case study in Sardinia (Italy). The value of multi-stakeholder involvement is demonstrated, and critical lessons learned for serious game development in general are presented.

“…• Savic et al [51] present their efforts in developing serious gaming tools for water systems planning and management. Their paper focuses on Serious Games (those used for purposes other than mere entertainment), with applications in the area of water systems planning and management.…”

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confidence: 99%

Twenty-Five Years of Hydroinformatics

Vojinović

Abbott²

2017

Hydroinformatics emerged in 1991 when numerical modelling of water expanded its range from one that was restricted to the modelling of flows to a much wider ranging sociotechnical discipline that supports stakeholders in addressing their water-related problems. However, despite numerous advances in hydroinformatics, the current practical and research effort is still very much technocratic (or techno-centric) which in turn may restrict the potential of hydroinformatics in its scope and its reach. This Special Issue, through the compilation of thirteen papers, illustrates some of the developments and applications in the field of hydroinformatics and marks the twenty-five years of its existence. We hope that this will help to further raise the awareness of the subject and its developments and applications. In the Editorial of this Special Issue, we briefly discuss the origin of hydroinformatics and we introduce the papers that are featuring in this Special Issue. We also give a way forward for future research and application.