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

Abstract

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).

Towards a Framework for Designing and Assessing Game-Based Approaches for Sustainable Water Governance

“…The latter theorizes the behaviors of agents, in particular when they share a common and limited resource. Finally, Marini et al [74] propose using Schwartz's socio-psychological theory of basic human values to design game-based approaches in which participants could move beyond their self-interest to more transcendental values. Some papers did not refer to any theories (e.g., [71]).…”

“…In addition, we suggest connecting the assessment to existing theories (e.g., participation theory, theories of trust building or behavioral changes) or, if no theories are available, justifying why that is so and helping to develop new ones. Referring to theories is valid not only for the assessment phase but also for the design phase [74].…”

The Potential of Serious Games to Solve Water Problems: Editorial to the Special Issue on Game-Based Approaches to Sustainable Water Governance

“…2. Marini et al aim to understand the relationship between social learning and serious games in a context of IWRM [5]. They argue that Schwarz' theory on transcendental values (i.e., beyond self-interest) provides a foundation for understanding social learning in IWRM, managing competing values and working towards long-term collaboration.…”

“…Nearly all field studies emphasize that water management relies on stakeholder collaboration. The article by Marini et al nicely address the competing values of stakeholders and how games should take this into account-by going beyond self-interest [5]. The question of course remains whether we can expect such magic from playing a game.…”

“…How is evidence from science brought into a stakeholder driven and political process? This is reflected in the papers on how games work at the science-policy interface [4] and understanding games as planning support systems [5]. One of the challenges in serious games, is how to connect playful interaction with data, realistic models and simulations into the game.…”