A Serious Game for the Water-Energy-Food-Land-Climate Nexus and Related Policies: Design Challenges and Implementation

We present the design and implementation challenges for the creation of a web-based Serious Game (SG) allowing the player (as decision maker) to implement and investigate current and future policies and implications related to Water-Energy-Food-Land-Climate Nexus. The design and implementation had to meet the following challenges:

(a) The SG addresses “real life” policy issues using data at National Level. Consequently, the complexity science model developed as simulator is the underpinning platform for assessing the game outcomes. This System Dynamics Model (SDM) involves over 7000 variables and runs in the background providing numerical outputs, with special techniques for optimising the processing and computational time.

(b) The SG has been designed as an operational decision making tool (i.e., not for educational or social awareness purposes alone). Main stakeholders are not only involved in the development of the SG, but will also play it to investigate consequences of policy options. These stakeholders include financial institutions (banks), policy makers (governments/ministries) and local authorities wishing to test the impact of specific “real life” policies. The SG is designed so that model sub-systems provide answers via separate play sessions. For example, a series of questions are posed where the player first explores ways to maximise energy production, followed by another series about minimising emissions, or combining more than one policy. The player selects the desired policies (policy instruments), using dedicated “policy cards”, with specific attributes (financial/social cost, duration, time needed for implementation).

(c) Although complex, the SG has been designed to be “understandable” also by non-science experts. Consequently, special effort has been invested in the visualisation mechanisms. The players can select the type and the way the information is presented. The complexity of the model visualisation has been reduced by representing the SDM as a chain of hierarchically related variables. The visualisation starts with the parameter influenced by the player (e.g., water allocation envisaged for the irrigation of a specific crop), followed by the visualisation of the derived variables up to the top of the hierarchical tree (e.g., water and energy balance) allowing the players to grasp the chain of causality between variables.

To the best of our knowledge, there is no other similar SG in the literature. In the paper we show the concept, design and implementation of the SG and demonstrate it for one Case Study (Greece). Currently the SG is being developed for another 11 Case Studies within the ongoing SIM4NEXUS project (www.sim4nexus.eu).