Steven Bachelder – The Serious Game System helps stakeholders tell their story

A Serious Game System is similar to a serious game which is basically a learning game or a training game but a Serious Game System is more open-ended it’s not prescriptive, it’s not predetermined. The learning outcomes aren’t decided in advance but they’re actually emergent in the system itself through the participants – from their perspectives their concerns their agency what it is they need to achieve as stakeholders if they’re dependent on what part of society they’re representing and it begins with a dialogue about what they would like to achieve, what are the challenges and what are the most difficult things they have and what do they share what commonalities do they have and then this is worked out through several iterations that actually all of these feed into the game structure so the game grows as the stakeholders give evidence, as they give experience as they play through different scenarios they see what works what doesn’t work, they negotiate with each other, sometimes they laugh with each other sometimes they laugh at each other sometimes they laugh at us, so there’s a lot of playfulness especially in the beginning about how to do this and then it becomes more and more formalized as the game grows through each iteration. The stakeholders have been able to explore – and also suggest what type of ecotechnologies they should be using or they would like to use in different problems. So ECO SELECT –that’s where they do it in the board game, but the board game – that we’ve developed in the Serious Game System in the first iterations of the board game, also is implemented in a digital game because as you go along there’s so much data there is so much information there are so many parameters that are operating, you need really the help of a computer to do all the calculations. So with the digital version which is the exact same version of the board game, then you’re able to do all the math.

02:00 - The system does the math for you so you’re able to concentrate on your decision-making process. Also you’re able to monitor the ecotechs and see if they are in fact performing as you would hope. The Serious Game System has a lot of variety of stakeholders to really test the different ecotechnologies and to evaluate them and see how they would like to use them, so it’s very different perhaps for someone from the municipalities or the waterworks, forestry or agriculture or Biogas industry, there’s a lot of different perspectives so it’s good for them and it’s good for the system to see how all these play together and how they need to accommodate or at least take into consideration the agency, the roles, the responsibilities of each other. It’s interesting to see the stakeholders deliberating and they’re playing the game and different things emerge and they’re negotiating because especially in the Serious Game System in the beginning, they’re also negotiating over the values of some things even sometimes the rules – what does this mean, what does this mean in real life and then when they’re competing with each other they also want to win even though they know this game is part of science so they’re trying to win… it’s really funny to see that the conflict in themselves of trying to be scientific and trying to win the game at the same time and surprisingly enough a lot of people really like to win even though it’s a scientific game.

The Serious Game System has been useful to BONUS RETURN because 03:28 - it’s actually helped the stakeholders see their actions and agency in a more systemic context, so not only do they play against the system, they play against each other. While one stakeholder might be trying to achieve a goal, another stakeholder might be trying to achieve a different goal and sometimes they collaborate and sometimes they conflict, and sometimes they know about these collaborations and conflicts and sometimes they don’t. By playing through a systemic way you can actually see this and the interesting thing about a Serious Game System is that you make consequential actions in a system, but it’s an inconsequential space. You can’t break a game, so the Baltic Sea region doesn’t suffer if the players do something radically inappropriate in a game to see what happens, there’s nothing at risk you get the learning outcomes but you don’t get the risks. I think one of the takeaways from the project for me has been really seeing the stakeholder engagement.

If you ask a 04:32 - stakeholder to do something you’ve predetermined and you have an idea about, they will accommodate you. But if you ask them what they think about something, why is what they do important for them, what is it they want to achieve, how do they think that would impact the Baltic Sea region in the long term. And if you ask them about what is it they tell their children about what they do and how they provide some sort of positive impact in our environment they’ll tell you a different story. So getting the stakeholders and allowing them to tell the story that they want to tell anyways and putting that into a system and having them work out the details around that and to realize the sort of heroic difficulty of much of what they do on a daily basis – I think that was a really interesting take away from the project. .