Serious games can go far beyond the borders of education and behavioural change. It can have a real impact on policy making and planning. We demonstrated this again at the workshop Planning the sea across borders in North Atlantic, November 12-13, at a workshop in Reykjavik,
The underlying issue is that there s no comparable legislation for the planning of marine areas in any of the Nordic countries. In Sweden and Finland, the economic zone is contemplated in the Planning Act. In Sweden the municipal planning and in Finland with regional plans. Norway has created management plans in an entirely different way.
The Nordic council of ministers therefore invited sixty planners from all Nordic countries, from Faroe Islands, Greenland to Norway and Scotland, to play the Marine Spatial Planning game. The players defined conflicts in an interactive process and came up with a plan and discussed how this might be implemented in reality. In the process they defined objectives and principles that can be used as guidelines for marine spatial planning in the Northwest Atlantic.
The results of previous game-based experiment in Lisbon was recently puiblished as Mayer, I. S., Zhou, Q., Lo, J., Abspoel, L., Keijser, X., Olsen, E., … Kannen, A. (2013). Integrated, Ecosystem-based Marine Spatial Planning: Design and Results of a Game-based Quasi-Experiment. Ocean and Coastal Management, 82, 7–26. doi:dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ocecoaman.2013.04.006
We are working hard on the new version of the MSP game – developed in Unity. The full version will be launched in March 2013 and can be procured for training and planning through Signature Games http://signaturegames.nl/gamelab/.
Do you want to know more send an e-mail to i.s.mayer@tudelft.nl