Serious gaming: Helping stakeholders address community problems

Citizens are increasingly coming together to solve problems that affect their communities. Participatory modeling is a method that helps them to share their implicit and explicit knowledge of these problems with each other and to plan and implement mutually acceptable and sustainable solutions.

While using this method, stakeholders need to understand large amounts of information relating to these problems. Various interactive visualization tools are being developed for this purpose. One such tool is ‘serious gaming’ which combines technologies from the video game industry – mystery, appealing graphics, etc., – with a purpose other than pure entertainment, a serious, problem driven, educational purpose.

Such gamification is an opportunity for participatory modeling approaches to embed models and simulations of complex processes into games and to attract the stakeholders. ut gathering the data.

Author: Nagesh Kolagani