Decision-making is often complex: interests of those involved can conflict and several options often compete for support and funding. In addition, decision-making needs to be sensitive for underlying motives, belief systems, and personal and political agendas. All this takes place in dynamic environments; intermediate actions and series of step-wise decisions are taking shape, while new situations are unfolding and ‘disrupting’ events are faced (e.g. new information, changes in urgency and priority of current problems, risks and uncertainties).
This course has the ambition to stimulate students to explore the potential of serious games for facilitating and analyzing decision-making and make students capable of using gaming approaches to analyze and stimulate decision-making. To this end, the (im)possibilities of serious gaming are discussed and participants will develop, test and play a serious game. The latter includes hands-on guidance by experienced tutors in defining a working structure and identifying game elements such as the players and strategies and valuable tips and tricks in facilitating games.
The scope of gaming approaches is broad. Elements for developing games are borrowed from a range of theories and methods, including game theory, economics, co-creation, social learning, participatory evaluation, scenario simulation, and focus group discussion. The participants are encouraged to critically reflect on ethical responsibilities of researchers, stakeholders and not-represented players or under-represented interests in decision-making processes.
After this course you are able to
- Gain insight in the range of gaming approaches for supporting and analyzing decision-making processes
- Understand the implications of working with gaming approaches, for two major purposes:
- Understand how gaming approaches can support decision-making in practice.
- Understand how gaming can be used for research, to analyze decision-making.
- Develop, test and facilitate a game for supporting and/or analyzing decision-making
- Reflect on capabilities and limitations of gaming approaches in decision-making processes in supporting decision-making.
The course is designed for
We are looking for motivated participants with an active attitude that want to actively join and cooperate in exploring the world of serious games.
Participants must be an advanced bachelor, master’s or PhD candidate. This includes, but is not limited to, the fields of public administration, economics, engineering, business administration, political sciences, planning, geography, environmental sciences, sociology, and behavioral sciences. No ICT, programming or modeling skills are required.
- Motivation letter (max. of 1 page, describing your reasons for applying for the course, your experience with gaming, and how/if you intend to use gaming in your study)
For more information click "LINK TO ORIGINAL" below.