NatCap for utilizing natural capital

As a reminder, NatCap is a collaborative project between several academic research hubs (Stanford University, the University of Minnesota, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences) and two environmental NGOs (The Nature Conservancy and World Wildlife Fund). NatCap works to empower governments, NGOs, and companies to incorporate nature’s diverse benefits to people into major decisions around the globe. In the process of sharing and training people on our approach and tools for utilizing natural capital, we’ve been developing training games to enhance and enrich our learners’ ability to take up and absorb these concepts and practices.

Easy ‘Road to a Resilient Future’?

Roads to a Resilient Future is played by multiple teams of four to eight people in two rounds. In the first round, teams are tasked to connect two population centers on a terrestrial landscape. The first round is pretty quick: there are five possible roads to choose from, and players are given two maps to help them choose, one that shows the lay of the land (what we call a “Land Use/Land Cover,” or “LULC” map), and one that shows a coordinate plane of how much it costs to build a stretch of road across any given cell on the map. It’s after the first round that things get a bit more complicated: after having an initial score given to each team’s choice, it is then revealed that natural capital losses due to the construction of the road are also being factored into the scores, and everyone’s score drops precipitously.

Teams are then given additional maps of the area, showing where the values for three services—habitat quality, sediment retention, and water quality—are located. They spend the second round considering this additional information and deciding if they should change their selected route to another one, and whether and where to place protected areas and/or wildlife crossings (which cost extra points but preserve more of nature’s value) along their road as well. The team with the highest score at the end of the second round, or the team with the most improved score from Round 1 to Round 2, wins.

Breaking barriers

This game has a multilingual history. We initially developed it with a team from World Wildlife Fund (WWF), who were using it at a workshop for infrastructure developers in Southeast Asia. As soon as we completed the English-language version of the game, key guidance materials were translated into Vietnamese as well. Our bigger task for translation came up more recently, as we prepared the game to be played in China and Peru. The initial language translation was not so hard (it mostly comes down to having the personnel or resources to do the translating); the challenge was in ensuring that the game itself made sense to these global audiences. Take, for instance, the word “trade-off,” which didn’t have an obvious direct translation into Spanish. Even in English, there seems to be some debate as to whether it should be written with or without a hyphen, and it has specific meanings in several specialized fields. Our audience in Peru were not only Spanish-speaking, but also non-specialist community members, which made things trickier. On top of that, “trade-off” is in the game’s title, so we needed the translation to be short and catchy. At first, our translator couldn’t find a way to both translate the concept of a trade-off and keep the language pithy and engaging. Ultimately, we decided to pull the word “trade-off” from the Spanish-language title entirely, and focus on explaining the concept during gameplay itself. We also had to reconsider our use of the word “resilient,” which also lacked a familiar translation into Spanish. So “Tradeoff!: Roads to a Resilient Future” became “Caminos hacia un futuro sostenible.”

Elephants vs jaguars

Another translation challenge had more to do with geography than language. In the original version, one of the game pieces in the second round are wildlife crossings, which are based on real-life constructions that try to help maintain connectivity between sections of habitat that have been disrupted by a road. In the original version, set in Southeast Asia, crossings were designed for migrating elephants, but we certainly couldn’t expect learners to make decisions about elephants in the Amazon! So, we “translated” elephants to a locally-relevant, but similarly charismatic and wide-ranging species, the jaguar. We didn’t have to change anything in the data for the game, but merely adapt and adjust the storyline.

The last factor that I’d like to mention here is perhaps less about translation, and more about understandability. We are lucky enough at NatCap to reach a wide variety of learners through our games. In Peru, we played the game with local researchers, but also government representatives and community members. Here at Stanford, in the US, we played with a classroom of undergraduate and graduate students in public health. In China, we played with NGO practitioners working primarily in conservation. To reach all those players, we had to develop a game that could be readily adapted to people from a diverse range of educational backgrounds and life experiences.

Reaching out

Our solution to this challenge has been to develop additional modules of learning activities around the game itself. For instance, sometimes it’s necessary to take more time to introduce the concepts of natural capital in-between rounds. The core functionality of the gameplay itself doesn’t change, but the amount of explanation and discussion built into the process now varies widely, depending on the audience. It’s more than just translating the words on the board or in the rules, but also figuring out how to best reach as many people as possible from the same core concepts. Moving forward, we see our games as potential centerpieces of day-long interactive workshops. By translating the whole game experience, we’ve broadened the opportunity for a global community of participants.

How did you like this post? Let us know in the comment section or on our social media!

You can also fill this short survey to help us create better contentent for you!

For more games about Life on land-related issues visit our Blog and Gamepedia!

The post Beyond Language: Translating Games for Global Audiences appeared first on Games4Sustainability.

As the ecosystems can help us with regulating climate or cleaning water, The Natural Capital strives “to shine a light on the intimate connections between people and nature, and to reveal, test, and scale ways of securing the well-being of both.”.

The Natural Capital Project works in many areas, including resilience to climate and coastal hazards in Belize and development planning in British Columbia, The Bahamas, and Myanmar. All that supported by the extensive software and mapping techniques used during meetings with local administration and planners.

But as “the process of preparing spatial data, running software tools, and appropriately interpreting results can be challenging”, The Natural Capital decided to prepare a more accessible tool – a serious game.

The Tradeoff! is a series of “mapping games that simply introduce concepts related to nature’s benefits to people”. With 3 versions of the game already available, Tradeoff! is a complex but easy tool which supports understanding of t coastal zone management, terrestrial/freshwater services and arctic development.

Why did the Natural Capital decide to create a new game rather than to focus on software’s development? What are the benefits of using the game, and how can it affect the attitude toward sustainable development? We discussed those and more questions with Henry Borrebach, the leader of the Natural Capital Project’s training team.

What, in your opinion, are the key elements of a serious game?

When the Natural Capital Project (NatCap) and our partners look into creating a new training game, we often have similar objectives, which tie directly to the elements of the games we develop: 1) Engage our learners in an interactive way, 2) Create ways for learners to come to key points themselves through their actions in the game, rather than through presentations or lecture, and 3) Try to simulate real-world circumstances within the game (e.g. the challenges of simplifying real-world data for various audiences, interacting with stakeholders with different values, etc.).

What do you think are advantages of game-based learning?

People learn in a lot of different ways, and teaching with games is a way to utilize different modalities simultaneously, combining, for example, visual, auditory, and experiential learning. It also gets people up and moving around (in the case of our games), and in workshops where all of the learners don’t know each other, it helps break the ice and get everyone talking to each other and talking about the concepts.

Could you briefly describe what the game(s) is about?

The Tradeoff! game series is about nature’s benefit to people, and about how development and planning decisions affect the value of those benefits.

Through the game, participants try to make decisions that strike a balance between the gains derived from things like agricultural or infrastructural development and the potential losses of natural value caused by that development. It’s also about how gathering spatially-explicit data about nature’s value can help inform better planning decisions. There are four version of Tradeoff! that cover different environments and decision contexts: 1) Best Coast Belize (coastal zone management), 2) Tradeoff! Agriculture Edition (farming, ranching, and terrestrial/freshwater ecosystem services), 3) Northland: Arctic Choices (Arctic-region development expansion), and 4) Roads to a Resilient Future (linear infrastructure and terrestrial/freshwater services).

What were/are the main challenges for the designing the games?

One of the biggest challenges we face is finding the balance between detail and abstraction. For a game to run well, we often need to simplify the circumstances, data, and decisions involved, but we’re also teaching science-based approaches and tools, so if we abstract too far away from empirical details, we’ll either lose our credibility, or fail to actually teach what we’re trying to get across in the game. Another big challenge is that, because NatCap runs trainings and workshops, and plays these games around the world, we have to build games that will not only reach audiences of very diverse technical/educational backgrounds and skillsets, but will also translate across cultures, languages, and contexts.

Are there skills needed to play the game(s)?

The Tradeoff! games have been designed to be playable by people who are completely new to the concepts entailed, but also to still be engaging for practitioners and experts in the field.

What are the most important lessons that can be learned from playing the game?

One of the most important lessons is that there are already data and tools available that can help people make better, more informed decisions, to improve the sustainability and resilience of development, spatial planning, or other similar projects. Another key takeaway is that it’s not a binary choice between development and conservation, but that there are many co-benefits and synergies to be found, and that oftentimes, sustainable solutions are win-wins for both people and nature.

Do you think that serious games can promote sustainability? If so, how?

I certainly think they can. The games that we work on at NatCap are designed to help train practitioners working around the globe learn the skills they need to do work that directly links to many aspects of sustainability, from coastal zone management and hazard mitigation, to sustainable development planning and best agricultural practices. The better we’re able to teach our learners, the more likely they’ll be able to put what they’ve learned into immediate action. For broader audiences, games can make big ideas more approachable, and can make facts that will seem tedious in non-interactive settings much more engaging. And people who are more engaged by these ideas about sustainability, I think, are much better positioned to take action in the world.

What sustainability goals can be achieved by using your games?

We’ve designed multiple games to be able to reach into different environments and planning/development decisions, so we’re certainly trying to have a wide reach in impacting sustainability goals in a variety of places. Primarily, though, I think the Tradeoff! games are about teaching both practitioners and decision-makers that we can make these sustainable and resilient decisions now—we don’t have to wait for some future technology to push toward sustainability; it’s achievable already.

One last, more personal question. If you had to choose, what would you say your three favorite serious games are?

I had a great experience playing a game with a collaborative project called Seeds of a Good Anthropocene, in which everyone had to first come up with their own seed. But then form teams and alliances to pitch imaginary projects to a panel of judges. It was a great way to learn about other cool initiatives in the world. It was great for the organizers as a way to collect a whole bunch of “seeds” for their collection all at once.

Another great game is from WWF, called Get the Grade. It combines a bunch of great elements: it’s a role-playing game, with competition and alliances at your own table, but each tables is also competing as a team against the other tables/teams in the room.

And, one more: It’s actually a kids game, but I’m a big fan of Don’t Flood the Fidgits, an online game from PBS Kids. Kids (or adults, really) have fixed budget and different options for what to build, in order to make towns for the Fidgits that will survive flooding events.

How did you like this interview? Let us know in the comment section or on our social media!

The post Natural capital with Henry Borrebach appeared first on Games4Sustainability.