Organizer(s): Andrew Bell; Thomas Falk; Sarobidy Rakotonarivo; Wei Zhang; Hagar ElDidi; Ruth Meinzen-Dick
Under many names (behavioral and framed field experiments, behavioral games, etc.), games now have several decades of both research and learning use in human-environment problem contexts. Games allow researchers and practitioners to center key dilemmas or shocks in the mind of the game player, putting focus on situations that may be rarely or never (yet) experienced, and advancing understanding for facilitator and player alike of how people will (should) respond to uncertain future scenarios. Games span a range of complexities - from pencil and paper, balls in cups, board games and tokens, through to computer-based games connected across networks - with each modality shaping what is possible within the game and how players’ attention will be focused. The flexibility with which different human-environment dilemmas may be represented in games (and thus the variation in what parts of human decision-making they link most closely to) mean both that games can be helpful in addressing a multitude of goals, and that it can be challenging to validate or benchmark the signals we obtain from game sessions and experiments. In this session, we invite presentations from researchers that do any of i) presenting novel empirical results or games that represent human-environment problem contexts; ii) consider how games connect to underlying mental models, existing theories, or other known benchmarks; or iii) consider the overlapping but often conflicting goals of games interventions for research and games for learning and development.