RSS02.A4 ​​​Gaming approaches for Analysing and Supporting Complex Decision-Making ​​

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 participants to explore the potential of gaming approaches for facilitating and analyzing decision-making and make students capable of using gaming to analyze and stimulate decision-making. To this end, the (im)possibilities of gaming approaches are discussed and participants will develop, test and play a 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, as elements for developing games are borrowed from a range of theories and methods, including game theory, simulation and gaming science, economics, co-creation, social learning, participatory evaluation, scenario studies, and focus group discussions. However, we do have a specific focus on the use of gaming for research purposes. The participants are encouraged to critically reflect on gaming approaches and the ethical responsibilities of researchers, stakeholders and not-represented players or under-represented interests in decision-making processes.