Inicio  /  Water  /  Vol: 8 Par: 10 (2016)  /  Artículo
ARTÍCULO
TITULO

Serious Gaming for Water Systems Planning and Management

Dragan A. Savic    
Mark S. Morley and Mehdi Khoury    

Resumen

Water systems planning and management share the same roots with gaming, as they rely on concepts in systems analysis, operations research and decision sciences. This paper focuses on Serious Games (those used for purposes other than mere entertainment), with applications in the area of water systems planning and management. A survey of published work on gaming is carried out with particular attention given to applications of Serious Gaming to water systems planning and management. The survey is also used to identify the principal criteria for the classification of Serious Gaming for water related applications, including application areas, goals, number and type of players, user interface, type of simulation model used, realism of the game, performance feedback, progress monitoring and game portability. The review shows that game applications in the water sector can be a valuable tool for making various stakeholders aware of the socio-techno-economic issues related to managing complex water systems. However, the critical review also indicates a gap that exists in the Serious Game application area with the lack of water distribution system games. A conceptually simple, but computationally elaborate new game for water distribution system analysis, design and evaluation (SeGWADE) is presented in this paper. It has a main goal of finding a least-cost design for a well-known benchmark problem, for which the game environment takes the computational and visualisation burden away from the simulation tool and the player. The game has been evaluated in a classroom environment in which a high degree of player engagement with the game was observed, due to its basic game ingredients and activities, i.e., challenge, play and fun. In addition, a clear improvement in learning has been observed in how players attempted to identify solutions that satisfy the pressure criterion with players readily identifying the proximity of the better solutions to the starting, infeasible configuration. Through applications of Serious Gaming such as this, decision makers can learn about the complexity of the water distribution system design problem, experiment safely using a computer model of a real system, understand conflicting objectives (i.e., minimization of cost and satisfaction of minimum pressure) and develop strategies for coping with complexity without being burdened by the limitations of the ICT technology at their disposal.

 Artículos similares

       
 
Dragan A. Savic, Mark S. Morley, Mehdi Khoury     Pág. 1 - 17
Water systems planning and management share the same roots with gaming, as they rely on concepts in systems analysis, operations research and decision sciences. This paper focuses on Serious Games (those used for purposes other than mere entertainment), ... ver más
Revista: Water

 
Tobias Jordine,Ying Liang,Edmund Ihler     Pág. pp. 53 - 59
Most first year computer science students find that learning object-oriented programming is hard. Serious games have ever been used as one approach to handle this problem. But most of them cannot be played with mobile devices. This obviously does not sui... ver más

 
Bert van Wee    
Land use transport interaction (LUTI) models are often developed to model the interaction between the land use and trans- port systems for relatively large-scale spatial developments, like new residential or office areas, new main roads, or railway lines... ver más

 
Ties Rijcken, Jan Stijnen and Nadine Slootjes    
The Dutch Delta Program is currently developing new government policies for flood protection and fresh water supply. Decision support instruments have to address the program?s technical and political complexity. The water system functions are highly inte... ver más
Revista: Water