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The Maritime Spatial Planning (MSP) Challenge simulation platform helps planners and stakeholders understand and manage the complexity of MSP. In the interactive simulation, different data layers covering an entire sea region can be viewed to make an assessment of the current status. Users can create scenarios for future uses of the marine space over a period of several decades. Changes in energy infrastructure, shipping, and the marine environment are then simulated, and the effects are visualized using indicators and heat maps. The platform is built with advanced game technology and uses aspects of role-play to create interactive sessions; it can thus be referred to as serious gaming. To calculate and visualize the effects of planning decisions on the marine ecology, we integrated the Ecopath with Ecosim (EwE) food web modeling approach into the platform. We demonstrate how EwE was connected to MSP, considering the range of constraints imposed by running scientific software in interactive serious gaming sessions while still providing cascading ecological feedback in response to planning actions. We explored the connection by adapting two published ecological models for use in MSP sessions. We conclude with lessons learned and identify future developments of the simulation platform.

The 2014 EU Directive on Maritime Spatial Planning (MSP) lays down obligations for the EU Member States to establish a maritime planning process, resulting in a maritime spatial plan by 2020. Consultation should be carried out with local, national and transnational stakeholders. Stakeholder engagement in MSP is complex because of the great number and diversity of maritime stakeholders and the unfamiliarity of some of these stakeholders with MSP and its potential impact. To facilitate stakeholder engagement in MSP, the 'MSP Challenge' table top strategy game was designed and played as part of several stakeholder events in different European countries. The authors study the efficacy of the game for stakeholder engagement. Background and evaluation data of nineteen game sessions with a total of 310 stakeholders with different backgrounds were collected through post-game surveys. Furthermore, the efficacy of the game for stakeholder engagement processes, organised by competent MSP authorities in Scotland and Belgium, is studied in more detail. The results show that the board game, overall, has been a very efficient and effective way of familiarising a great diversity of stakeholders with MSP and to create meaningful interaction and learning among stakeholders in formal planning processes. However, the case studies also show that contextual factors-the level of familiarity with MSP and participants' perception to sustainability-influences the efficacy of the game.

TSC import 1193 2012-02-06 QC 20130624

Educational games are often less attractive than entertainment games in visuals, gameplay, and other aspects, but do we need entertainment-level beauties in our education or are beasts sufficient? To identify the importance of attraction for educational games, the authors offer the results of a comparative analysis of five educational games used and evaluated from 2005-2010 (N=754). They operationalized attraction through statements in which players were asked to rate the games’ visual, gameplay, and user interface attractiveness. While some scholars argue that for game-based education to become successful, educational games need to be visually more attractive, the results of the analysis show the opposite. For educational games, attraction is of relatively low importance. The authors further found that gameplay is the most important aspect of attraction and visuals the least. These results contribute to the debate amongst designers and educators on what priorities to set when considering game-based education., QC 20120913

QC 20120502

The communal, situating and critiquing capabilities of multi-user game environments represent the principals of collaborative constructivism as a process-based experiential pedagogy. Applied in higher education, such a pedagogy favours active, critical and reflective learning. This thesis argues how a didactic multi-user game environment incorporating the aforementioned capabilities can be used in, as well as enrich, collaborative constructivist didactics in higher education.