What Are Games Good for? Exploring Opportunities and Limitations to Using Board Games in Research

There is a growing interest in the use of serious games for sustainability education or to explore trade-offs in decision-making. Board games are a subset of these serious games, and have the advantage of face-to-face interaction and more seemingly malleable components and rules. In this paper, we consider the opportunities board games present for thinking through the rules that organize actions and the informal modes of interaction encouraged by platforms. We emphasize the role of discussion, debriefing and the potentials of game re-design as an entry-point, generating insights into motivations for actions and strategies for change in the domain of sustainability. We elaborate on the use of board games drawing from a boardgame workshop event held in Indonesia with members of the local government, farmers and PhD candidates. The game was designed to explore tradeoffs and decision-making related to food safety, nutrition, yield, and environmental management, and was designed by an interdisciplinary team of scientists at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. In exploring the use of board games in this context, we also caution against the use of gameplaying itself as a source of data and insight, and consider the ethical implications of doing so.