Via: SILVIS
Lab - It’s All A Game – Land Use and Conservation In Everyone’s Hands
Trails
Forward is a role playing Serious Game about the effects
of land use on rural ecology and economies, currently under development by a group
of economists, and environmental and computer scientists from across the
University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Based on the research of the interdisciplinary UW-Madison Conservation
Conversation Group, Trails Forward is being designed as a simulation
platform that can be used to investigate the consequences of manipulating environmental,
economic, and institutional factors around land-use conflicts.
Game dynamics emerge as an interaction between
policy specification, player input, and the resultant behavior of autonomous
computer-based agents. These agents represent autonomous individuals within the
simulation environment and constitute a core feature of the Trails Forward
architecture. The development of these agents can be tailored to represent a
wide range of potential roles, ranging from home buyers to wildlife species. By
acting in an autonomous and self-interested fashion, the cumulative behavior of
the set of agents can be used to describe the entire system (Source: Trails Forward Wiki).
Each species within the game has its own underlying
model that takes into consideration the species ecology and known behaviors, as
well as habitat needs. One of the interesting aspects of this approach is that
it provides a unique interaction between data driven ecological models and the
decisions made by individual players in the pursuit of specific goals and
results.
The strategy is to build a bridge between Computer
Sciences and Ecology and this meant many hours talking to ecologists, reading
about a species biology, ecology, behavior, preferences, programming and
finally, testing. A solution the group found to test their game and increase
the amount of models, was to offer an “Agent Programming for Conservation
Games” class at UW – Madison where students from different backgrounds worked
together to create new models.
The dynamics of the roles are intended to represent
the multiple demands placed on the landscape and engage players to think about
how they can optimize their land-use strategy to maximize their own objectives,
and then cooperate with others in an attempt to achieve multiple objectives.
Through gameplay, players manipulate the landscape by implementing forest
harvesting, housing development, and conservation actions.
According to Trails Forward Wiki, one of the
greatest benefits of this simulation environment is that it allows players to
examine complex relationships and dynamics that are either impracticable or
impossible to experimentally manipulate in the real world.
In sum, as reported by SILVIS Lab, using a Serious Game to
collect data while simultaneously educating the general public is the major
contribution of Trails Forward.