1.3. Serious Games (Laura)

Serious games have long been used for planning in the healthcare, defense and education sectors (Chew, Lloyd, and Knudsen 2015). More recently, they have been developed for the natural resource management sector to help players understand complex adaptive systems (CAS), promote knowledge co-creation and help participants develop a common vision for management of the resources at play. Teaching about CAS can be difficult but using serious games, players can understand theories and concepts by experiencing them through the game (van Bilsen, Bekebrede, and Mayer 2010). Ecosystems can be described as complex adaptive systems, meaning that the parts of the system interact non-linearly, which means emergent properties emerge from the system within its environment (van Bilsen, Bekebrede, and Mayer 2010). When making decisions that will affect a CAS, it is difficult to understand what the impacts of the decision will be given the emergent properties of the system, which are often unknown. Decision-makers are therefore faced with an extra layer of complexity. Serious games help understand how these CAS work in two different ways.

 1.4. MSP - What is it and Challenges (Muhammad)

2. Research Questions

2.1. Research Question 1: Do board games promote more interactions between teams than computer games? 

Hypothesis: Board games allow participants from different teams to be physically closer to each other, therefore could facilitate interactions between teams. Also, computer simulations can be isolating, in their difficulty and interface, which might discourage teams from interacting with each other in the real world. 

2.2. Research Question 2: Does MSP Challenge 2050  improve the participant's knowledge of MSP?

Hypothesis: Serious games represent a simulation of reality and therefore participants who were not experts in MSP (most) should report learning about the application of MSP. 

2.3 Research Question 3: Did MSP Challenge 2050 help participants of a same team build a common vision of MSP in their assigned country? 

Hypothesis: Stakeholders with competing interests can make collaboration more difficult, but if they can reach a consensus on the direction of MSP, collaboration will be easier. Given that participants in a team were given competing and complementary roles for the planning of their country, it would be interesting to see if playing the game helped create a cohesive common vision of what MSP needed to look like in their country.

3. Materials & Methods

3.1. MSP Challenge 2050 (Muhammad)

3.1.1. Board Game

3.2.2. Computer Game 

CASE STUDY MAP HERE?

3.2. Population (Steven)

3.2.1 Participants
The MSP event in Newfoundland was organized as part of a demonstration for students studying Marine Spatial Planning at Memorial University in St-John’s. There were 18 participants in attendance, 9 masters students from Memorial University (some of which have , 5 local stakeholders as well as 1 professor from McGill and 3 graduate students from McGill.
Of the 18 participants in attendance 14 participants answered a pre-game survey providing information on the types of stakeholders in attendance. From the survey information, one an note that the majority of participants have been active in the non-profit sector while a fifth of the participants have had some experience working in the public sector. A small subset of the participants also had some background working in the private sector.