Congratulation to Vera Ziltener to successfully complete her Master thesis
For her Master thesis, Vera created a role-playing game (RPG) which is set in India and played it with participants from Switzerland.
She abstracted and summarised the participants, opinions about wolves in Switzerland and the usefulness of RPGs to four typologies using CATPCA and k-means clustering.
Her results show that the participants of the stakeholder groups sheep farmer and NGO rated the game to be highly relevant for Switzerland. With few adaptations, a Swiss version of the game can be created. The general game structure can be maintained for the Swiss version, which indicates that the underlying mechanisms are the same in both systems. This shows that it is worthwhile to look at human-carnivore-conflicts on a global scale.
Concluding, Vera thinks RPGs are suitable tools for education and research, and probably most important to facilitate dialogue between different stakeholders and typologies. It functions well as an ice-breaker and can be used to release emotions in a controlled setting to start a constructive dialogue and thus the solution-finding process.
