Wicked games: using games to resolve environmental conflicts

Some games are not for kids. The right games, with the right people playing, change the way we see things and the way we do things.

The world is complex, and most of the challenges we face today - climate change, poverty, migration - belong to a special class of problems: they are wicked. In an universe riddled with uncertainty, where outcomes do not depend only on our actions but on the interactions between our decisions and those of all the other agents involved in the system – whether they are humans or not - we must abandon the notions of control and planning and embrace new paradigms of decision. This is even more true when the system on which we hope to intervene will react, sometimes even anticipating our actions. Use DDT to fight malaria and discover you are poisoning the ecosystems. Start discussions on a moratorium on soybean cultivation and watch deforestation rates increase before the decision even happens. More often than not, decision-makers are reduced to « muddle through ».

There are other ways. It is possible to explore the future, and exploring it, making it possible. It is possible to design scenarios and explore different alternatives using thought experiments, the same method used by Albert Einstein. But faced with the complexity of the world, and our own cognitive limitations (not everybody is an Einstein), this approach quickly finds its limits. So, we must cheat. And use other resources than just our own little grey cells. Games serve this purpose. Games can, if well designed and well conducted, serve as a powerful tool for understanding how women and men make decisions. They help exploring alternative strategies, finding how to counter them, learning, negotiating new agreements, and becoming aware of the limits of our knowledge and of the flaws in our reasoning. It is so much easier to play chess with the board and the tokens in front of our eyes, than wearing blindfold.