From system concept to serious game: the SIM4NEXUS approach to policy-relevant nexus research

There is growing interest in using serious games for a wide range of applications, from water resources management, to surgery simulations, to pilot training. At the same time, there is rapidly growing interest in the water-energy-food/land-climate nexus, where interactions in one sector can lead to impacts in other sectors, some of which may be hard to predict due to complexity and feedback. However, common practice still revolves around sectoral silos, with relatively little interaction or consideration of wider impacts. Serious games could help erode some of these silos, fostering efforts towards holistic policy making that accounts for systemic impacts of policy decisions in a safe space, where potential impacts (unforeseen or otherwise) can be explored and assessed without real consequences. One current major point of criticism of some serious games is their lack of policy relevance. SIM4NEXUS (www.sim4nexus.eu) is an ongoing H2020 research project that will develop policy-relevant serious games for 12 case studies in scale from sub-national to global. This is being achieved by close case study stakeholder involvement at every step in the process, from qualitative system design and conceptualisation, policy analysis and selection, quantitative model development and serious game testing and playing. SIM4NEXUS covers five nexus sectors (water, energy, land, food and climate) and develops quantitative, scientifically-robust system dynamics models to quantify and explore the nexus relationships for each of the 12 cases. In this way, models can explore the impacts of changes in one sector (e.g. due to policy actions) both within that sector and on all other related nexus sectors. The SIM4NEXUS serious games ‘play’ the underlying models, but in a way accessible to others not familiar or involved with the model development process. Through intelligent game design and the link to the quantitative models, nexus-wide policy and climate impacts can be clearly and effectively communicated to stakeholders and policy makers in each case study while also being fun to play, offering opportunity for nexus exploration in an educational setting. This work details the entire process in SIM4NEXUS, going from system conceptualisation, through quantitative model development and ending up at the serious game, emphasising the constant stakeholder collaboration to ensure that the research and outputs remain relevant and accessible.