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. At the same time, there is increasing interest in the water-energy-food/land-climate nexus, where interactions among sectors are made explicit. Common practice still revolves around sectoral silos. Serious games could help erode these silos, fostering efforts towards multi-sector policy making accounting for systemic impacts on policy decisions. One major criticism of some serious games is their lack of policy relevance. SIM4NEXUS (www.sim4nexus.eu) is an ongoing H2020 project developing policy-relevant serious games for 12 case studies from sub-national to global scale. This is being achieved by close stakeholder involvement at every step, from qualitative system design, policy analysis/selection, quantitative model development and game development. SIM4NEXUS covers five nexus sectors (water, energy, land, food, climate) and develops quantitative, scientifically-robust system dynamics models to quantify and explore nexus relationships in each case. Serious games will be able to explore the impacts of changes in one sector both within that sector but also on all other nexus sectors. The SIM4NEXUS serious games will ‘play’ the underlying models, but in an accessible way. Through intelligent game design and the link to the quantitative models, these impacts can be clearly and effectively communicated to 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, emphasising the constant co-creation with stakeholders to ensure that the research and outputs remain relevant, accessible, and useable for strategic policy making.