Serious Games for Science Education
Recognized by the the 2019 Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) Making and Doing STS Awards committee for “its playful, community-initiated engagement with extraction infrastructures.“
Helium Futures is an engagement and education game centered around a fictional community facing helium extraction. Game play follows the boom and bust cycle of oil and gas extraction from perspectives given to the players. Players learn through engaging with scenarios rooted in real-world events from across the United States. Decisions in these scenarios influence extraction. The game ends with a discussion guided by the playbooks about how the game connects to the players lives. Topics include: how players feel about extraction; what policies are in place in their communities; how they could engage with development.
Helium Futures was developed as part of Katherine Ball’s Master of Science, Technology and Policy Program (MSTP) thesis project, and was co-designed with members of No Fracking Arizona under the direction of Kirk Jalbert over the course of a one-year period as an exercise to make sense of helium development occurring in the Holbrook Basin region of Arizona.
About Serious Games
“Serious games” are designed to provide knowledge to the players and help guide them through complex decision-making scenarios. Serious games also shorten the temporal window for envisioning the impact of collective action. Unlike prior games related to resource extraction that primarily emphasize economic interests and accumulations of wealth, Helium Futures is a co-developed board game that encourage players to think about the long-term trajectory of their community and a range of potential futures. Serious games provide a developmental framework for communicating complex systems, representing a range of stakeholder inputs, and encouraging balanced discussions. By applying participatory design to game development, community members are able to find new ways of engaging with the topic and discover new system components.
The Design Process
In fall, 2018, Civic Futures conducted knowledge-building workshops with NFAZ. to identify topical priorities pertaining to helium extraction, as well as stakeholder perceptions related to important concepts such as public participation in environmental governance. Developing a “serious” game emerged from the workshops as a way to help NFAZ understand the complex technological, political, and social system surrounding helium extraction debates. Data from workshops informed the primary topical domain of the board game—where the “board” represents the geographical region of northeast Arizona. Discourse analysis conducted by members of the Civic Futures team of media, industry reports, and regulatory documents related to oil and gas extraction in AZ and elsewhere were then used to generate narratives and activities, which are represented in the game by decision-based cards and in playing out scenarios on the board. A series of prototypes and game-testing workshops were then held with NFAZ and an extended community of players to refine the game.
Doing Engaged STS
Co-creation of a serious game for NFAZ takes an innovative approach to doing “engaged” STS. The project focuses on public participation in science and their interactions with policy-making systems. It expands on STS work on resource extraction and in building capacity in partnership with communities through participatory design and game studies. Furthermore, the research facilitates conversations about speculative futures grounded in contemporary events. Finally, the co-development process structures capacity building interventions such that they offer opportunities to study how communities engage in complex topics and build towards making constructive interventions.