Conference: Game on for CSIRO at Pax Aus 2023

CSIRO Postdoctoral Researcher Dr Delphi Ward recently had the chance to showcase her innovative approach to research at PAX Aus – the national gaming and popular culture convention.

Joining 80,000 attendees for the three-day event at Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre, Dr Ward participated in a Gamifying Government panel about how Australian Government departments and agencies use games-based technologies.

The panel was moderated by Adrian Webb, former Manager of Virtual Worlds within the Australian Public Service, and also included Broderick Matthews, Senior Manager of Education Programs at Questacon.

“PAX Aus was very different to anything I’ve been to before as a researcher,” says Dr Ward. “It was a huge event, and a great opportunity to see the diversity of panel discussions and exhibits as well as taking part in our panel discussion”.

Gamifying Government has been running at PAX every year since 2018, and aims to showcase how federal government departments are utilising games-based technologies and practices to engage with the public and improve internal training and capability. This year’s iteration focused on how federal departments are using games for education, and had just under 200 attendees.

 “Gamifying government has been a staple of PAX Panel sessions, being well attended and showcasing that diversity of interests at the event” said Adrian Webb, the originator of the panel. “This year we got to showcase both digital and analogue usage of games for engagement, entertainment and building awareness. It was great to see the interest from the public in the questions on X (formerly known as Twitter) via #Gov@PAX and at the end of the session”.

The research

Dr Ward works within CSIRO’s Valuing Sustainability Future Science Platform (VS FSP) on the Future States project. Her research uses systems models to project different scenarios for change, and then uses those to inform decision makers about sustainable adaptation pathways.  

“We use our scenarios to explore what actions or interventions can guide social ecological systems towards more sustainable futures,” explains Dr Ward. “We’re particularly interested in how to navigate tipping points – those are really abrupt changes in the way systems operate, often with cascading impacts on people and ecosystems. The idea is to be proactive about how we deal with these rather than being caught unprepared for potentially catastrophic changes.”

As part of her work, Dr Ward is using the East Coast of Tasmania as a case study system – running models of the marine ecosystems, communities and economy to explore how the future might look under different scenarios. The project requires significant stakeholder engagement with a broad range of groups, and that’s where the innovative use of a game – designed specifically for this context – has proved valuable.

The game

“You can give a talk or a lecture on tipping points, but it can be hard to tell what people take away from that experience,” says Dr Ward. “You might think that everyone goes away with the same information, but listening to a talk can be a very passive experience – inevitably someone will be thinking about lunch – and it can be hard for listeners to integrate the information with what they already know. We realised that a game could be much more effective to get people thinking about social-ecological systems than a traditional workshop would be.”

The game in question, called Best Kelp Secrets, was designed in partnership with Boho Interactive. It’s a narrative table-top game that takes players through 70 years in the life of a small, hypothetical town on Tasmania’s East Coast, as it faces a series of tipping points. Players are cast as characters including the East Australian Current, which brings baby sea urchins to the area from warmer waters; rock lobsters that need to defend their kelp patches from the sea urchin onslaught; and householders trying to get their needs met in the town.

“We love working with scientists because they have the most interesting questions,” says David Shaw, one of Boho Interactive’s key creatives. “It’s a real balancing act to simplify the future of an entire region into one game. You make such huge sacrifices, but the science still needs to be rigorous; the people need to be fairly represented, with compassion, respect and autonomy; and, most importantly, the game needs to be fun.”

In the timeframe of the game, which spans from the 1960s to 2030, the players experience processes that lead to tipping points, with their collective actions determining whether they cross or avoid those tipping points. The game can end in many different ways as scenarios play out – but it is the insights that players gain into systems thinking and the discussions that take place afterwards that Dr Ward describes as ‘magic’.

“When you’re bringing together different knowledge holders – for example, industry representatives, natural resource managers, community members – everyone comes with a different perspective or issues that they want to see addressed. The game creates an opportunity for those agendas to be momentarily put to one side and lets people interact as themselves rather than as their expertise. The shared experience of the game creates a starting point for the discussion – it gives them a common set of examples they can draw on to compare to what’s happening in the real world. This shared language can help them effectively communicate different perspectives, and collectively, to explore how diverse interests can be supported sustainably in the future.” 

The conference

The invitation to speak at PAX Aus provided Dr Ward with an opportunity to engage with a new audience of gamers and game developers; and the Gamifying Government panel has a longstanding reputation as an effective vehicle for showcasing different career pathways.

“It’s a great venue to talk to people with an interest in gaming about how they could use gaming approaches working within different government departments and agencies,” explains Dr Ward. “The panel this year focused on how games can be used as an educational tool, but even within that scope there was room for difference. I was there talking about a tabletop game, whereas the panellist from Questacon talked about using a computer game in which the player has to defend a henhouse from fox attacks as a way of teaching kids abut cybersecurity.”

The audience response to Best Kelp Secrets was a positive one, with several attendees coming up to Dr Ward afterwards to find out more, and discuss whether something similar would be possible within their own organisations.

Nathan Harrison, the Boho team’s lead developer for the game was also in the audience, and appreciated the opportunity to see that response.

“Seeing the game talked about at PAX was a real highlight of this project,” he said. “I had rich conversations with people from the audience, including game designers who hadn’t thought of games in a scientific context, and organisations who hadn’t considered games as a tool for their programs. I think for a lot of people the panel sparked new ideas for how to work with games and futures.”

Dr Ward agrees that there is huge potential for games to be a valuable part of the toolbox – for researchers like herself but also across other sectors – as society finds a way to move forward and tackle complex problems.  

“We’re facing so many different challenges as a society, and one of the problems we have is that our traditional approach to solving problem is very siloed,” she concludes. “We fix one problem without thinking about the possible ramifications and flow on effects.”

“The panel, and the experience of being at the convention, reinforced the idea for me that gaming can provide a way of approaching problems differently. We can test different strategies and look at things from a different perspective – connecting different concepts and making them more tangible. Playing games together can shift how we discuss issues compared with a more serious approach – it can ease communication, even around challenging issues. That’s got to be a good thing.”

Author – Ruth Dawkins