Serious games in natural resource management: steps toward assessment of their contextualized impacts

Abstract

Natural resource management (NRM) is complex and often characterized by a multitude of stakeholders at different scales, each with their own goals. Increasingly, serious games are used in these contexts as (social) learning tools and boundary objects to facilitate collective learning and support local decision-making. However, despite the well-established interest, the scientific evidence of the impact of serious games remains a debated topic. Here, we present a brief overview of the most recent literature. Our aim is to contribute to that debate with a conceptual proposal based on the issue-attention cycle, we suggest to clearly linking game objective, desired learning, and associated impact assessment method to support researchers and practitioners in their efforts to move from knowledge to action while building scientific evidence about the impact of serious games.