Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
forest management
serious game
decision-making
trade-offs
systems thinking
Demonstrating SIMA-Play: A Serious Game for Forest Management Decision-Making through Board Game and Digital Simulation
🤖 AI Summary
Forest management entails complex trade-offs shaped by intertwined environmental and market dynamics, yet current educational and decision-support tools inadequately address this complexity. This study proposes SIMA-Play, a serious game that uniquely integrates forest growth simulation data into its core mechanics, blending tabletop and digital interaction modalities. By providing visual feedback, the game enables players to formulate management strategies under dynamic conditions and evaluate their economic and sustainability outcomes. The design effectively fosters systems thinking, rendering forestry trade-offs more intuitive and amenable to deliberation. Beyond delivering a functional interactive prototype, the project outlines a forward-looking research agenda encompassing experimental validation, longitudinal tracking, and digital scalability.
📝 Abstract
Board games have shown promise as educational tools, but their use in engaging learners with the complex, long-term trade-offs of forest management remains strikingly underdeveloped. Addressing this gap, we investigate how forest growth simulation data can inform decision-making through information visualization and gameplay mechanics. We designed a serious game, SIMA-Play, that enables players to make informed forest management decisions under dynamic environmental and market conditions, simulating forest growth over time and comparing player performance across economic and sustainability outcomes. By using visualization to give players feedback on their choices, at the end of the game, it supports systems thinking and makes the trade-offs in forestry practices easier to understand and discuss. The study concludes with a research roadmap that outlines future experiments, longitudinal studies, and digital versions of SIMA-Play to assess its long-term effects on learning and engagement.
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
serious game
forest management
simulation
information visualization
systems thinking
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