Last Island: Exploring Transitions to Sustainable Futures through Play

A serious game was designed and developed with the goal of exploring potential sustainable futures and the transitions towards them. This computer-assisted board game, Last Island, which incorporates a system dynamics model into a board game's core mechanics, attempts to impart knowledge and understanding on sustainability and how an isolated society may transition to various futures to a non-expert community of players. To this end, this collaborative-competitive game utilizes the Miniworld model which simulates three variables important for the sustainability of a society: human population, economic production and the state of the environment. The resulting player interaction offers possibilities to collectively discover and validate potential scenarios for transitioning to a sustainable future, encouraging players to work together to balance the model output while also competing on individual objectives to be the individual winner of the game.

Author: 
Firouzeh Taghikhah
William L Raffe
George Mitri
Sebastian Du Toit
Alexey Voinov
Jaime A Garcia
Presented At: 
Interactive Entertainment (IE) - Australasian Computer Science Week (ACSW) 2019
Year: 
2019
Type: 
Conference Proceedings
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