Serious Board Game Jam as an Exercise for Transdisciplinary Research

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Simulation and Gaming for Social Design

Abstract

This paper describes using a serious board game jam as training for transdisciplinary collaboration and provides tips for organizing similar events. Entangled socio-environmental problems are considered “wicked problems.” An effective way to tackle these problems is a transdisciplinary approach. The transdisciplinary approach facilitates a systemic pattern of collaboratively addressing wicked problems related to various stakeholders. However, many people lack collaboratively working and mutual learning experience in transdisciplinary situations, so special training is necessary for maturing actual collaboration. In planning such training, it will be essential to consider several factors; small-scale, experimental, safe-to-fail, easy-to-focus, and fun, since such training must be easily repeatable for achievement capacity building. Based on these principles, the author and colleagues hosted serious board game jams in 2018 and 2019 at a research institute in Kyoto, Japan. These case studies will help readers who are interested in the social and collaborative aspects of game-based learning.

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Acknowledgement

SBGJ2018 and SBGJ2019 was funded by the NIHU Interactive Communication Initiative. In the preparation and management of SBGJ 2018 and SBGJ2019, we received immense support from the FEAST Project (No.14200116), JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP19K20513 and Open Team Science Project (No.14200075) at RIHN, Christoph Rupprecht, Yuko Matsuoka, Yuko Kobayashi, Yasuhisa Kondo, Akinori Nakamura, Hisafumi Nakabayashi, Yoshihiro Kishimoto, Tomohiro Goto, Kentaro Hayashi, Yuka Egawa, Maki Tateishi, Kentaro Yoshida, Gordon Calleja and all participants. We would like to express our sincere gratitude.

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Correspondence to Kazuhiko Ota .

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Ota, K. et al. (2021). Serious Board Game Jam as an Exercise for Transdisciplinary Research. In: Kaneda, T., Hamada, R., Kumazawa, T. (eds) Simulation and Gaming for Social Design. Translational Systems Sciences, vol 25. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-2011-9_10

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