Games and the water sector

The water sector has always been very suitable for all sorts of computer games. One of the reasons is that water is a commodity with many stakeholders who come from a wide variety of backgrounds and motivations. Until recently, water sector games were only intended for the public’s education. It was high time for a change, and it’s underway.

Games developer Jane McGonigal (PhD from UCal Berkeley) feels very strongly about it: Gaming holds the solution to the world’s problems. No, this isn't a joke. Watch the video of her TED Talk if you want to find out more or read her book Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World.

And it works! When biochemists at the University of Washington started using an online game, it took them only three weeks to solve the structure of a complex protein related to the development of AIDS. The problem had escaped them for more than a decade with conventional research methods.

So what is the water sector doing? You can broadly divide it into three areas: Education of the public, public water management (including risk management and disaster response), and water management and engineering research, and gaming can be used in all three. When it comes to games, the focus is still on educating the public, but that's starting to change.

Water Wars
Two American scientists - Tad Hirsch of Intel and Vince Tidwell who works at Sandia National Laboratories - recently developed a game called Water Wars. The game centers on water issues in the state of New Mexico. New about it is that it is based on gaming environments like World of Warcraft and Second Life.

When you play Water Wars, you have to take on the role of a farmer, developer or water management official and that heavy educational emphasis probably does not give it the appeal of World of Warcraft. You don’t get to be a superhero, but if you're into SecondLife, you'll like it. The developers of Water Wars do want policy makers to come on board as well.

ScienceSim
ScienceSim, of which Water Wars is part (watch the video), may have more answers. ScienceSim offers a virtual environment for visualization, education, and training purposes, but can also be used for scientific discovery. It was launched in January 2009 by the ACM and the IEEE Computer Society community for the Supercomputing 2009 conference (SC09).

Together with the conference organizers and the Fashion Research Institute, Intel helped develop the hardware and simulation infrastructure behind ScienceSim. One objective of this initiative, sponsored by Intel, was to provide a turnkey kit that researchers and others can download and use for free. Take a look, if you had not heard of it yet: ScienceSim. It is still in beta, and you do need to install a Second Life client for it.

5th World Water Forum
Also in 2009, the Dutch water sector asked the Dutch creative sector to think of a solution: How to seduce the world when it comes to water use.

At the 5th World Water Forum, which took place in Istanbul in 2009, Joke Witteveen of xmediaworks in the Netherlands spoke about the use of online gaming techniques in the water management sector. It was part of a session called Thinking Outside the Water Box; see also this brief report of that session. It sounds good, but this is still focused on the public, not on the research environment.

The 6th World Water Forum will take place in Marseille, France from March 12-17, 2012.

River Basin Game
The University of Twente’s Department of Water Engineering and Management developed a somewhat similar game as Water Wars for its Water Footprint Network. It is called the river basin game, and lets you be a farmer who uses water for irrigating his fields.

The players learn what the effects are of other people besides farmers using water too, and how to cooperate. They also find out about other issues related to water use in a river basin. The game can be played at different levels, and starts at secondary-school level. This game, too, can also be played by water management professionals just like Water Wars.

Flooding simulations (UK paper, 2004)
In 2004, Edward Borodzicz, Professor of Strategy and Business Systems at the Business School of the University of Portsmouth, already published a detailed paper titled "Flood Management: A Simulation and Gaming Perspective", together with Chinese colleagues Yung-Fang Chen and Jia-Min Chao.

The paper points out that although flood management science and techniques have advanced, the losses of property and human lives due to flooding have increased as well. Typical strategies used to focus on engineering, science and technology solutions, it says, and examples of those are floodwalls and levees, forecasting systems and evacuation, flood plans and flood insurance.

Flooding emergencies involve many agencies, such as emergency responders, utility companies and volunteer organizations, and in crisis situations, they don’t cooperate well enough. The authors argue that simulations could play a role in overcoming that, but point out that there are potential problems in the areas of fidelity and validation. They therefore offer eight rules for simulation design.

There have been rapid developments since then.

WaterTown
WaterTown - developed by the University of Abertay Dundee - was presented during the International Water Week which took place in Amsterdam at the end of October 2011. It is available in four languages - English, Dutch, German and Norwegian - and is a game for water managers and decision-makers. Its development framework is the EU Interreg IVB programme Skills Integration and New Technologies (SKINT) for sharing water management knowledge and best practices within the North Sea region. (See also this PDF on WaterTown as well as this PDF of a presentation on WaterTown.)

3Di water management
3Di water management is another interesting Dutch development. It uses 3D-visualisation of detailed flooding simulations within an internet framework. (See also this PDF on 3Di water management.)

Dance4water
The Unit of Environmental Engineering at the University of Innsbrück, the Department of Civil Engineering as well as the School of Geography and Environmental Scienceat Monash University, and Melbourne Water came up with Dance4Water, which stands for Dynamic Adaptation for enabling city evolution for water. It is a prototype of a digital city. Its development framework is the EU's FP7.

Conclusion If the water sector wants to make some real headway, it needs the input from a top games designer and scientist of the future like Jane McGonigal and Joke Witteveen as well as the input from a strategist like Diana den Held - and a cultural differences expert - to make these games, and to make them even more attractive and optimally effective.

And which university water management and engineering department is going to be the first that really embraces gaming as an R&D technique? As mentioned above, biochemistry has started to use it and it looks like gaming is already used as a research technique in for example operational and sociological research as well.

I wrote the above on January 21 and 22, 2012. I became curious as to how the water sector was already using Jane McGonigal's vision and did a web search, augmented by a few tidbits I already knew. Interesting is that I found half of the above when I used "riothermie" as a search keyword. Feel free to comment!

MYSTERY CLICK

Take the chance of learning something new and click on the question mark:

HANDY DOWNLOADS (PDF):

How to cook meat
This method was developed scientifically, using FlexPDE modeling software. Next, click on the image below to get a great tool that will help you do it.

How to limit flooding
Learn how you can help limit rainwater flooding.

How To Insulate Your Door
And how not to.

TAKE-AWAY:

Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are.

Chinese proverb

DISCLAIMER:

Angelina Souren and her business SmarterScience accept no liability for the results of decisions anyone makes on the basis of anything contained in any web page on its (this) web site, nor are they responsible for what happens on other web sites (external links).

SEARCH THE WEB SITE: