Neighbors by Way of Water

Author
mediachef
Post
04.21.2013
 

A Big Watershed Game

A massively multiplayer game using the landscape as a game board.

Northern Lights.mn is pleased to announce its partnership with the Minnehaha Creek Watershed District through its Cynthia Krieg Watershed Stewardship Grant program and game artist Ken Eklund to create a location-based game that uses the watershed landscape and cultural features as a game board.

Why a game?

Community play is a great way to celebrate the connections between residents, recreational users and the streams, lakes and wetlands in the watershed. Through play, we build relationships and the awareness that may ultimately make us more active and sustained collaborators in local watershed management. The Watershed District has an overarching concern about how to connect people who live and recreate along the creek and lakes and the surrounding uplands to each other in ways that help them act together on watershed-wide issues.

The project will explore how a location-based game might help unify people around common water resource management goals despite the diverse interests and a wide array of land uses found along the 27-mile long stream system and across the 181 square miles of the watershed. Project themes will range from the personal and collective sense of connectivity with the creek, lakes and wetlands; the dynamic and varied nature of these water features; and the notion of the watershed as a network of neighborhoods. The project will showcase the Minnehaha Creek corridor and locations within the watershed that elicit a sense of connectivity to the creek, lakes and wetlands; their ecological health and their cultural and recreational value.

Participatory design events will involve the community in the game development and help build the public’s capacity to engage the watershed management process. The focus of the current phase of game development is to conceive, flesh out and test the game concept and its key components. The full scale launch will take place during the second phase of game development.

Using games for civic engagement

Games have a long history of engaging people and building social networks to problem- solve collaboratively. Game quests can impact personal perspectives and relationships. As a platform for civic engagement, a location-based game aims to inspire civic imagination to think creatively about watershed-wide issues and stewardship. Unlike customary watershed education and outreach, games signal a space in which playfulness, critical thinking and collaboration are not just useful activities but essential values.

According to Jane McGonigal, a well-known game designer and researcher, “games build the kind of trust, relationships and social networks so critical to [collective action].” Playing games, people naturally weave a tight social fabric.” Research like hers shows that we like people better after playing a game with them, even if they have beaten us badly, because “it takes a lot of trust to play a game with someone: trust they will spend their time with us, play by the same rules, value the same goals, stay with the game until it’s over. Playing a game together builds up bonds, trust and cooperation and builds stronger social relations as a result.”

Cynthia Krieg Stewardship Fund

The Cynthia Krieg Stewardship Fund was established by the Minnehaha Creek Watershed District (MCWD) in 2000 in memory of Cynthia Krieg, who dedicated her life to community service and natural resource protection. The fund is dedicated to projects that promote environmental stewardship through education and innovation within the District.