Games for Geoscience 2023

A science session on geo-gaming.

The Games for Geoscience session has just held its 6^th science sharing session at Europe’s largest gathering of geoscientists, the European Geoscience Union (EGU) General Assembly. To give you a sense of scale, there were over 18,000 attendees, with around 15,000 onsite in Vienna and 3,000 joining virtually, with EGU committed to delivering a hybrid conference.

Bärbel Winkler presenting the Cranky Uncle game at the 2023 Games for Geoscience session (Photo by Rolf Hut).

Games are hugely popular. Some estimates suggest that there are over 3 billion gamers worldwide and that the gaming industry is worth more than music and movies combined. Games help people connect, find new friends, and stay in touch with old ones. They can even accidently teach you things about volcanoes.

But games can offer us so much more than mere entertainment.

Legendary Science Communicator and Katia and Maurice Krafft Award winner, Sam Illingworth, described the power of games in his Keynote lecture in the Science and Society session. Games offer people a safe place to explore controversial topics and they enable people to take control of their own learning. As we describe in the introduction to the Games for Geoscience session, games can put you in someone else’s shoes and force you to make decisions from another perspective.

Despite this huge and largely untapped potential, games are often viewed as silly or as something for kids. Practitioners who use games for training, engagement, or outreach purposes will often adopt a different terminology, such as simulations, exercises, or interactive workshops, to either spare their own embarrassment or out of a fear of not being taken seriously. However, these are games, and they are powerful, and they are engaging in a way no other medium is, and they work.

It is for these reasons – sharing our love of games, to help people to appreciate their value, and to highlight games as a serious and effective tool – that myself, the beforementioned Sam Illingworth, and Rolf Hut founded Games for Geoscience. Since then we have been joined by Liz Lewis, Jaz Scarlett, Malena Orduna Alegria, and Lisa Gallagher as convenors of the session. We have Twitter and LinkedIn channels. There is also the Geoscience Games Night but that’s another story.

In 2023 we had 13 presentations from researchers around the world who have been designing and using games in their work. Below are brief summaries of that work:

Gaspar Albert asked us whether video game maps can be so real that they become deceptive? Research involving 300 people found that they preferred the gaming maps but were mostly able to distinguish between real and game maps. Gaming maps are getting more real all the time and machine learning methods could further blur the virtual-reality boundary.

Grisel Jimenez Soto showed us visualisation of geodata in virtual reality for training and storytelling. This provided participants a first-hand experience of the data and they could learn geological knowledge without time and space restrictions. Participants were highly engaged and wished to further engage with the experience.

Who wants to be a Mil… a Geomorphologist! This was the question posed by Samuele Segoni. When faced with the challenge of teaching geomorphology to disengaged engineers, he gamified the experience. Using a serial quiz at the end of each session, participants were motivated to learn during the session. Feedback collated by the app used for the quiz could even guide the design of future sessions.

Anna Chapuis challenged us to Save the Glaciers! This is an educational escape room (without the room) where players solve a series of puzzles about 4 glacial enigmas: melting; mass balance; glacier sliding; and, mass loss due to climate change. The game can be played physically or virtual and has different versions suitable for students aged 11-18.

Martin Mergili told us that Geomorphology is a Game! He created a VR game where players can explore a reconstructed landscape before witnessing a landslide, recreated using physics-based modelling. Participants can then explore the evidence of these past landslides by interpreting tree rings of recovered logs.

Graphic designer and scientific illustrator Clémence Foucher showed us Expedition Sea Level. This beautifully designed narrative game leads players through three chapters. 1. An animated video imagining the Maldives in 2081 through the eyes of 14-year old Samira. 2. First-person mini-games following Samira who has awoken to find herself in her grandmother’s shoes 55-years earlier. 3. Players follow a multiple choice game where their decisions lead to different emission scenarios.

Geo-gaming stalwart, David Crookall, shared a veritable treasure trove of geo-simulation and gaming (GSG) resources. This collection will be invaluable to those of us working in the area and those wanting to get up to speed.

Lisa Gallagher has been designing and using games to help communicate and share hydrological research for several years. In her presentation she shared some of the approaches used, along with reflections, feedback and experiences.

A lack of imagination can inhibit disaster planning. Often we are asked what went wrong after an event, but Gordon Woo showed the successful implementation of a round-table game adopting a downward counter-factual approach. Participants are instead encouraged to ask to look back at disasters and ask what would have made it worse – this helps identify possible future scenarios otherwise not imagined.

Iris van Zelst introduced us to QUARTETnary, a card game that helps players understand and appreciate the diversity of life across geological timescales. Players must collect a set of four cards all from the same geological era. The presentation helpfully focusses on the practical elements of designing and developing a game without going broke!

Christina Veiga-Pires showed us a board game developed to help communicate the environmental changes seen in Mozambique, covering the archaeological, climate, and human factors as well as there interactions. The players assume the role of a researcher who must collect the information they need to write a book on the changes. They learn how scientists collect and use data as they play.

Cranky Uncle is a favourite of the Games For Geoscience session and our friend, and volunteer extraordinaire, Bärbel Winkler, provided us the latest updates. In Cranky Uncle you play as the eponymous Uncle, spreading misinformation about climate change. As they earn Cranky Points, players unlock new tactics. This teaches players to watch out for these methods in popular discourse.

Dirty Matters: The Soil Game puts players in the shoe(?) of an earthworm and other underground critters. Each character has unique special skills so in this collaborative board game players must work together to save the soil from negative impacts like contamination and wild fires.

That’s all from Games for Geoscience in 2023 - hope to see you in Vienna next year for the 7th Games for Geoscience science session.