Food 4 All game now on tour !
Our serious game on informality is finally finished and now ready for dissemination. At NFP's World Food Day, 20 October in The Hague, we offered participants the opportunity to play the game. In these last months of the year, we will also do a small tour, presenting the game and playing it with companies and organisations that show interest. In case you are interested, get in touch. Read below about a recent symposium on serious gaming.
The symposium ‘Games for Impact: research, learning and engagement’ was held at Wageningen University & Research last Friday October 30th. It was a great opportunity to learn more about serious games as an educational approach.
The main speaker was Darko Petrovic, Business Development Lead for Gaming, Sport, Media and Entertainment at WFP. Darko leads WFP’s gaming partnerships, including the Game the Food System initiative, bringing together game developers, students and players to explore food and nutrition security and more resilient food systems. He emphasized how games build community by enabling conversations and crossing boundaries in a serious and entertaining way. The WFP also runs Game Jams with students, as doing game design yourself is a great way to unpack problems and think through variables, mechanisms and scenarios of a complex setting.
According to the host Federico Andreotti (assistant professor and responsible for the Wageningen UR Game Hub), serious games are a perfect fit when working on food system transformation: they are especially useful for making complex systems and interactions visible and tangible. And to do so for different target groups; students, policymakers, but importantly also local communities.
The symposium marked the end of the WUR postgraduate course ‘transforming food systems through game design and play’. So the afternoon was dedicated to testplay the games created by students.
The event also launched the WUR online and physical game library, building on the Games at TABLE experience. The library will collect games and resources for education, making them easier to discover, access and use across WUR. The initiative aims to build a community around game-based learning and empower WUR teachers to integrate games into their teaching.
Of course, NFP shared copies of the Food4All game with Wageningen UR game library and those of WFP and FAO.
In the last part of the symposium, participants played game prototypes developed during the postgraduate course "Transforming food systems through game design and play". Students presented their games and invited everyone to play, discuss and explore different perspectives on food system transformation.
Author
Mirjam Schoonhoven
consultant serious gaming
