Over the past two years, we have been refining a game designed to bring the issue of the sustainability crisis to anyone without scientific experience. It is a participatory dynamic in which the participants have the opportunity to build “indirect” simulations with the MEDEAS-Mundo model, that is, it is not necessary to learn about any programming language but through the people who supervise the meeting , participants complete, tab filling and interactive interface participants can visualize the result of different future scenarios. From GEEDS we have energized more than a fortnight of games already in very different situations and with different audiences of different training and age (university courses, meetings of environmental groups, on a secondary school and even a film day), and that is the basis of a teaching innovation project in which we collaborate with professors from the University of the Basque Country UPV-EHU.
The dynamics developed and the lessons learned have been summarized and published in the next open access publication in the magazine called Sustainability: “Global Sustainability Crossroads: A Participatory Simulation Game to Educate in the Energy and Sustainability Challenges of the 21st Century. Especially, the game is capable of generating debates on issues that are outside the public sphere, such as the relationship between economic growth and sustainability, the role of technology, how human desires are restricted by global biophysical constraints, as well as the probability of reaching the climatic tipping-points in the future.
Group dynamics of the Global Sustainability Crossroads game carried out during the V Course of Ecological Economics of the Faculty of Economics and Business of Sarriko, UPV-EHU (Bilbao 11-23-2018)