Gustavo Melo

A Serious Game for Exploring and Training in Participatory Management of National Parks for Biodiversity Conservation: Design and Experience

In this paper, we discuss the experience in the design, use and evaluation of a serious game about participatory management of national parks for biodiversity conservation and social inclusion. Our objective is to help various stakeholders (e.g., environmentalist NGOs, communities, tourism operators, public agencies, and so on) to collectively understand conflict dynamics for natural resources management and to exercise negotiation management strategies for protected areas, one of the key issues linked to biodiversity conservation in national parks. Our serious game prototype combines, techniques such as: distributed role-playing games, support for negotiation between players, and insertion of various types of artificial agents (decision making agents, virtual players, assistant agents). After a general introduction to the project, we will present project’s current prototype architecture and results from game sessions, as well as some prospects for the future, namely: the design of assistant artificial agents and of virtual players and the integration of a viability-based simulation engine.

A Serious Game and Artificial Agents to Support Intercultural Participatory Management of Protected Areas for Biodiversity Conservation and Social Inclusion

This paper addresses our experience in the design of a serious game, aimed at computer-based support for intercultural participatory management of protected areas (e.g., parks, marine reserves, biosphere reserves...), in order to promote biodiversity conservation and social inclusion. Its objective is, via a computer assisted role-playing game, to help various stakeholders (e.g., environmentalist, tourism operator, traditional community...) to collectively understand conflict dynamics and explore negotiation strategies for the management of protected areas. Therefore, this helps at mutual understanding and negotiation between different cultures, contexts and practices (traditional community, technical manager, environmentalist...) about strategic issues when aiming at both biodiversity conservation and social inclusion. After introducing the objectives of our serious game, named Sim Parc, we will describe its design and its current architecture. We will also discuss the introduction of various types of agents in the system: a decision making agent playing the role of the park manager, artificial players replacing some of the human players in the game, assistant agents assisting human players, and expert agents providing human players with technical information about the viability of their proposal (e.g., about the survival of an endangered species), or to analyse relations (e.g., dominance or equity) among players proposals. This last type of agent aims at introducing a technical viewpoint and culture in this intercultural participatory process. Some of these agents have already been implemented and tested and some others are in progress.

Design of a Participatory Decision Making Agent Architecture Based on Argumentation and Influence Function – Application to a Serious Game about Biodiversity Conservation

This paper addresses an ongoing experience in the design of an artificial agent taking decisions and combining them with the decisions taken by human agents. The context is a serious game research project, aimed at computer-based support for participatory management of protected areas (and more specifically national parks) in order to promote biodiversity conservation and social inclusion. Its objective is to help various stakeholders ( e.g. , environmentalist, tourism operator) to collectively understand conflict dynamics and explore negotiation strategies for the management of parks. In this paper, after introducing the design of our serious game, named SimParc, we will describe the architecture of the decision making agent playing the role of the park manager. In the game, the park manager makes final decisions based on its own analysis and also on the votes of the stakeholders. It includes two modules: 1) individual decision – based on a model of argumentation, which also provides a basis to justify and explain the decision; 2) participatory decision – to take into account the preferences/votes from the stakeholders.

Design of a Decision Maker Agent for a Distributed Role Playing Game --- Experience of the SimParc Project

This paper addresses an ongoing experience in the design of an artificial agent taking decisions in a role playing game populated by human agents and by artificial agents. At first, we will present the context, an ongoing research project aimed at computer-based support for participatory management of protected areas (and more specifically national parks) in order to promote biodiversity conservation and social inclusion. Our applicative objective is, through a distributed role-playing game, to help various stakeholders (e.g., environmentalist, tourism operator) to collectively understand conflict dynamics for natural resources management and to explore negotiation management strategies for the management of parks. Our approach includes support for negotiation among players and insertion of various types of artificial agents (decision making agent, virtual players, assistant agents). In this paper, we will focus on the architecture of the decision making agent playing the role of the park manager, the rationales for its decision, and how it takes into account the preferences/votes from the stakeholders.