Role-Playing games

A powerful tool for facilitating consensual decision making

Social development and cohesion within a region partly depend on the use of its resources. However, resource management is typically approached from a purely technical perspective, focusing more on finding an optimized solution guided by technical expertise than on building consensus among the actors involved.

The ComMod approach (Companion Modelling) is a methodology that combines participatory modeling and role-playing games to reconcile expert knowledge with the representations of the actors. Its aim is to collectively find practical solutions to complex and/or uncertain problems.

Since our inception, we have been implementing ComMod approaches in France and internationally, and developing role-playing games on a wide range of topics.

In practice, we organize multi-actor workshops to build a dynamic model of the resource management system under discussion. We then develop a role-playing game to explore various scenarios.

Our games are not educational tools but debate platforms. They highlight interdependencies and possible trade-offs in resource management issues. Lisode coordinates the ComMod research school annually.