Megan L. McKittrick
ABSTRACT
In order to enhance resilience in coastal communities, stakeholder engagement events are often used to invite dialogue while encouraging cross-jurisdictional collaboration and comprehensive problem-solving among practitioners (such as floodplain managers and city planners). Inviting such dialogue and collaboration can be challenging, and calls for more inclusive communication models exist in a number of fields, inspiring practitioners in the resilience community to look to climate change (CC) games as a solution. I pose the following research question: in what ways do CC games operate as boundary objects? To answer this question, I observed two game-based resilience-related stakeholder engagement workshops in coastal Virginia: one featuring the Multi-hazard Tournament (MHT) and the other, the Game of Floods. I conducted semi-structured observational field notes and survey research, including interview and questionnaire. Findings suggest that CC games are complex and idiosyncratic; while no one disciplinary tradition can adequately explain their work, the notion of boundary objects can. I merge multidisciplinary scholarship with data from survey research to generate a rhetorical boundary work heuristic that articulates the goals of these games. The rhetorical boundary work heuristic I offer will help practitioners, as well as those researching environmental and risk communication, assess existing games for their ability to fulfill their goals for their intended audience, within their unique contexts, while attending to important strategies in game design. It can be used as a rubric for determining whether a given game operates according to these standards, or it can drive the development of questions for post-test questionnaires if practitioners are assessing the efficacy of their games in use. It will also help in further development of current or future games for stakeholder engagement, as designers can use these features as standards to work toward.
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Index Terms
- Climate Change Games as Boundary Objects: Moving Toward Dialogic Communication in Stakeholder Engagement
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