The Importance
of Play
Play is Not
Just for Kids
Play is a serious learning tool, and not just for children.
Research on role-playing games with adults, including elected officials, community advocates, and corporate leaders, has shown that:
participants absorbed significant amounts of new information,
shifted their views on the urgency of complex problems,
became more confident that conflicting groups could reach agreement.
In studies of communities navigating climate adaptation, game participants were significantly more likely to adopt new practices than those who did not play.
Why Games
Work
Games work because they transform everyone in the room into a problem-solver.
Research on collaborative serious games shows that participants share ideas and forge relationships during game sessions, developing mutual understanding between stakeholders that persists beyond the room.
Games create the conditions for harder conversations, lowering defensiveness, building shared understanding, and making it easier for people with different perspectives to find common ground.
For children, games have been shown to improve problem-solving, memory, cooperation, and empathy, and the effects are well documented across a wide range of contexts and age groups.
Build on Familiar
Favourites
One approach that works particularly well across ages is to take a game format people already know, a memory game, a card game, or a board game, and translate it into a new context. The familiar structure means players can focus on the content rather than learning the rules.
This can work equally well for adults and children. Cool Critters, a memory card game developed for the Waiaroha Discovery Centre, uses this approach to introduce children to the freshwater creatures of Heretaunga through social play. For Farms That Last we repurposed Snakes and Ladders as Landslides and Cherrypickers to help farming communites learn about triggers that lead to change.