Playing with the Past to Understand the Present: The potential of using Nusfjord (2017) to Teach About the Complexity of Fisheries as SocioEcological Systems

Abstract

Games are vehicles that transport their players between different realties (Peters & Westelaken 2014). By doing this, they have the potential to provide many different benefits for their players, such as relaxation, excitement, social interaction, and learning. Higher education is increasingly trying to capitalize on this potential and many teachers now make use of different forms of game-based learning and serious games (Plass et al. 2015). Some educators design their own games (Weines et al. 2017), while others either use existing serious games (Qudrat-Ullah et al. 1997) or try to repurpose commercial off-the-shelf video games (Whitton 2010) or board games (Bridge 2014). Following suite, at our own department we count on the assumption of enhanced learning through games and we are currently exploring the potential of repurposing various entertainment board games (e.g. <i>Nusfjord, Dominant Species, Evolution</i>) in the context of interdisciplinary bachelor’s and master’s programs in fisheries and aquaculture science. These programs combine biology, economics, and social sciences with a taste of history and technology