Designing virtual river: A serious gaming environment to collaboratively explore management strategies in river and floodplain maintenance

Abstract

Dutch river management is in transition from a phase of intervention and implementation to a phase of maintenance. In light of this transition, we discuss initial results towards the development of a serious gaming environment where river and floodplain management actors can collaboratively explore intervention and maintenance strategies. We introduce the design approach of a serious gaming environment based on qualitative interviews with river and floodplain maintenance actors. Based on these interviews, we identified two key variables to explore strategies for river and floodplain maintenance: maintenance intervals and floodplain scaling. We proceed with presenting the Virtual River; a concept for a serious gaming environment. In this environment, actors can play out intervention and maintenance scenarios around these two key variables over time using simplified hydrological, morphodynamic and vegetation models.