On September 1st 2013, Swissnex India conducted a gaming jam event at their office in Bangalore. Fields of View co-facilitated the gaming jam along with Collaborative Community and IGDA Bangalore. Participant space comprised individuals from diverse backgrounds from different nations. Self-organised teams were asked to develop a physical prototype of a game on Indian culture. Apart from facilitating, participants from Fields of View were part of different teams at the event.
We will discuss the prototypes of games developed by teams which included participants from Fields of View.
In team ‘Starks’, Murali and Rufael from Fields of View teamed with designers Simon, Kenneth and Debhasish. Challenges with traffic jams set the base for initial discussion. However, participants felt that the theme was too serious for a game and decided to shelve the idea.
Rufael and Simon suggested a game on Indian gods and food respectively. They mentioned that lack of easy ways of getting information and knowledge motivated them to propose a game on gods and food. Considering the time constraints, and other challenges such as lack of expertise and chances of controversy involved in developing a game on gods, the team moved ahead to develop a game on Indian food and etiquette.
A card game for creating and enhancing knowledge on Indian food.
Unsure whether a physical prototype for the first two ideas was possible in the limited time, the team decided to proceed with the third idea.
Quick prototyping and test plays helped the team to gain further insights into game mechanics and game theme. After few iterations, the team designed the physical prototype of the game.
A set of cards were designed for the game with 2-4 players. Initially it was advised to have at least one Indian player to help facilitating the game. Each card represented an Indian food item from breakfast, lunch and dinner and contained different scores based on the type of food, calorific values etc. Also, few cards represented common food such as curd which could be taken along with food during breakfast, lunch and dinner.
In the game, players would be given 9 cards which would form their ‘plate’. Objective for the players in the game is to maximize their score by making 3 ‘3 card’ sequences out of the 9 cards. Each of this 3 ‘3 card’ sequence represents a combination of food items for breakfast, lunch and dinner respectively. In turns, players either decide to pick a new card or drop a existing card. The game ends when all the cards in the set of cards are used or all players decide to end it. Scores of all players are tallied to decide the winner. Card categories based on calorific values, vitamins etc. are used to decide a winner in cases where two or more players get same score.
Participants believe that the full version of the game would help foreigners gain knowledge of Indian food. With proper modifications, this game could be tailored for kids in India.
Team ‘Bangsterdam’ was a combination of Bangaloreans and one Amsterdammer. Together they looked at what caught their attention. It also had to have fun game-play. They chose marriage, seeing big differences in the marriage culture between India and Europe. They brought each other up to speed about the differences in each of their countries and began to think about how this broad idea can be changed into something real.
First up they started by making a mind map of already existing games, shows etcetera, about marriage and the ‘game of love’. Then they discussed on how to make a multi-player board game that captured the procedure of getting married in India. The team figured all the criteria that were before two persons, or a family, got married. Five main categories in this game we named as: Family approval, education, looks, personality and career.
The core of the game was to fit the profile of the bride. The bride would be the game master, decided by a dice roll at the start of the game. The game master, or bride, sets up a profile of his or her perfect man of wife. He has 100 tokens to divide in these 5 main categories. He keeps his/her profile of his/her perfect man/wife secret.
The objective of the game is for the players to correspond to the game master his/her perfect profile. The players don’t know this profile but during the play there are ways to find out.
The players begin in the core of the board. Rolling the dice decides how much squares he/she can move. The player can choose which arc he/she is going to follow. Do you think education would be an important categorie for the GM? If you already have a lot of career-points, then you might choose another category. The arcs overlap somewhat. So, during the arc you can choose to step over to another overlapping arc.
Half-way through there is a shortcut. A player landing on this one can take a risk. He/she can answer a question (Like: What’s the minimum age for marriage in India?) If one answers right, he get to skip the rest of the arc and receive all the points. In case he/she gives the wrong answer, his turn is over and needs to wait.
By passing over the ‘date-squares on the bord, player gets the chance to ask the gamemaster the value of one of his 5 categories. This information will remain restricted. Metaphorically the player gets to have a ‘date with his/her potential lover, and gets to know what their interests are. This information will remain classified.
By landing on a danger-square the player falls prey to a bad habit, like alcohol use, smoking, using drugs or stealing. This will give the player negative points. A player can have 3 negative points. The fourth one is the fatal one, the player is out. There is also a cleansing arc. This you can use to get rid of your bad habits by finishing this arch.
Then there are chance-arcs. These give you random points on one of the 5 categories. Easy score!
The players get to know more and more about the interests of the Game master. When they feel they correspond (have equal or more points than tha Game master demands) they go to the core and propose. The Game Master can choose to say yes and mary, or to say no and end the game for the player.
This game is as much an understanding in how the ‘game’ of marriage in real life goes, as it is a fun game to play with a group of people. It shows you the power one has to ‘create’ the profile they want to be. It also lets the player know that one can change for another and there is noting like a destined one, people transform and are fluid.
Towards the end, each team presented the prototypes and invited other teams to play. On a whole, the gaming jam resulted in developing diverse prototypes of games by the participants.
SprintCity is a planning support tool which simulates urban growth and train frequencies along a rail corridor, over a period of 20 years. The purpose of the tool is to give decision-makers insight into the relationship of spatial development and infrastructure, competition between municipalities and the specific qualities and opportunities of each stations on the corridor.It is an initiative of the Deltametropolis Association, in collaboration with Delft University of Technology CPS and Movares. In its prototype phase it was partially funded by the Next Generation Infrastructure foundation. Today, the development of SprintCity is paid fully by the users of the tool, in most cases a Provincial government.
In order to include human decision making in the simulation, SprintCity has the format of a role playing game (ideally played by the real stakeholders), supported by a computer model with realistic data input. It features three types of players: The Province-player controls the overall development of the corridor, and needs to find an optimal location for regional functions, such as a hospital or educational facility. The Transport-player controls the time table of the rail services on the corridor, and aims to increase ridership while running a profitable service. The Municipality-players control the land use plans of each station area, and have the goal to develop these areas according to previously chosen ambitions and a master plan.
In the first rounds, municipalities competed severely over urban developments. In later rounds this problem was in part solved by communicating. However, Heerhugowaard and Sloterdijk kept having trouble to fill the extensive development areas until 2030.
The Municipality-players initally did not realise that they could zone areas by density as well. After this was clarified in the second round, the municipalities began adding varying densities of zoning in their regions. This added another dynamic to the game: the municipalities began communicating with the province and the Transport player about the sort of plan they had made, and what they would require for such a plan from the Province and Transport. For example, Zaandam player said he would need more train stations along all his stations as he had planned a very high density residential zone at Krommenie, Wormerveer, Koog Zandijk, Koog Bloemwijk and Zaandam. Similarly, Amsterdam player said since he had zoned Amsterdam Sloterdijk as high density commerical area, he would require hotels there.
Even though the session was held online, at three different locations, communication on the Google+ platform was fruitful, especially between Province and Transport players (concerning placement of new facilities and adjustment of time table).
The teams were able to accommodate 76% of the demand for urban functions along the corridor, hereby performing better than the Business as Usual scenario (56%) and slightly worse than the real stakeholders did at the Zaancorridor (86%).
These spatial developments resulted in the following increase in inhabitants, jobs (including visitors of facilities) and ridership. It must be noted that a great deal of the increase in jobs, visitors and ridership can be explained by the extraordinary building activities of the Province player. He built two education centers, two furniture retail centers, three hotel + conference centers, four hospitals and three recreation facilities, while in reality only one of each functions is needed in the area.
We are trying to organise more game sessions of SprintCity in India, and we will be working on an English version of the game. With FoV, we are also planning to implement a version of this game for Bangalore.
This post is by Dr. Émile Chappin, Assistant Professor of Energy & Industry, Delft University of Technology, and a Visiting Researcher at Fields of View. Dr. Chappin worked with us on developing a simulation game to understand to complexity of energy systems. These are his thoughts about the complexity of the sector and how a simulation game helps in understanding it.
Vibrant Electronics City sets the scene for three weeks of intensive research on serious gaming. We are driven by the need for stability and affordability of our energy supply – they are essential for flourishing societies. That’s the reason to deal with the nitty-gritty of typical European electricity markets in which billions of Rupees or Euros are at stake but where megawatts and megawatthours are easily mixed up. The key is not only in the details: electricity markets are complex systems, of which the performance is the result of the transactions in the market, the responses to the influences from outside, such as (proposed) policies, the evolving institutions and rational or irrational expectations.
This is where we start: how can we really learn to understand the essential workings of this system? The pure nature of complexity tells us that we can’t, really. But that’s not a satisfactory answer. We should do something that helps us – students, researchers, policy makers and companies – to gain better understanding of these systems. We need to start learning how we can somehow manage the system as a whole throughout the coming decades. Not in the classical sense of management, which presumes that some form of direct control is possible. We need to find new ways of shaping the system in a (more) desired direction. How? Join us in the world of simulation games!
The notion of optimality is void. There is no perfect outcome of this system/problem. Such judgments of the system state are observer-dependent, time-dependent and cannot be predicted. One can only speak of trajectories that appear desirable or not, given a set of strong assumptions, a time-frame, a set of objectives and a delineated system.
Simulation and gaming should be used as tools for discussion. Because the system we’re observing is complex, any model we make and any simulation we run is definitively wrong. That, however, does not make them useless: they can be used as a digital laboratory, our laboratory in silico. By applying many modeling and simulation techniques capturing parts of the real-world system and its problems, and using those in a variety of relevant contexts, we may get a glimpse of understanding what patterns may emerge and how we can contribute in shaping the system . That is the approach for TU Delft’s Energy Modeling Laboratory .
Experience and involvement leads to deeper understanding. The complexity in the real-world system works in counterintuitive mechanisms and leads to patterns that are hard to really understand. Our experience shows that grasping some of these patterns by experiencing them in a serious game really helps to build an intuition for the consequences of the system’s complexity . That in itself implies that lessons learnt – or patterns observed – may well contribute to understanding the complexity of the real world system and any effort in shaping the system accordingly. An example in our game is the understanding that ‘simple’ economic laws such as the notion of marginal cost bidding really work (at least to a certain extent). Other examples are the irrational response to soft information of future developments, the almost unbelievable developments on world markets for fuels, the wicked trade-offs between short-term profit, market share and the reliability and affordability of energy supply in the long run.
Managing is the art to use the mechanisms that drive change. Understanding and exploring what the mechanisms are that drive our societal system is extremely difficult, if not impossible. Let’s consider this management that, making use of that, an art, an “attempt to bring order out of chaos” . How to know what decisions matter, what actors matter and what outcomes matter? How to measure performance? How to measure change? To answer such questions, we need to bring together theory from various fields (history, engineering, multi-actor systems, complexity, economics, policy, design, etc.) and knowledge from application domains (energy, water, transport, IT).
We hope that simulation and gaming contributes to this process. By doing so, we make the theory operational in specific domains: we ask questions such as how we can develop and maintain an affordable electricity sector which is both decarbonized and in which supply is secured. It helps us to define what change and stability really means and how we can measure it. That way we hope to find out how we may bring about changes that put our systems on a more desired trajectory. If we can manage our precious infrastructures – the backbones of our society – that may be how.
How can a three week trip to Bangalore help gaining insight in the Dutch electricity sector? Which countries – including their energy sectors – are more different than the Netherlands and India? Well… despite the fact that the Indian and the Dutch culture are fundamentally different, both societies show many communalities. Both India and the Netherlands are quite busy: at least traffic is a pain. The fraction of the Indian population that resides in Holland may not be so far apart from the fraction of Dutch people that are in India. What Indian food is, is impossible to define, as it is for Dutch food (although for different reasons). It is easy to complain about the weather – umbrellas are a requisite in your backpack. Dutch and Indians can express themselves in peculiar ways in English. Indians like chocolate and ‘stroopwafels’ as least as well as the Dutch. And… more often than not, we can meet each other in humor.
These commonalities show that the complexity of our societies does not mean we cannot try to understand and improve them. It means we need to find new ways of doing so. The mechanisms and laws probably do not work as we expect them to! There is only one way forward: dive in the deep, experience new things, debate with an open mind, challenge all assumptions, indulge in to cultural diversity, and… embrace complexity!
 Stephen Sondheim, composor and lyricist, 2005.
One of my cherished experiences of graduate school was finding a whole community of feminists to engage with. I remember being very excited about my feminist theory class, and finding that not only do these women understand my language, they can enrich it in so many different ways. None of my co-students were in sociology – they were in English Lit, Philosophy, Education, Political Science , Geography, Psychology, and so many others. None of us shared any interdisciplinary lens, and yet, by grappling with the most difficult of texts, we were able to construct our own language to talk to each other. We learned much about the theories of solidarity and the hard-won practice of it that winter.
As I moved through the different courses, I soon realized that this was not really an isolated incident – that themes of solidarity and difference are prominent not just in our personal/political relationships with each other, but also in the theoretical debates about the fundamentals of feminism. How do we recognize difference? How do we form relationships of solidarity with other feminists who are fundamentally different from ourselves? What of one’s privilege and power? How do we speak and represent another? These are still very important questions we are dealing with, as evidenced by the recent Harvard debates that exploded on Kafila (here, and here).
I think the major problem about the statement that was released by the Harvard, at least for me, stemmed from two different sources. I’ll try to be brief about both of them.
The first is the Northern white privilege, that goes unnoticed, unacknowledged and is largely invisible to the North and South audiences . The thing that pisses us ( those of us who think of ourselves as the Southern feminists) no end is not only the manner in which White Northern feminists take over, but the fact that they rarely acknowledge the historical privileges that their voices have. When they are brought to the table, they are automatically heard. Their voices are always considered more ‘evolved’, more articulated, and often more authoritative. And feminists have been crying themselves hoarse for eons about why this practice, this pattern has to be deconstructed, how this has to be dismantled, and how these processes have to be dealt with more sensitivity by feminists themselves. I think, given this long history of engaging with power even within our own circles, we feel frustrated when someone, especially if they are feminist , comes along and ignores all of this. It feels like a slap in the face of all that effort we have made to understand, deconstruct, and deal with our privileged positions.
The second is the importance of self-reflexivity in feminism. It is perhaps the cornerstone of most feminist philosophical thought. We are taught that our views are the product of where we stand, with respect to the intersection of various multiple identities. So, if I am a Hindu non-Brahmin Middle-class Woman, then I must acknowledge the various biases, privileges, blind spots and opinions that come with that position. So, we are trained to engage with these positions and statements tentatively. We are not ‘holders’ of truth, we are not ‘definers’ of fact . We are trying to view the world from our own warped positions, feminism is the lens we view this world from, and that is our perspective. Our conclusions, when we draw them, have to have this element of self-critical engagement, and more importantly, self-reflexivity. It has often descended into excessive navel gazing. But the reason we do this as a method, as a practice is because we are aware how invisible privileges hurt all of us – we have to be aware of our ‘subject positions’ to understand the ‘dimension’ of truth that we are examining. And that ridiculous paragraph in the Harvard blog had nothing of this nuanced idea of solidarity. It is so self-congratulatory in its tone about the linkages of different forms of violence. . as if they are the first to have ever come up with the idea. I think it can piss off anybody, as far as I can tell.
I think what happened was because these debates are so internal in the feminist community that it can often go unvoiced in the diatribe against the Harvard post. I think it is important to voice why we are pissed off, not just for us, but also for the students of the Harvard community. They need to understand that because they are at the table, they automatically, by the power bestowed upon them, exclude others on that table. They have to ensure that those voices are heard, and that that system of exclusion is highlighted.
So, I get the vitriol, I get the sarcasm, and I get the anger. It comes from an old wound, yes. . .but it also comes from the disappointment of having to suffer a new one, once again.
City Game session – TARA Trust from Fields of View on Vimeo.
We played the city game with 13 children from Tara trust who were at IIIT-B for 17 days for a summer camp. These kids were from under privileged areas of Goa and Bangalore. Amar Chadgar (Photographer and Observer), Akhil Sukumaran (Observer), Vardhan Varma (Note-taker) and Bhagyalakshmi (Note-taker), Juhi from Tara Trust and I (game-master) were also a part of the game session.
The game was an interesting experience for us because just that morning we had a game session with kids from Sri Kumaran Children’s Home. We were excited to see the differences in the these two cities. We began the game with a round of introductions and said that we would do a trial round. A mixture of Kannada, English and some broken Hindi were the main languages used to communicate. After the trial round, we just continued the game to the 2nd round.
They sat around in a circle and put in a lot of factories, big bazaars, mountains, drinking water (separate for humans and animals), Majestics [sic] (3 of them), Infosys, speed breaker, road, Chinnaswamy stadium, community TV, animals, solar company, Agra Taj Mahal, Mysore palace, Mysore zoo, an IIT, Indian ocean river [sic] to name a few that were interesting! In between they started placing aspirations such as ‘I want a beautiful city’ and ‘save water’, but we asked them to replace these with actual places.
After 13 rounds of the game, when asked if they wanted to live in this city, all of them said they would like to live here. It was a crowded, clustered space with almost everything one could think of. We then asked them what is missing in this place that they need to live. A few pointed out there was no poultry, farm or milk – where would they eat? Then one of them said we could source all of these through the malls they had. One of them pointed out fire stations were missing. They also said there was no place they could buy gold or a place to cut their hair, or even a place to buy spectacles!
This game was a special one for us, as these children built a city of their experience. Some of these building came up as a result of their experience at the summer camp and a few were from back home. They said since this place had a lot of factories, the city could hold up-to 2 crore people.
City Game session at IIIT-B from Fields of View on Vimeo.
We played a session of the City Game with kids of class 10 and 12 from Sri Kumarans Children’s Home, as part of IIIT-B’s excITe program. We had 40 students participating, who formed 10 groups of 4 each; and the two teachers formed the eleventh group. In this game, the students were asked to build their city by taking turns to place blocks that were representative of buildings. This was the first time we played this game with a group as large as this (42 people!).
Like most other cities, this city had markets, business places, stadiums, amusement parks, residential areas, resorts, Vidhan Soudha and a High Court. However, this city also had a solar power plants, a flyover from a residential area to an IT park, “to let” buildings, nuclear power plants and even 2 dams! The groups used the wooden blocks creatively; for example, the cricket stadium was 6-8 blocks in a circle with 4 other blocks forming the floodlights! This is in stark contrast to many other game runs where the blocks are merely indicative of a building/place/road etc.. One of the teams decided they wanted to be the government. They built the Legislative Assembly, and even passed a law! This was the first time anyone assumed a role in the game. However, none of the teams followed the law, and one of the teams even opposed the way that this particular team “decided” to be the government.
Every team except one said they would not like to live in the city that they built; the reasons mostly being lack of adequate residential areas, lack of planning and lack of other basic amenities such as hospitals and markets. The general consensus among the teams was that this was a city with a population of 2-3 lakh. One of the teams said that this city looked like an island city for tourism, with a population like the Vatican City.
Unlike other sessions of the City Game, we asked the teams to choose for a winner, based on whatever criteria they thought was important. Two teams voted for the team which took the initiative to be the government, and three teams voted for the team which took the initiative to oppose the undemocratic manner of the other team becoming the government!
All in all, a great session of the city game. I’ll stop here, the video is more explanatory!
The last couple of months have given us so many unique experiences which we never thought we would have during the course of our Industrial Engineering & Management degree. Working on our project on understanding networks in solid waste management has been an eye opener on so many levels. We are slowly, but surely coming to terms with the complexity of the garbage issue at hand in Bangalore.
The complete process of waste management is a complex one involving multiple systems and sub-systems. Through our project we aim to apply concepts and tools of Industrial Engineering like Network Optimization, Supply Chain Management and Simulation Modeling to analyze ways improve the process and provide a more systematic approach to addressing the problem. Our primary area of work is the optimization of transportation network in solid waste management which includes push carts, collection autos and trucks. We also aim to create a problem statement of the garbage situation through our findings throughout the project.
The garbage problem in Bangalore has become more evident since the irregular functioning of the three main garbage landfills leading to pile up of garbage at various points mainly on roads and empty sites. The coordination and organization of this process is poor and leads to pile-up of garbage at these pick up points whose location is chosen without appropriate planning. There is no synchronization or time management in the movement of the collection vehicles till the secondary point, and also of the trucks from this point to the landfills. Through the course of the project so far, we have interacted with the various stakeholders associated with the problem. From the Pourakarmikas to the officials to residents, we have tried to view the problem from various perspectives. Through these interactions we have obtained quite a few interesting details and insights.
The basic process of collection consists of dood-to-door waste collection by the auto-rickshaws. The autos consist of 1 driver and 2-3 collectors. Once the auto-rickshaws are done collecting, they go to one of the truck’s pick-up points and load the waste into the trucks. The dry-leaves and other waste left on the roads are collected by the Pourakarmikas using push-carts and those too are loaded into the trucks at the pick-up points.
In our first field observation at ward 19 (Sanjaynagar), in a casual talk with the driver of the garbage auto, we were told that no instructions were given to the drivers on what route he should take to complete the area assigned to him. We followed the auto and accompanied the collectors through the process. The BBMP had laid out a directive stating the incorporation of waste segregation at every house (into wet and dry waste). Our presence gave them a sense of empowerment as the residents took the collectors’ pleas to segregate the waste (as instructed by their supervisors), more seriously with us going along with them. Most residents on the other hand found the exercise of segregation pointless as they assume that all kinds of waste were mixed eventually in the garbage truck/compactor.
In another such chat with the same garbage truck driver, he mentioned his inability to cover all points of collection on certain days. The reason being, the truck overloads well before they could cover 75% of garbage pick-up points, at times leaving a pile of foul garbage until the next day/ trip. We also found differences in the actual number of vehicles (auto-rickshaws, trucks and push-carts) assigned for Solid Waste Management (SWM) in Sanjaynagar ward and the data provided in the BBMP SWM monitoring file.
These are few of many details and instances we have observed and recorded through the course of our work in Sanjaynagar ward. We hope to understand the problem in a deeper sense in the days to come.
This article is written by Anuj N.K, Akhil Sukumaran, Nandhakumar S, Kunal Vinayakya and Prateek Sultania, final year students at M.S Ramaiah Institute of Technology studying Industrial Engineering and Management.
Students from M.S. Ramaiah Institute of Technology – Akhil Sukumaran, Anuj NK, Kunal V and Nandha Kumar, who are currently interning with Fields of View, participated in the 2-day Hackathon organised by the Planning Commission of India. They submitted an info-graphic about “Solid Waste Management in Urban India”, which is attached at the end of this post; and won the second place for visualisations in Bangalore. This is their report of the event.
The aim was to represent the issues(s) in a sector and convey what the 12th Plan recommends on these issues. We, the team of four from MSRIT, had the opportunity to contest in the Visualization category in the event conducted at IISc, Bangalore. The topic we chose for our visualization was ‘Solid Waste Management in Urban India’ in the Urban Development sector of the plan. We focused on key issues such as waste processing in India, allocation of funds for scientific treatment and disposal and also compared certain parameters in waste management in six tiers of cities classified based on population.
The next segment of the info-graphic consisted of the recommendations of the 12th Plan for Urban Solid Waste Management which included: The 4 R’s i.e. Reduce, Re-use, Recycle and Re-manufacture; enhancing re-cycling facilities for E-waste; incentivizing Private Public Partnership (PPP) in hazardous waste management and also emphasized on segregation of waste at source and its effective disposal.
Click on the below image to view the full info-graphic. This work is licensed under Creative Commons CC BY-SA 3.0 License.