Ten years ago, most people would have mistaken the concept of “serious gaming” for an everyday oxymoron. Today, serious gaming is changing policymaking around the world. Still, hundreds, and even thousands of years ago, some of the first known “serious games” were already emerging – in India.

Now it is up to Indian policymakers to embrace new gaming technology and insights, and continue this organically Indian practice of using games to simulate and manage real life situations.

So how do we define serious games?

Serious games are all games that support critical and strategic thinking through behaviors like role-playing, conflict resolution, exploration, empathy, iteration, resource management and problem solving.

Such games inherently encourage experimentation and creativity – essential for innovative policy design – since they are low in external risks. They are therefore invaluable tools for a low-risk, but reality-based, empirical approach to policymaking.

But India has not yet taken full advantage of serious gaming, which is ironic, considering serious games’ robust presence in India’s mythology and historical development. From the decisive game of Chaupar in the Vastraharan episode of the Mahabharata, to the ancient Indian games of chess and Moksha-Patamu (Snakes and Ladders), Indian society has long shown a deep respect for games’ ability to provide valuable real-life lessons without incurring the costs of real-world interaction. That is exactly the purpose of serious gaming in education and policymaking today. And now more than ever technology allows us to develop increasingly realistic games, and therefore design more effective strategies to deal with otherwise overwhelming policy challenges.

CSTEP is leading the way in the design of serious games for the Indian context. Forthcoming games address such tricky issues as national security and disaster response, sustainable energy, infrastructural design, transportation, public health, and agriculture supply chain management. Many of these games work with simulated “agent-based models,” where computer “agents” act like real people would act in various situations. The games allow real people to interact with these models, as actors or stakeholders with the irrational human tendencies that derive from gut feelings, emotions and information asymmetries. These interactions provide immeasurable “trial-and-error”-type insights for policymaking, but with no cost for errors. Policymakers can view these insights, then, as if they were “memories of the future,” and craft policy with these memories in mind.

CSTEP has two principal goals with these games: to spread awareness about issues that affect citizens’ well-being – traffic and public health, for instance – and to encourage policymakers to recognize and embrace serious gaming in the pursuit of more efficient, socially equitable and ecologically sustainable policy design.

An example of a training game being developed at CSTEP can be found here.