Read the full story at Smart Cities Dive.
Anyone can be a water resources manager in Phoenix, where the community is coping with a drought that has stretched on since the turn of the century. At least that’s the premise of a new role-playing game created by water resource specialists on the Phoenix Water Services Department’s conservation team.
Winning the game, which is geared toward high school students, requires players to get out of a water shortage within three years — without going over budget or causing too many negative economic or social impacts. Each year, a player gets to select three water management decisions to implement. The game is built in Microsoft Excel, and the user interface is basic: With each decision, values in the spreadsheet update to show players the resulting cost, amount of water conserved, and impacts on their society and economy scores — measures of public opinion and the local economy’s health, respectively.
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