MAGIC Nexus Game

The MAGIC Nexus Game is available as a single player and a multiplayer version. The single player version offers an individual learning experience at two different levels of complexity. The multiplayer version enables collaborative learning and requires a minimum of four players and one facilitator, preferably all present in one venue. Player instructions and facilitator instructions for the multiplayer version are available for download.

To play the game, please follow this link: game.magic-nexus.eu

 

Consolidation of the United Nations Agenda for Sustainable Development and ambitious directives by the European Commission have put the European Union (EU) up for a challenge: the EU needs to reconcile its food and energy security goals with goals of climate adaptation and sustainable and efficient use of water and land resources. Tackling this challenge requires that measures are taken in several sectors or policy domains (food, energy, climate, water, land). However, measures taken in one domain have implications across other domains. These interlinkages in the so-called “nexus” complicate the development of coherent and effective policy.

To get a better grasp on the complexity of policy development in the nexus domain, we have designed a game with an educational character. The target audience is educated laymen with an interest in policy development in the domain of the water-land-carbon-food-energy nexus, such as the EU and national policy makers as well as MSc and BSc level students. The purpose of the game is to experience the challenges and solutions for member states – as part of a larger economic block – to achieve food and energy security within safe environmental boundaries. The game conveys the main trade-offs and synergies in the nexus using a quantitative framework of relations between the nexus elements based on environmental footprint indicators. This framework is made accessible to players by means of an interactive dashboard, which they can use to explore the effects of choices regarding the consumption and production of food and energy, on the food & energy dependency of the EU as well as carbon, land and water footprints.

 

   

 


The MAGIC Nexus Game and the computational framework behind the interactive dashboard of the game have been developed at University of Twente, the Netherlands, under the lead of dr.ir. Joep F. Schyns. The interactive dashboard of the game has been translated to a web app by the Statistics Technology and Analysis of Data group at University of Naples Federico II, Italy, with executive contributions by Eligesoft sas (Italy) and advisory contributions by the University of Twente. The game and web app are published under the CC BY-SA 4.0 (Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International) license. Contact: Dr.ir. Joep F. Schyns (University of Twente), j.f.schyns@utwente.nl, for suggestions to improve the game, or Dr. Michele Staiano (University of Naples Federico II), michele.staiano@unina.it, for suggestions to improve the web app.