On April 3, 2025, Dr. Wolfgang Hauser and Dr. Wolfgang Weimer-Jehle introduced the Serious Gaming platform “Futurescapes Navigator” developed within the ZuWaKo project. The platform builds upon the logic of Cross-Impact Balance analysis (CIB) (Weimer-Jehle 2006). CIB describes a system as a network of descriptors with mutual cross-impacts, which foster or hinder the development of a specific outcome of other descriptors. The “Futurescapes Navigator” (FN) allows to interactively play and explore a Cross-Impact (CI)-matrix. Any choice of a descriptor outcome can be attributed to specific player, who can pursue a certain goal in the context of a given CI-matrix. During the game, players get feedback on the cross-impacts between their choices and the other elements of the matrix (e. g. the choices of other players, context-descriptors or indicators), as well as on other CIB-metrics. Not all descriptor variants have to be defined by a human player: there is also the possibility to determine a certain descriptor outcome by chance or by automatically selecting the most fostered outcome. In this way, the Futurescapes Navigator enables players to gradually experience the interrelationships of the system and develop a profound system intuition that can support the subsequent negotiation of problem solutions in the real world. The Futurescapes Navigator is not fixed on one theme but it is possible to use CI-matrices on any topic as a basis for the development of a Serious Game. The application is web based, so that players and host can be spatially separated. The application will be publicly released at the end of the ZuWaKo project and will then be available free of charge.
