Offsetting Game—Framing Environmental Issues in the Design of a Serious Game

Background: Biodiversity crisis requires researchers to reflect on tools and strategies to engage with different stakeholders. We propose that serious games can be designed to introduce stakeholders to a novel environmental policy tool and to communicate research on environmental issues. Our case is biodiversity offsetting (BDO), a novel policy tool aiming to reconcile nature conservation with other land uses. As any media, games offer certain framings of the issues they communicate about—some aspects are made more salient than others. However, frame analysis has not been widely used to analyze the design choices or the messages communicated by games. We analyze how these framings are designed into a game communicating about environmental issues. Aim: To intervene in the emerging public discussion on BDO in Finland, we designed a land use board game and during the design process, played it with public and private stakeholders who would soon encounter and implement biodiversity offsetting policies in Finland. The aim of this article is to describe how our framings of BDO affected the design process and how those framings interacted with the design decisions we made. With our analysis, we want to contribute to the understanding of how framings and design choices interact in game design and how paying attention to framings is especially important for the design of SGs. Method: We analyze how our framings of biodiversity offsetting and our design choices interact in game design. Our understanding of biodiversity offsetting guided our game design, but the design choices also contribute to the framing of the issue itself. Results: Game design choices strongly frame the topic of the game and thus influence the function of a serious game. Thus, the framings of the topic should be considered carefully during the game design process, especially in the context of serious games.