Designing and implementing a Role-Playing Game: A tool to explain factors, decision making and landscape transformation

In this paper we describe a research process on contextual driving factors and decision-making processes used by local actors for land use change in a zone of the Colombian Amazonian frontier. We integrated landscape multi-temporal analysis, Role-Playing Games (RPG), interviews based on flow diagrams and an historical study of landscape dynamics for the construction of our methodological approach. Findings of the study include individual detailed decision-making insights at the farm level that shed light on the mechanisms that boost the advance of the agricultural frontier into the Amazonian forest. We illustrate how individual decisions are related with the general landscape dynamics. A formalization of results was carried out in UML (Unified Modeling Language) for the future construction of a Multi Agent System (MAS) model, the implementation of which will be useful for land use planning, discussions among local and regional actors and scenario building. The RPG constitutes a device that could "talk" by itself, in the name of local actors. Facts that hardly would be communicated in an interview emerge implicitly and explicitly through the exercise. The RPG is a device that we call a "dense methodological tool", in the sense that it is a designed object that synthesizes a complex system. This is central to territorial planning because RPG and derived MAS models talk to actors and researchers in the same language that human memory and projection mental capabilities function. These objects condense time and space and help make problems clear, and they assist in the finding of solutions and exploration of possible scenarios.