Making a splash with the Water Reflections serious game

Policymaking is a complex balancing act: aligning diverse interests, interpreting data, and making decisions under uncertainty. Yet, many decisions happen within institutional silos, limiting cross-sectoral thinking and jeopardising systemic approaches. What if policymakers could step into each other’s shoes, experiment with real-world scenarios and test collaborative strategies before making decisions?

Our new Water Reflections Game offers just that: an immersive, decision-making experience where players take on different roles, debate real cases, and co-create strategies for water resilience. Designed for policymakers, it fosters systemic thinking, challenges assumptions, and strengthens cross-directorates collaboration in ways traditional policy discussions cannot.

What is the Water Reflections game?

Water Reflections is a 90-minute role-playing strategy game designed for policymakers, based on real cases and initiatives implemented worldwide to address water challenges. Players represent different European Commission Directorates-General (DG), each bringing their own mandate, priorities and perspectives, thereby simulating inter-DG dynamics.

The game unfolds over six steps, offering a different type of decision-making experience: individual, collective, competitive and collaborative phases of prioritisation and resource investment. The outcome is a co-created water resilience strategy built from the selected real-life cases that players would adapt and replicate across Europe. At the end, the collective strategy is analysed using Systemic Change principles to reveal missing dimensions needed for a holistic sustainable transition.

Why a “game” for policymakers? 

Serious games are defined as "a set of cognitive design properties to focus on changing user behaviour and transferring knowledge instead of the mere entertainment function of traditional games¹". Beyond entertainment, they are designed with a purpose (see also our blog post on serious games).

Compared to traditional practices, serious games engage users at a deeper level of knowledge, enhance learning and collaboration, encourage problem-solving, and support behavioural change. They are increasingly used in policy and research contexts to promote organisational change and systemic thinking. 

The Water Reflections Game meets these needs: 

• Enabling science for policy: Bringing local perspectives into policymakers’ discussions.
• Promoting organisational change: Encouraging collaborative decision-making and fostering empathy through gameplay
• Driving action: Identifying concrete implementation pathways for water resilience.
• Raising awareness: Prompting reflections on how policymaking intersects with water issues.
• Encouraging systemic thinking: Providing a playful yet structured space to practice systems thinking.
• Advancing research on innovative policymaking: Revealing levers and barriers to holistic, systemic, and cross-cutting policymaking in public administrations.

How did we develop the game?

The game was developed as part of the Water Resilience Experiment - a design-driven, multi-level governance initiative led by the Joint Research Centre and supported by the  Directorate-General for Environment.  

See the report

We followed an iterative process: identifying real-world cases through scientific and grey literature, consulting the European Commission's water expert community, and selecting inspiring and controversial cases from around the globe. Through collaborative testing sessions with policymakers and JRC scientists, we refined the game rules, steps and materials to ensure engagement and fitness for purpose.

Learn more about the design and development process in the report on the Water Reflections serious game.

We are now in the implementation and data collection phase, gathering valuable insights to inform research on innovative policymaking, systemic change, and water-related decisions. The game can be applied in diverse settings: as a training tool, in collaborative workshops, or to explore real-world water initiatives. Its role-playing element also offers an accessible way to understand the inner workings of EU institutions — ideal for audiences new to EU policymaking.

Who’s playing? 

Between January 2024 and June 2025, over 170 players from the European Commission participated in 38 groups, across 11 sessions.

These included colleagues from the Directorates-General for: Agriculture and Rural Development, Energy, Environment, International Partnerships, the JRC, Home affairs,  Maritime Affairs and Fisheries, Mobility and Transport,  Enlargement and Eastern Neighbourhood,  Reform and Investment Task Force,  Regional and Urban Policy,  Research and Innovation,  European Research Executive Agency, Secretariat General of the Commission, European Environment Agency,  Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion , and several EU Delegations – all assuming the roles of other Directorates. Remarkably, only one player missed the instructions and played their own role, which other players immediately noticed through their "emotional state"!

The game is designed primarily for policymakers addressing water resilience through the structural lens of the European Commission but its versatility allows broader use: as a learning experience introducing real-world water initiatives from around the globe and as a collaborative decision-making exercise where participants negotiate as different Commission Directorates-General.

What we learned so far

We observed fascinating patterns: Directorates-General-level observations: 

• Players learned to understand other services missions and water connections beyond their own.
• Stereotypical views of the work of others were common, but players were surprised by the diversity of topics each service could tackle.
• Roles in the fields of health and food safety, environment, and agriculture were most popular, and perceived as most relevant to water resilience.

Negotiations:

• Some cases such as cloud seeding, ice harvesting, art and data-oriented initiatives generated lively debates.
• Participants tended to negotiate decisions based on their own DG’s interests, rather than working collaboratively

Strategic preferences:

• Players mainly supported cases addressing urgent, visible and tangible water problems related to human needs, often favouring short-term solutions such as drinking water standards and watershed restoration over prevention.
• While collective decisions covered all seven Systemic Change principles, there was a tendency to overemphasise infrastructural cases and overlook social, cultural, and paradigm-shifting elements linked to long-term transformation.

How are we using Systemic Change principles?

We drew upon environmental scientist Donella Meadows’ work on Leverage points as places to intervene in a system. These pathways to system change range from specific and tactical to social and cultural. To achieve systemic change, strategies should include as many different leverage points as possible. Our game uses seven simplified principles to analyse whether co-created strategies are truly holistic.

Want to play?

Whether you work on water-related issues or are interested in systemic thinking, collaborative policymaking, or organisational change (inside or outside the European Commission)—we would love to hear from you.

Drop us an JRC-EU-Policy-Labec [dot] europa [dot] eu (email)! 

Interested in playing the water game? It will soon become available on our website. So stay tuned! 
 

¹Xu, Faye, Buhalis, Dimitrios and Weber, Jessika (2016) Serious games and the gamification of tourism. Tourism Management, 60. pp. 244-256. ISSN 0261-5177 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2016.11.020