Challenges in the design of the Virtual River serious game

River management of national and regional waterways has become a complex matter involving multiple disciplines and stakeholders. The decision-making processes in river management regard issues that have a broad, wide-spread, non-transparent and frequently politically sensitive impact on a large and diverse group of stakeholders. The decisionmaking processes are therefore multidisciplinary as well as multi-actor; it can only be addressed properly by integrating these disciplines and actively involving all end users. As part of the RiverCare research programme, the project presented in this abstract focuses on communicating the results of the other RiverCare projects effectively to river managers and stakeholders by creating interactive and intuitive visualisations incorporated in a serious gaming environment: ‘Virtual River’. Ritterfeld et al (2009) define a serious game as “any form of interactive computer‐based game software for one or multiple players to be used on any platform and that has been developed with the intention to be more than entertainment”. In this project, the serious game, combined with the visualisations, aims to empower stakeholders to make informed decisions in the realisation of self-sustaining multifunctional rivers by allowing a highly usable and accessible interaction with the models and data generated in the RiverCare projects. Ultimately, the serious game aims to provide stakeholders with an environment where they can safely test management strategies together.