During this workshop we had to create different characters, each with different ages and interests. For example, one character is a career starter who wants to be independent, save the world, and has a fear of failure. Another character is a team leader of the personnel department of a textile company who wants to get rich during the restructuring of the company to become more sustainable while improving its productivity. We put ourselves in the characters’ shoes and thought about what they would like to learn about bioeconomy and, most importantly, how. This required flexibility and open-mindedness from all participants. The workshop moderators used ice-breakers to create a welcoming and friendly environment where we felt comfortable learning from one another, whether it was about bioeconomy or game development. We could express our views openly, and were interested to see how our ideas would be taken up and incorporated into the development of the game as the project progressed.

Over a period of 18 months, we, citizens and bioeconomy experts, participated in several of those workshops contributing to the concepts and designs of the applications. The workshops took place in Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy and Estonia, the five countries from which the project partners come. While writing the project proposal, it was decided that two schools would participate in the workshops. The comprehensive school Eiserfeld in Siegen, Germany and the Tartu Environmental Education Centre in Estonia participated in the co-creation phase. There were eight workshop groups in total, with two groups focusing on one of the four areas of the project. Allthings.bioPRO made use of two overlapping concepts, the Co-Creation approach and the human-centred Design Thinking approach, to create meaningful and helpful solutions.

 

The focus of the workshops was adapted along with the progress of the technical game development. While we created fictional characters to predict their needs and decisions at the beginning of the workshops, specific game ideas and content were discussed in later meetings. The workshops were interactive and stimulating. But it was not easy for us workshop participants and the project partners to bring individual ideas together into one game. Unlike baking a cake from a recipe, the implentation of Allthings.bioPRO was more like collaboratively creating a dish from multiple potential ingredients while always taking into account every participant’s different tastes and preferences. The objective was to create a serious game that could inspire both young and old and introduce as many topics related to bioeconomy as possible, using quizzes and tasks. Difficulties often arose in reconciling the depth of the information to be provided and the gaming factor of the task at hand, which led to stimulating discussions to reach an agreement. As the game and app are meant for citizens, it was important for the game developers to integrate our opinions as members of the general public from the outset. They allowed us to decide which topics we wanted to know more about and how this could best be conveyed. All the ideas and conceptions that came out of the various workshops of the different missions were collected, sorted and evaluated by the Allthings.bioPRO project partner and game and app design developer Nurogames. The ideas that seemed the most feasible to realise were taken. In principle you could put a lot of topics in a game but to keep it light and fun, we had to choose wisely.

 

In one of the workshops, the idea of sending a hero to Earth emerged, delivering the message from the architects of the universe that Earth is not worth saving. The hero, however, disagrees and believes that the earth can still be saved and that humanity only needs support. Because the hero defies its superiors, it loses all superpowers. Nevertheless, the hero does not give up and supports mankind’s journey to save the world. With every progress made the hero will earn back parts of its superpowers.

The avatar, the BioHero, was designed by the two schools involved in the project. The pupils had the idea of depicting the Earth as a filthy, polluted planet, which is being cleaned and renewed bit by bit through the successful completion of the individual campaigns.

When playing, users can become BioHeroes who help mankind change their fossil-based way of life to a more bio-based, sustainable one. In 8 consecutive quests, the BioHero has to solve different quizzes and tasks, reduce the emission of product chains, can compete with other BioHeroes and learns step by step a little bit more about the bioeconomy.

The beta-version of the game and the mobile app are currently being tested and the final versions are expected in summer 2023.