Serious Gaming: A Solution To Long-term Planning In The Water Sector

Serious gaming: A solution to long-term planning in the water sector

Published: 31 March 2025

By Jake Wood (Economic Regulations Manager, NWL) and Jono Ewens (Associate Director Strategic Advisory, Aqua Consultants)

Serious gaming could revolutionise the water sector’s planning, blending innovation, interaction, and stakeholder engagement to balance financial, environmental, and social priorities.

First move: Why long-term planning needs innovation

National water and wastewater services face an increasingly complex and demanding environment. The ability of water companies to innovate and adapt their approaches will be critical to achieving resilient and sustainable outcomes. Long-term delivery strategies (LTDS) aim to identify the ‘winning moves’ that water companies must make to address these challenges, all within the constraints of a highly regulated industry – the rules of the game.

Serious gaming has emerged as an innovative solution, offering an engaging, risk-free environment for testing strategies, exploring scenarios, and fostering collaboration. This approach was piloted at Northumbrian Water’s Innovation Festival through a design sprint, resulting in outputs that secured seed funding for further development.

In partnership with Aqua Consultants, Turner & Townsend, and Quirk Solutions, Northumbrian Water is leading the adoption of serious gaming into water sector planning. Working with partners in the Living Water Enterprise (LWE) – a partnership that has put Northumbrian Water on the front foot for AMP8 delivery – we aim to embed serious gaming to enhance long-term planning strategies.

The aim of the game: What is serious gaming?

Serious gaming involves the use of game-based techniques, in a physical or sometimes digital setting, to tackle real-world problems, test strategies, and enhance decision-making. Its roots can be traced back to early wargaming in 1820s Prussia, where it was developed to give armed forces a competitive edge by improving strategic understanding so that leaders could make better decisions.

Over time, these tools evolved and have been widely adopted in sectors such as business and healthcare. Their goal is often to gain a competitive advantage or deliver maximum value with the resources they have. One example is the ‘red team–blue team’ exercise, which simulates adversarial scenarios to rigorously stress-test strategies and improve resilience.

This is not the first application of gaming techniques in the water sector. There are examples from continental Europe and Africa where gaming techniques have been used as an educational tool to communicate improved land management practices and develop sustainable, integrated water cycles for new residential districts.

Spotting the opening: Opportunities for serious gaming

There are plenty of opportunities for serious games to add value in the water sector. Red team–blue team exercises are already widely used as a way of testing physical and cyber security. And simple online games can be used to engage customers and, if applied thoughtfully, elicit customer preferences.

Where Northumbrian Water and its partners are trying to break new ground is in the application of gaming methods to the challenge of developing long-term strategies that will stand the test of time. By creating a ‘safe to fail’ environment, serious games enable rapid ‘what if?’ scenario testing. This can help identify what areas of future uncertainty are most important to consider in adaptive plans to ensure water and wastewater services will be resilient in the long term.

Gaming – whether digital or tabletop – is also a great way of bringing diverse stakeholders together to foster collaboration. It offers a way to meaningfully allow people to engage with complex, interrelated issues. While this approach is addressing serious issues, games revolve around play at their heart; even the Ministry of Defence’s Wargaming Handbook states that these games should, where appropriate, be fun.

Chasing check: Challenges for serious gaming

Adopting serious gaming comes with clear challenges which we aim to address in our work. One common risk in innovation requires investing valuable time and resources in an approach that may not yet be fully understood or accepted. This is compounded by the learning curve required and potential player scepticism from those unfamiliar with the method. After all, not everyone has had a chance to hone their Dungeons & Dragons skills, so may need guidance when asked to roleplay in water strategy games.

It’s vital to recognise that serious gaming is a versatile framework, not a universal solution. Success depends on carefully developing and tailoring the game to suit the specific context and objectives.

By tackling these challenges, we can unlock the full potential of serious gaming, advancing its application to the next level for further play.

Winning moves

A chess grandmaster doesn’t emerge victorious by contemplating only the next move; they have a plan that looks many turns ahead and can adapt to plausible potential board states. We need to do the same in the water sector. But with threats of check coming from the queen of storm overflow discharges, the bishop of sustainable abstraction, the rook of leakage, and the knight of nutrient neutrality – to name but a few – it is all too easy to focus on today’s battles and leave thinking about our next move to another day.

Serious games can help us step back from the table to review our strategy. By carving out the time and space to explore multiple potential futures through the medium of games, we can better prepare to be proactive in the face of an uncertain future.

As we move into the delivery phase for plans developed through PR24 for AMP8, now is the perfect time to start considering how our long-term strategies need to evolve.

So, put your game faces on and play out how to avoid the futures you fear and reach the utopia you dream of. You’ll almost certainly learn something, and you might even have some fun.