Role-playing games for opening the black box of multi-agent systems: method and lessons of its application to Senegal River Valley irrigated systems

Multi-agent systems and role playing games have both been developed separately and offer promising potential for synergetic joint use in the field of renewable resource management, for research, training and negotiation support. While multi-agent systems may give more control over the processes involved in role playing games, role playing games are good at explaining the content of multi-agent systems. The conversion of one tool to another is quite easy but organisation of game sessions is more difficult. Both these tools have been used jointly in a fully described experiment in the Senegal river valley for issues of co-ordination among farmers. Role-playing games first enabled us to work on the validation of the MAS. Subsequently, the combination of both tools has proved to be an effective discussion support tool.