The Gaming with Science Podcast looks at the intersection of science and tabletop board games, with the occasional dip into video games, RPGs, game theory, or whatever else the dice roll up. If you ever wondered how natural selection shows up in Evolution, whether Cytosis reflects actual cell metabolism, or what the socioeconomics of Monopoly are, this is the place for you. (And if not, we hope you’ll give us a try anyway.) So grab a drink, pull out some dice, and let’s get gaming with science!
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The Gaming with Science Podcast looks at the intersection of science and tabletop board games, with the occasional dip into video games, RPGs, game theory, or whatever else the dice roll up. If you ever wondered how natural selection shows up in Evolution, whether Cytosis reflects actual cell metabolism, or what the socioeconomics of Monopoly are, this is the place for you. (And if not, we hope you’ll give us a try anyway.) So grab a drink, pull out some dice, and let’s get gaming with science!
#Atiwa #Bats #UweRosenberg #LookoutGames #Extension #Outreach #SciComm #BoardGames #Science
Overview
It's time for bats! In this episode, we talk about Atiwa, a worker-placement game by Uwe Rosenberg based on a specific scientific study showing how fruit bats provide enormous ecological benefit to communities in Ghana. We're also joined by Mariëlle van Toor, one of the researchers involved in that exact study, to help explain why this whole thing is so important. So grab some fruit, settle into your favorite roost, and let's talk about Atiwa.
Timestamps
00:00 Introductions
01:30 Humans and honeyguides
05:55 Bats avoiding collisions during rush-hour
09:43 Atiwa gameplay
21:12 The study behind Atiwa
26:58 What is that fruit?
31:44 Uwe Rosenberg does great outreach
35:25 Exosystem services
39:48 More bat facts!
42:10 Nitpick corner
45:58 Final grades
Links
Atiwa (Lookout Games)
Original study by Mariëlle van Toor et. al. (Current Biology)
Video abstract for the above (Youtube)
Press release for the above, with photo by Christian Ziegler (Max Planck)
Straw-colored fruit bat eating a banana (Youtube)
Paper on honeyguides working with humans (Science)
Paper on convergent evolution of hearing genes in bats and whales (PubMed Central)
The Eidolon monitoring network
Tautonym - When genus and species have the same name (Wikipedia)
Sugar plum tree (Upaca kirkiana) (iNaturalist)
Research article on the New York Land Acquisition Program to limit pollution to New York City (Pace Environmental Law Review)
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This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license.
Full Transcript
(Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/ )
Unknown Speaker 0:00 Brian, hello
Jason 0:06 and welcome to the gaming with Science Podcast, where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games.
Brian 0:10 Today, we're going to discuss a T wop by lookout games. All right, hello. Welcome back to gaming with science. This is Brian.
Jason 0:21 This is Jason,
Marielle 0:22 and this is Marielle. And I'm a researcher at Linnaeus University in southeast Sweden, and I mostly work on combinational movement ecology, and especially looking into the role of animal movement for the spread of pathogens. And sometimes I also look into dispersion of seeds by animals. So this is what is relevant for the game today.
Brian 0:42 Very much, and we're extremely excited to have Marielle van Toor here. This is a unique example of a science game for us. This game was explicitly inspired by a study that was published by Marielle and Dina Dechmann in it wasn't even that long ago when was the study published?
Marielle 0:58 2019
Brian 0:58 in 2019 so that's relatively recent in Current Biology, which is a is a very bright and shiny journal. So very excited to be able to make this arrangement here to talk about a Atiwa and sort of environmental activism, scientific environmental activism and ecological services and bats and Ghana, okay, but before we get into that, we usually start with some kind of a science banter, science fact, Jason, you are up this time. Marielle, I think you said you might have something as well. So usually we give the guest host first dibs. So do you want to share us something with us?
Marielle 1:30 SoI have one thing that I think is really cool, and that is in some way related to the game, even though it's on a completely different system, but also located in Africa. So there's a researcher whose name is Claire Spottiswoode, and she works in South Africa, and she's been working on a system of mutualism, and that means interactions that are mutual or beneficial to both partners between humans and birds. And this is particularly the
Gaming with Science
The Gaming with Science Podcast looks at the intersection of science and tabletop board games, with the occasional dip into video games, RPGs, game theory, or whatever else the dice roll up. If you ever wondered how natural selection shows up in Evolution, whether Cytosis reflects actual cell metabolism, or what the socioeconomics of Monopoly are, this is the place for you. (And if not, we hope you’ll give us a try anyway.) So grab a drink, pull out some dice, and let’s get gaming with science!
