Regional Mountain Conference

Serious games are structured, rule-based devices designed to support learning and deliberation on complex issues by combining modelling, facilitation, and collective reflection. In mountain tourism, they can make interdependencies, responsibilities, and trade-offs discussable across heterogeneous actors, while remaining accessible to participants with diverse expertise. This paper examines the application and effects of a place-based serious game in a Swiss Alpine destination context through the Mountain Tourism Fresco, developed within the Swiss national research programme SWEET Lantern and implemented as a case study in a series of workshops organiced in Verbier–Val de Bagnes.

The Mountain Tourism Fresco is a three-hour workshop. The first phase combines a territorial map with a card system that structures causal chains linking tourism-related practices and drivers to climate change in the Alps, and to impacts on tourism. Participants then discuss mitigation and adaptation actions as “solutions” options to maintain tourism activities under changing conditions. A second phase mobilises narrative tourism personas (e.g., residents, workers, second-home owners, visitors, decision-makers) to explore differentiated constraints and leverage points in 2050-oriented scenarios.

Empirically, the study relies on a mixed-methods design combining three survey waves (pre, immediate post, follow-up), participant observation across four workshops, and semi-structured interviews with participants and local tourism stakeholders (e.g., destination and municipal actors, practitioners, business representatives). The analysis focuses on how the game operates as a mediation and boundary-object device in destination transition processes: how it supports territorialised problem framing, articulates responsibilities across roles, and sustains attention to climate-related transformation questions beyond the workshop setting. Findings are discussed with caution given voluntary participation and a limited number of respondents, which constrains statistical inference and the generalisability of quantitative patterns.