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Geogames for change
Published in Dale Leorke, Marcus Owens, Games and Play in the Creative, Smart and Ecological City, 2020
Alenka Poplin, Bruno de Andrade, Ítalo Sousa de Sena
GeoMinasCraft was inspired by Minecraft and its ability to digitally represent landscapes, enabling visualisation, interaction and learning about natural resources, the land use and the possibilities to build on the mining areas. It invites the player to explore the cultural landscape of Ouro Preto, a town in Minas Gerais, Brazil, founded as a village by the Portuguese crown on 11 July 1711. The village expanded into a town during the Brazilian gold rush that started in the 1690s, and a rapid growth after 1950s (de Oliveira, 2010) resulted in many new buildings that were built in risk areas (Calil, 2018), not preserving historic sites or natural resources (Fonseca et al., 2001). GeoMinasCraft was designed to communicate landscape values and consequentially core functions related to geodiversity (Brilha et al., 2018). Geodiversity was defined by Gray (2013, p. 12) as a composite that includes ‘the natural range (diversity) of geological (rocks, minerals, fossils), geomorphological (landforms, topography, physical processes), soil and hydrological features. It includes their assemblages, structures, systems and contributions to landscapes’. The game also implements online communications that may be attractive particularly to the generation of digital natives, those born in the age of information technology (Prensky, 2001).
Geodiversity and the ‘8Gs’: a response to Brocx & Semeniuk (2019)
Published in Australian Journal of Earth Sciences, 2020
In conclusion, we maintain that the term ‘geodiversity’ has real value both in focussing attention on the variety of global and local geoscience elements as a basis for geoheritage assessments, in raising the importance of geoconservation as an integral part of nature conservation, and in supporting biodiversity and many aspects of cultural heritage. Geodiversity describes the variety and richness of geology, geomorphology, soils and hydrological features of the planet at all scales and is not restricted to the regional or local level as suggested by Brocx and Semeniuk (2019). Geodiversity has clear relationships with both geoheritage and geoconservation and is fundamental to the geosystem services that benefit society in a huge number of ways, not just in supporting biodiversity, vitally important though this is. Modern society could not exist without geodiversity, the components of which have been exploited by human societies through the millennia from the Stone Age and Iron Age to the Oil Age and Silicon Age. Rather than being ‘brought in as a separate adjunct’ by Brocx and Semeniuk (2019), geodiversity deserves to have an absolutely central position in the relationship between geology, geoheritage, geoconservation, geotourism and geosystem services.