All Work and No Play? Facilitating Serious Games and Gamified Applications in Participatory Urban Planning and Governance

Abstract

As games and gamified applications gain prominence in the academic debate on participatory practices, it is worth examining whether the application of such tools in the daily planning practice could be beneficial. This study identifies a research-practice gap in the current state of participatory urban planning practices in three European cities. Planners and policymakers acknowledge the benefits of employing such tools to illustrate complex urban issues, evoke social learning, and make participation more accessible. However, a series of impediments relating to planners' inexperience with participatory methods, resource constraints, and sceptical adult audiences, limits the broader application of games and gamified applications within participatory urban planning practices. Games and gamified applications could become more widely employed within participatory planning processes when process facilitators become better educated and better able to judge the situations in which such tools could be implemented as part of the planning process, and if such applications are simple and useful, and if their development process is based on co-creation with the participating publics.

Gamification of E-Participation: A Literature Review

“…Government involvement is nonetheless essential by nature in this research stream and hence some researchers often simulated a governmental presence on the gamified tools they were evaluating [20,74,75,76]. Nonetheless, governmental presence in research is still observed [4,8,9,11,38,53,68,71]. In fact, although such reports are rare, some of the research has led to actual policy implementations [69].…”

“…It is hence interesting to observe that a number of competitive implementations attempted to shift the focus of the competition from a competition between users to one between ideas [8,9,20,64,69], often employing leaderboards of ideas instead of or next to leaderboards of users. [2,7,8,9,16,28,31,41,55,64,73,76,78,79,80,81,83,86] 18 All [4,7,12,16,20,22,24,28,31,36,41,48,52,54,64,68,73,74,76,77,78,79,81,83] 24…”

“…Urban planning [4,18,20,24,36,48,53,54,74,75,77] 11 Agenda setting [8, 9, 53, 55, 69, 75] 6 Crowd sensing [5,13,17,42,47,63,69,71,72,87] 10 Analysis [8, 9, Depending on their personality, users might react to idea-based competitive designs by cooperating more with each other on getting the best ideas to win the competition, fueling positive engagement, or they might still engage in negative competitive behavior amongst each other [64]. There is hence, at least a possibility for cooperative, group advancing behavior to emerge within the competition, making such ideabased competitive designs worthy of further refinement and investigation.…”

“…Gamification of e-participation, in particular has been observed to induce increased citizen engagement with the government as is intended from its introduction to e-participation [8,9,11,18,20,22,31,34,35,38]. Gamified e-participation is, however, often misunderstood in practice, implicating its potential for success [4,28]. It is hence of importance to understand how this unique approach to fostering e-participation has been implemented and the actual and potential outcomes that it can bring about.…”

Urban Changes and Citizens’ Engagement by Using Digital Media

“…Gamification is often applied in participatory urban planning by using game elements to enable citizens to debate or give feedback on specific plans and to propose ideas for small-scale projects (Ampatzidou, Gugerell, Constantinescu, Devisch, Jauschneg, & Berger, 2018). As a limitation of using gamification and serious games for citizens' engagement for urban planning, Ampatzidou et al (2018) stated that "the researches, planners and policy-makers do not make a clear distinction between games and gamified applications and use these terms interchangeably, which leads to a certain fuzziness in the practices they adopt and which often results in either disappointment, or the exclusion of such tools from the participatory process".…”