Edutainment: Role-Playing versus Serious Gaming in Planning Education

Abstract

This exploratory study assesses the utility, in terms of learning and conceptualizing planning, of a role-playing exercise (the Great Planning Game [GPG]) and a serious game (Polis PowerPlays [PPP]) employed in a planning theory course offered at The University of Queensland in Australia. The study reveals that role-playing and serious gaming are equally engaging and help planning students learn and embody different roles while having fun. No great differences can be discerned in terms of learning effectiveness. With regard to teaching style, the GPG is more passive and tends to encourage collaboration, whereas the PPP is more dynamic and fosters competition. Both activities help students discover aspects of planning—and planning stakeholders—which they may not have considered before. Most participating students appear to regard planning as a pluralist pursuit. Communication and public participation are viewed as central to planning processes. However, traces of incrementalism and rationality are also present. While students believe in equity planning (i.e., advocacy from within the system), radical social justice approaches that challenge the status quo are notably absent. Overall, the authors conclude that these activities cannot fully replace guided and structured instruction but, as “whole task practices,” are a desirable complement to direct instruction.

Agency and Structure in Urban and Regional Planning: An Illustrative Overview and Future Research Agenda

“…The principles of game theory are central to the theory of actor-centered institutionalism which views actors as players making decisions on public policy (Scharpf 1997). Building on the principles of game theory, “serious games” (i.e., games applied outside the context of pure entertainment) have become increasingly popular in planning research, planning education, and citizen participation (Poplin 2014; Pojani and Rocco 2020). As serious games focus on decision-making, negotiation, and cooperation, they are suited to address actor-centered research questions.…”

Embedding Sustainability in Interdisciplinary Pedagogy for Planning and Design Studios

“…To encourage critical voice, activities that were “game-based” or included “role-play” and simulation were designed. These type of learning activities often support development of creative skills (Davies et al 2013) and involve accommodation as opposed to assimilation of learning, through which knowledge is acquired in a process of interaction, self-motivation, feedback, and competition (Blatner 2009; Pojani and Rocco 2020). For example, a “pitching urbanism” game was incorporated in teaching and learning activities, in which students teamed up and each team was assigned one “urbanism” discourse (e.g., landscape urbanism, green urbanism, sustainable urbanism, smart urbanism).…”

Questioning Low-Carbon Transition Governance: A Comparative Analysis of European Case Studies

“…This paper discusses a number of European experiences, selected in the framework of the Erasmus+ project LOTUS, whose aim is to design higher education tools to inspire Europe's future city planners, architects and administrative staff to guide communities towards a greener future and to transfer successful concepts across borders and national contexts [32,33]. With the aim of testing and implementing new energy concepts in a dynamic framework, a city planning serious game (Serious Game Urban Energy Management UrbEM-Game) is currently under development on the basis of a catalogue of real-world scenarios (Catalogue of Real Cases-CoRC) [34], that will contribute to testing and validating the serious game mechanism [35] in relation to their understanding of the emerging practices in energy governance and the peculiar dynamics that link the involved actors in different regulatory and institutional contexts. In more detail, to explore possible paths towards the reduction of GHG emissions, the LOTUS partners built a shared database of case studies ranging from two main areas of intervention: the renewable energy sources area, aimed at lowering emissions on the supply side, and the energy conservation area, whose aim is the increase in energy efficiency on the demand side [36].…”