Lessons About Learning from Serious Games: The Learning Potential of Co-creation and Gameplay in Participatory Urban Planning Processes

Abstract

Serious games have been hailed as particularly suitable learning technologies for unravelling complex urban issues and wicked problems. This chapter presents the main research findings from the development and testing of a serious game, called Energy Safari, which tackles the issue of local policy for the energy transition in the northern Dutch province of Groningen. While planners appreciate the learning and engagement potential of serious games, particularly for addressing the complexity of urban issues and large-scale transitions, games are not widely employed in practice, due to organisational and administrative constraints and lack of familiarity with the method. While engaging in a participatory game prototyping process, researchers, public administrators, and private sector and civil society representatives were able to access aspects of the energy transition outside their own disciplinary field. This enabled the research team to incrementally create an analytical model of the local energy policy and its social and technical ramifications, which were eventually implemented in the game. Learning during gameplay covered a variety of styles and goals, ranging from direct knowledge transfer to social and other forms of open-ended learning. However, a gender gap among players and a resistance towards long-term change were also observed. To summarise, despite some shortcomings, serious games cover several learning factors and can address complex issues while adapting to different network structures and participating stakeholders.