Urbanism and Minecraft: Designing a game jam to reimagine the city

Abstract

This article presents a theoretical–methodological experience that combines a card game and a game jam in Minecraft to re-imagine cities. A game jam workshop was designed for the City and Science Biennial 2021 held in Barcelona with three central components: (1) the identification of urban space problems in the chosen environment, (2) the co-creation of stories about the future and improvements for the city areas using speculative storytelling techniques based on cards, and finally (3) the creation and modelling of urban spaces and the resulting actions in the Minecraft environment, in which the participants are both designers and players. This experience is an original combination of game jam methodologies and research in the field of digital and non-digital storytelling. The results show that adding the speculative narrative dynamic in the form of a card game to the co-designing of an environment in a video game world generates a creative methodological environment that allows participants of different ages to become involved.