The main goal of this paper is to study the design and implementation of a digital serious game for civic engagement in urban planning. Digital serious games are games that aim to support learning in a playful and engaging way. Learning about the environment and planned changes is essential in civic engagement. The study case is taken from a city district, Billstedt, in Hamburg, Germany. In the implementation of a game concept we concentrated on the design of a marketplace in Billstedt. The game was called “B3—Design your Marketplace!” The B3 game aims to provide a playful digital environment in which the citizens gain information about the current situation in the city district, have the possibility of submitting their own designs for the marketplace, vote for the preferred designs, and chat with the experts and other participants. The prototype of the B3 serious game was evaluated with a group of students and a group of elderly people. The majority of the participants involved in testing expressed appreciation for the digital serious game as a new form of online civic engagement in urban planning. The paper concludes with a discussion about the potential of digital serious games for civic engagement and open research questions.
The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential of Minecraft’s game environment for urban planning with older and younger children in a public school in Tirol town, Brazil. Minecraft is employed as an innovative tool to tackle the present lack of engagement and involvement of key societal actors such as children and young people in urban planning. Thus, how can games support children to co-design their future city? Which heritage values do they represent graphically in the game environment? Geogames are games that provide a visualization of a real spatial context and in this study, Minecraft is the tool which we use to explore youth engagement. We designed two experiments, which tested Minecraft as a geogame environment for engaging young people in urban planning. These experiments were conducted with children, who emerged as active emancipated actors to bring their values to the planning practice. The playtesting results revealed the potential of Minecraft to keep children engaged in the design workshop, as well as their relevant ludic ability to co-create walkable, green, and interactive places. New research questions arose about the potential of creating a culture of planning among children in order to motivate other social actors to share responsibilities for sustainable development and management.
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