Digital Serious Game for Urban Planning: “B3—Design Your Marketplace!”

Abstract

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.