Playful public participation in urban planning: A case study for online serious games

The aim of this paper is to study the implementation of online games to encourage public participation in urban planning. Its theoretical foundations are based on previous work in public participatory geographical information systems (PP GISs), play and games, with a special focus on serious games. Serious games aim to support learning processes in a new, more playful way. We developed the concept of playful public participation in urban planning, including playful elements such as storytelling, walking and moving, sketching, drawing, and games. A group of students designed an online serious public participatory game entitled NextCampus. The case study used in NextCampus was taken from the real-world question of a possible move of a university campus to a new location in the city of Hamburg, Germany. The development of the serious public participatory game NextCampus resulted in a physical prototype, user interface design, and a computational model of the game. The NextCampus game was tested with the help of two groups of urban planning students and presented to three external experts who provided valuable recommendations for further development. The critical comments questioned the level of complexity involved in such games. The positive comments included recognition of the potential for joy and the play-fulness a game like NextCampus could evoke. Public participatory online applications aim to attract citizens to discuss current issues related to their environment and to improve the process of public participation in general. An integration of geographic information systems (GISs) with public participatory tools represents one of the latest innovations in this area. ways of integrating the new applications into participatory processes and considers which new functionalities and technical characteristics could offer the most benefit to users. In the past, these technologies and other map-based applications were frequently criticized as being too complex for the majority of potential users (Steinmann, Krek, & Blaschke, 2004). New forms of collaboration and technical solutions emerged during the Web 2.0 era. For example , Google Maps and Google Earth can be used by lay users and non-experts without intense training. Recent research on collabo-rative mapping also known as ''geography without geographers'' prior work in PP GIS to include much wider, distributed participation (Hardy, 2008). Despite these new forms of collaboration and innovative technologies , Moody (2007) demonstrates that the use of GIS technology to involve citizens in participatory urban planning does not seem to empower citizens. An important factor in such findings …