Design of a serious game for participatory planning of nature-based solutions: The experience of the Edible City Game

Urban Farm DB summary

A paper addressing the problem that serious games proposed as a tool to foster civic participatory processes often fail due to lack of funding or design skills, presenting a new framework for designing serious games for participatory planning of nature-based solutions, with guidance on definition, content, and evaluation steps. The framework's usefulness is illustrated through the design of the Edible City Game (ECG), a digital serious game for participatory planning of edible city solutions (urban nature-based solutions with a food component), which was implemented on Tygron, a platform providing a graphical interface for urban-planning serious games. The paper argues that while Tygron provides user-friendly software for designing serious games, the final product still requires a proper design-oriented process to fulfil its purpose.