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O. Devisch, J. Diphuis, K. Gugerell, M. Berger, M. Jauschneg et al.:
"Game Mechanics for Civic Participation in Digitized Cities";
Vortrag: AESOP - 13th meeting: Complexity and digitalization of cities - Challenges for urban planning and design, Finnland; 15.01.2015 - 16.01.2015; in: "Conference Proceedings of 13th AESOP Complexity and Planning Thematic Group", (2015), S. 142 - 167.

The digitization of society not only made it possible for authorities to
involve citizens in policy making - via social media, real-time
monitoring, etc. -, but at the same time increased the demand from
these citizens for more direct participation. Both authorities and
citizens see participation as an instrument to reach a well-defined
objective. In the case of a municipality, for instance, this may be
generating public support for a new policy or the avoidance of juridical
complaints and thus the shortening of a building process. This
instrumental approach to participation is miles away from its true
objective, namely to emancipate people, irrespective of personal
ambitions (Arnstein, 1969). Emancipation requires that acts of civic
participation are accompanied by processes of interpretation,
reflection, and contextualization, or, in short, by civic learning. Gordon
& Baldwin-Philippi (2014) discuss two requirements for civic learning:
namely critical reflection and lateral trust. Critical reflection refers to
the ability to map key actors, to analyse key dynamics, to understand
the concerns of involved actors, etc. Lateral trust refers to the trust
between citizens and/or local community groups. This is opposed to
vertical trust, which refers to the trust of citizens in (local) authorities.
The two authors argue that games are excellent platforms to support
civic learning, under such conditions.
A difficulty in this respect is that developing a good game is timeconsuming
and thus costly. Considering that civic learning is a longterm
process, typically addressing a multitude of issues and involving
multiple audiences, it is clear that such a process requires a series of
games, making it virtually impossible for one organization to cope
with. The paper therefore proposes to no longer reason in terms of
complete games, but rather in terms of game mechanics. These are
methods to steer the interaction of players within and with the game
world (Sicart, 2008). Think of rules and actions supporting actions
such as searching, collecting, bargaining, cooperating, creating, etc.
The challenge is then no longer to develop a full game addressing a
given spatial issue, but rather to develop re-usable mini-games
addressing single features of civic learning. These mini-games can
then be combined into a `full´ game as the participatory process
evolves.
The purpose of this paper is to list and describe a number of game
mechanics relevant to civic learning and to touch upon a series of
challenges related to the `organic´ use of such mechanics along a
participatory process.

Civic learning; guided self-organization; collective efficacy; game mechanics, dynamics and aesthetics

http://publik.tuwien.ac.at/files/publik_257000.pdf