This article is written by Fernando Kleiman, Rens van den Bergh, Jeroen van Schaick, Marijn Janssen and Sebastiaan Meijer*

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There is a recent trend of using games for more than just entertainment.

Games for change, games for learning, gamification are all labels for different techniques applying game design in professional contexts.

This is also called “serious gaming”, where the power of games is used to facilitate learning.

In the Netherlands, the use of games is quite common in the private and public sector, where it’s been known and discussed for years under the label of Policy Gaming. For more than 60 years, games have been used for scenario building and decision-making. But despite their long history and the many ways games can be used, the discussion mostly takes place in specialised literature.

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Most games are built as special projects for particular situations such as team-building, training or even specific decision-making tasks.

Project leaders often ask external developers to create the game. Large consultancy firms and some universities have the necessary competencies and some of them have already some pre-made solutions that can be adapted to a variety of needs. Courses and even full-programs for master and PhD level are offered throughout the Netherlands, as there is a whole market demanding these skills.

But hardly any public sector organisations have dedicated positions for game designers.

Why government needs game designers

In the Netherlands, where there is a vast experience in game design for serious use, new initiatives still emerge. One of these comes from the spatial planning department in the province of Zuid-Holland, where two of this article’s authors work.

The spatial planning department of the province co-ordinates local decisions on, for example, housing development, industrial estates, the design of road infrastructure, and the development of recreational areas and nature. Within the department, one team is responsible for data analytics (e.g. demographic trends and land-use trends), monitoring planning policies (e.g. how many new homes have been built) and futures studies (e.g. how may technological innovation impact land use patterns; what the new trends are in planning approaches). The team also co-ordinates data analytics and policy monitoring for the wider organisation.

Game are a departure from the traditional one-way communication and towards changing the decision-making processes to make it more interactive and iterative

In 2017, this team got a new colleague — an in-house game designer. This has enabled them to completely transform the way they do citizen engagement. They had several motivations in bringing on a dedicated game designer:

  • Innovation: Zuid-Holland is facing many new challenges — energy transition, climate adaptation, economic shifts, societal inclusion — and they all require new solutions. And in particular, new ways of finding solutions in collaboration with a complex network of stakeholders. Traditional participation might not work, and the organisation needs new mechanisms to engage stakeholders.
  • New priorities: As of 2021, a new environmental planning law will come into effect. As a result, the spatial planning system in the Netherlands will undergo a fundamental change in the coming decade. One aspect of the new law is that the system will be much more based on early involvement of stakeholders. Another important aspect is an even stronger focus on integral policy-making implying more co-operation between policy specialists (e.g. infrastructure, housing, nature and climate policies). The new law introduces and implies novel legal and “soft” instruments and — as a result — requires novel skills focused on interaction and co-creation.
  • Becoming a learning organisation: Societal dynamics in the Netherlands are moving towards a much livelier civic debate. This requires an attitude characteristic of a “learning organisation”: building new relations with citizens and building new alliances to realise projects for the common good, bringing multiple societal signals to the table.

The idea behind embedding serious game design as a capability within the organisation — rather than hiring these skills on a project basis — was that the interactive “tables” a game designer would create could become a core part of the ongoing policy practice. In addition, the image of the province as an innovative and open learning organisation would be strengthened.

Communicating through games

The public sector communicates a lot of information.

Some of this information may always be best suited for reports, presentations or graphs, but some things are less suited for these formats and can benefit from more interactive means. Game design can be a powerful tool to do that.

In the last three years, they have developed more than 15 games, and in the process involved hundreds of civil servants, politicians and citizens.

Here are a few of the games they’ve created:

  • Playing with Rules — This card game offers the opportunity to decide on different laws for different topics in a light-hearted manner and invites the players to discuss those choices.
  • Archipelago game — The game consists of an archipelago of 6 islands. A group is formed for each island, all of which receive the same assignment and every group member thereby a role of their own. The game is meant to increase awareness about participation and societal inclusion. The game is directly aimed at preparing organisations for implementing the co-operative aspects implied in the new spatial planning law.
  • Money is Green — Calculating and designing a business case for a fictional building and its surroundings. The aim of the game is to create a joint business plan with which we can make an existing building future-proof using the scale model through all sorts of green and sustainable measures. The game brings together specialists’ perspectives and helps them co-operate better.

These are all examples of how, beyond just collecting, processing and publishing reports, the team used the available data to produce interactive artefacts that civil servants and citizens could play with. By playing, the information itself could be experienced and modified in ways regular means of communication in the public sector can’t achieve.

This is a key point, as most of the games are aimed at capturing the attention of the players, in order to help communicate the information the department produces.

In this way, it’s a continuation of innovations in planning practice that has been evolving for several decades. From a rational-driven practice based on legal instruments to a communication-driven planning practice more based on soft skills, experiencing alternatives and collective decision-making.

And it’s a departure from the traditional one-way communication and towards changing the decision-making processes to make it more interactive and iterative.

Challenges and lessons from three years serious game design

Because the use of serious gaming is a relatively new method in the public sector, it still has to prove itself. Many public officials have no experience with using or playing serious games and have no idea how where to start or what to expect.

Many of the challenges in the public decision-making process are complex and abstract. Playing a game can make them tangible, but even the process of developing the game itself adds value. In order to make the game, the policy problem at hand needs to be analysed and dissected to turn it into a playable game. This game design process helps to create a better understanding and forces experts to discuss real life measures and actions in order to have them represented in the game. This development process is often seen as very enjoyable and a fun way to translate complex models to understandable games.

The idea is to not only relay information, but also gain feedback collected from players’ interactions with the game

Games are one of the ways the public sector can create communication channels that flow both ways between citizens and policy-makers. The idea is to not only relay information, but also gain feedback collected from players’ interactions with the game. With such feedback they can improve previous information, models and schemes in a more bottom-up, participatory and dynamic information cycle approach.

Currently, serious games are a detour from the “business as usual” approach. With the ambition for more participation, experimenting and safe training environments, a long-term possibility is that serious gaming may become part of routine, perhaps with a new generation for whom the use of serious gaming is more and more expected, rather than an exception. It’s not at all unthinkable that simply passively reporting information will no longer be accepted by participants without the support of interactive methods like serious games.

Other governments and companies should watch this space. Gaming can be used in many ways and having it in-house might level-up some decision-making and information production processes. — Fernando Kleiman, Rens van den Bergh, Jeroen van.Schaick, Marijn Janssen, Sebastiaan Meijer

(Picture Credit: Unsplash)

*Fernando Kleiman is a Brazilian Federal civil servant and a PhD at TUDelft (The Netherlands), researching games and public policies. Rens van den Bergh is the game-designer in the spatial planning department/Province of Zuid-Holland (The Netherlands). Jeroen van.Schaick is the manager who decided to hire the game-designer in the spatial planning department/Province of Zuid-Holland (The Netherlands). Marijn Janssen is a full-professor and head of the information and communication technology section of the technology, policy and management faculty of TUDelft (The Netherlands), researching games and public policies. Sebastiaan Meijer is a professor and vice-dean of the division of health informatics and logistics at KTH (Sweden), researching games and public policies.