City Makers: Insights on the Development of a Serious Game to Support Collective Reflection and Knowledge Transfer in Participatory Processes

Having the ability to give form to cooperative environments while easing the process of collective reflection, serious games have been put forward since the sixties, as a way to overcome challenges in participatory processes. This paper discusses the City Makers game prototype and reports on the game development process, with a focus on five key game-testing sessions. The overall aim of the serious game is to foster collective reflection and facilitate knowledge transfer in and across multidisciplinary groups. The hypothesis is that framing the participation process in a game format facilitates idea generation and dialogue between stakeholders. Therefore, the paper concludes with a set of challenges a serious game has to overcome in order to communicate knowledge from one group to another