Serious Urban Games: From Play in the City to Play for the City

Abstract

The academic study of playful activities has rapidly gained relevance over the past ten years and given birth to an interdisciplinary field known as Game Studies. In that context, a small but promising research area deals with interactions between game design, urban planning and socially relevant issues such as urban rehabilitation, innovation, integration, inclusion and civic engagement. We believe that digital and non-digital ludic practices in urban spaces offer countless untapped potentialities for the promotion of active, responsible forms of citizenship, awareness- raising on key sociocultural and political issues and the promotion of more participative urban design and development processes. To map a possible direction for future research, we will discuss some features of ludic activities designed to motivate players to interact with their surrounding urban space and fellow citizens in positive ways. We will describe two ludic genres: Serious Games and Urban Games, the overlapping of which defines an emergent Serious Urban Games sub- genre. As a first step towards a more extensive analysis, we shall then detail two key tendencies in Serious Urban Game Design using some examples to argue for the relevance and usefulness of designing, organising and studying playful activities in metropolitan areas.