Last week has been pretty intense. My department finalized a, for a regional planning agency, rather unusual project and ran a couple of community meetings during the week. What happened in those meetings wasn’t the typical PowerPoint presentation followed by a Q&A. People, mostly of younger age, played a 3D video game and participated that way to Boston’s Chinatown Masterplan process.
Emerson students created the excellent video below, that captures the very core of the project in about 3 minutes:
I only got during the final phase of the project involved, helped testing the game, setting up the website and organizing our community meetings, but it was an absolutely exciting experience to take part in. Especially the first community meeting, hosted for Chinatown residents, stood out with an highly energized atmosphere.
The game helped in the meeting as ice breaker, facilitated engaging discussions about the neighborhood and provided a fun environment for the audience to work with. We all were somehow surprised when we actually saw game mechanics kicking in. At the point where scores and winners are announced, people started cheering, got all excited, compared scores and discussed strategies why one couldn’t complete all tasks or what would have been a better way to play.
The good part: it all had serious, real world backgrounds – well, real world compressed into 30 minute tasks. However, the game deals with existing challenges of Chinatown residents. The game allows players to walk in somebody else’s shoes through Chinatown and complete tasks as another person, equipped with different skills and opportunities. It’s an educational game, used to gather feedback on and engage in an urban planning processes.
But it’s still fun to play, and fun is the one aspect I wouldn’t underestimate here. It helps to broaden the audience of the community meeting, attracts especially younger people and provides an experience you wouldn’t expect.
Although the game can be played online, it is designed for meetings, to be played by people located in the same room. The game serves as facilitator for participation and gets people talking to each other, very actively as we found out during the meeting. The game is not designed as standalone solution.
The online game version should extend the dialog started during the meeting and provide opportunities for others to chime in at any point (we’re working on it, almost there).
Further readings:
- the Participatory Chinatown project website,
- the view from one of the participants
- Rob’s sophisticated post about the game and
- a Boston Globe editorial