In the debate about smart cities, an alternative to a dominant top-down, tech-driven solutionist approach has arisen in examples of ‘civic hacking’. Hacking here refers to the playful, exploratory, collaborative and sometimes transgressive modes of operation found in various hacker cultures, this time constructively applied in the context of civics. It suggests a novel logic to organise urban society through social and digital media platforms, moving away from centralised urban planning towards a more inclusive process of city-making, creating new types of public spaces. This book takes this urban imaginary of a hackable city seriously, using hacking as a lens to explore examples of collaborative city-making enabled by digital media technologies. Five different perspectives are discussed. Hacking can be understood as (1) an ethos, a particular articulation of citizenship in the network era; (2) as a set of iterative and collaborative city-making practices, bringing out new roles and relations between citizens, (design) professionals and institutional actors; (3) a set of affordances of institutional structures that allow or discourage their appropriation; (4) a critical lens to bring in notions of democratic governance, power struggles and conflict of interests into the debate on collaborative city-making; and (5) a point of departure for action research. After a discussion of these themes, the various chapters in the book are briefly introduced. Taken together they contribute to a wider debate about practices of technology-enabled collaborative city-making, and the question how city hacking may mature from the tactical level of smart and often playful interventions to a strategic level of enduring impact.
Modern day challenges of water resource management involve difficult decision-making in the face of increasing complexity and uncertainty. However, even if all decision-makers possessed perfect knowledge, water management decisions ultimately involve competing values, which will only get more prominent with increasing scarcity and competition over resources. Therefore, an important normative goal for water management is long-term cooperation between stakeholders. According to the principles of integrated water resource management (IWRM), this necessitates that managerial decisions support social equity and intergenerational equity (social equity that spans generations). The purpose of this discussion is to formulate preliminary recommendations for the design of serious games (SGs), a potential learning tool that may give rise to shared values and engage stakeholders with conflicting interests to cooperate towards a common goal. Specifically, this discussion explores whether SGs could promote values that transcend self-interest (transcendental values), based on the contributions of social psychology. The discussion is organized in the following way. First, an introduction is provided as to why understanding values from psychological perspectives is both important for water management and a potential avenue for learning in SGs. Second, a review of the description of values and mechanisms of value change from the field of social psychology is presented. This review highlights key psychological constraints to learning or applying values. Based on this review, recommendations are made for SGs designers to considerwhen developing games forwatermanagement, in order to promote transcendental values. Overall, the main conclusions from exploring the potential of value change for IWRMthrough SGs design are as follows: 1-SGs design needs to consider how all values change systematically; 2-SGs design should incorporate the many value conflicts that are faced in real life water management, 3-SGs could potentially promote learning by having players reflect on the reasoning behind value priorities across water management situations, and 4-value change ought to be tested in an iterative SGs design process using the Schwartz's Value Survey (SVS) (or something akin to it).
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Playfulness intertwined with city-related themes, such as participatory planning and civic media are becoming more popular. In the last ten years, game designers have taken up the theme of play in relation to the urban environment. In this paper, we present a conceptual mapping of “urban play,” through the analysis of eight examples of urban games. Better conceptual tools are necessary to discuss and reflect on how games draw on, or deal with, urban issues. While urban games are diverse in medium, intent, and experience, across the spectrum analyzed in this paper, they hold the potential for various player experiences emerging through play that may be useful to designers. These are: a sense of agency and impact; feelings of relatedness and empathy; an awareness and understanding of complexity, perspective-taking and scenario-building, and either planning or taking action. The conceptual mapping offers scholars and practitioners a more nuanced vocabulary for designing games and playful interventions that might be used to tackle societal issues that either require or could benefit from genuine public involvement as engaged citizens.
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Voor Nederlandse game bedrijven vormt de doorlooptijd van het game designproces een steeds groter probleem bij het ontwikkelen van games. Game design processen lopen systematisch achter op de gebruikte hardware- en softwaretechnologieën en daarom wordt kwalitatief hoogstaande games ontwikkelen voortdurend complexer. Door toegenomen ontwikkelkosten ten gevolge hiervan zien game studio?s als Game Oven, PlayLogic en Lunagames ?die tot voor kort nog succesvolle titels produceerden? zich nu gedwongen de deuren te sluiten. Als deze trend zich voortzet verliest Nederland haar innovatieve game bedrijven één voor één en gaan de lange termijn plannen van de overheid voor deze creatieve industrie in rook op. Game design bepaalt de inhoud, werking en spelervaring van een game door het ontwerpen van spelregels, levels, verhalen en mechanismen. De cycli die nodig zijn om games te ontwerpen, te evalueren en aan te passen, duren te lang voor het behalen van de vereiste hoge kwaliteit. Doordat tijdige en begrijpelijke feedback over de kwaliteit van game designs ontbreekt, tasten game designers in het duister en kunnen bedrijven niet snel genoeg op de marktvraag reageren. Er is een enorme kloof tussen game designs en de programmacode van het uiteindelijke product. We noemen dit de representatiekloof bij game design. Een aantal game bedrijven vraagt het lectoraat Play & Civic Media van de Hogeschool van Amsterdam (HvA) om haar kennis en knowhow aan te wenden om methoden te ontwikkelen die hun game design processen versnellen. Het lectoraat stelt daarom voor om in een RAAK-MKB project getiteld ?Live Intelligent Visual Environments for Game Design? samen met tien game bedrijven, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) en TU Delft te werken aan krachtig live game design gereedschap dat de representatiekloof bij game design overbrugt en design cycli verkort door doorlopend en direct (live) feedback te geven over de kwaliteit van het eindproduct. In een periode van twee jaar zullen krachtige design notaties, talen en gereedschappen ontwikkeld worden dat designers in staat stelt om sneller, autonomer en gerichter interactieve spelelementen te ontwerpen en de kwaliteit van speler-ervaringen te verbeteren. Hiermee kunnen bedrijven hun concurrentiepositie herwinnen en gaat bovendien een markt voor thematisch specifieke en kleinere projecten voor hen open die momenteel nog moeilijk toegankelijk voor hen is. Allereerst zal met bedrijven geanalyseerd worden welke notaties en vormen van feedback over designs ontbreken voor a) mechanismen en b) verhaallijnen, missies en trainingen. Daarnaast zal met Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica de vereiste taaltechnologie ontwikkeld die doorlopende aanpassingen technisch mogelijk maakt. Vervolgens worden de gekozen visuele notaties, feedback en taaltechnologie ontwikkeld tot live game design gereedschap. Hierin werkt HvA samen met de TU Delft dat veel ervaring heeft het ontwikkelen van efficiënte productietools voor geavanceerde en realistische (trainings-)simulaties. Extra expertise op het gebied van design gereedschap is aanwezig bij de Universiteit van California Santa Cruz. Wetenschappers van deze instelling monitoren het onderzoek. Daarna zal in drie case studies met bedrijven het gereedschap worden getest, gevalideerd, geëvalueerd en verbeterd. Disseminatie en kenniscirculatie worden ondersteund door de Dutch Game Association en Dutch Game Garden. De borging van het netwerk en projectresultaten gebeurt bij de Hogeschool van Amsterdam door inbedding in kenniscentrum Create-IT en in de opleiding Informatica.
PUBLIC PLAY SPACE promotes innovative and creative practices for the co-design of inclusive, cohesive and sustainable public spaces, through the use of games and digital technologies, in a transnational and European perspective, fostering the process of placemaking.Participation of citizens in the design of the public space is recognized as fundamental to build inclusive, cohesive and sustainable public space. As local governments grow more and more interested in civic participation, it becomes important to explore available methodologies addressing challenges related with participatory processes. Games have been proposed since the 1960s as a means of facilitating participatory processes by enabling cooperative environments to shape and support citizens’ interaction. The change led by Information and Communication technologies opens the debate on how advanced technologies, from video games to Virtual and Augmented Reality can help to open the process of co-creation to new audiences, enhancing citizen participation, both with respect to the design and space usage. PUBLIC PLAY SPACE aims to explore the process of development and use of innovative video-games for public space co-design through a wide range of actions targeted at education, knowledge production, debate rising and audience development; it will focus on the following actions:- On-line platform development;- State of the art book development;- 3 Creative & Capacity building workshops on advanced video-games co-development;- 3 Open-Game Events / Public space co-creation workshops with citizens (T: Neighbourhood associations, young people, citizens);- A Co-created touring exhibition on Games for placemaking, taking place in 6 cities;- 1 symposium on games for co-design;- Public Play Space experience book.
