Serious gaming as a means of facilitating truly smart cities: a narrative review

M. Cavada*, C. D.F. Rogers

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

The term ‘smart cities’ is contested: its interpretation is becoming ever broader, often to accommodate commercial interests. Since cities are made up of individuals, all of whom are guided by their own world views and attitudes, the residual question is not ‘what should we do?’ but ‘how should we do it and how should we encourage and enable everyone to join in?’ By exploring the ways that gamification can be used to understand the effects of ‘smart initiatives’ on cities and their operation, it was concluded that gaming has considerable potential to affect individual and societal practices by profoundly influencing the gamers themselves, while technology and the game design itself play a central role to how gamification is implemented and used. This paper proposes one way of both creating cities to which citizens aspire and delivering a beneficial change in attitudes and behaviours to make such cities work. We propose that way-finding games should be developed as the most appropriate tools for participation. Designing such serious games with sustainability, resilience and liveability agendas in mind, encouraging widespread citizen participation as gamers, and taking cognisance of the outcomes would lead to both smarter citizens and smarter cities.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)695-710
Number of pages16
JournalBehaviour and Information Technology
Volume39
Issue number6
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2 Jun 2020

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council under grant numbers EP/F065965 (Mapping The Underworld), EP/F007426 (Designing Resilient Cities–Urban Futures), EP/K012398 (iBUILD), EP/K021699 (Assessing The Underworld), EP/J017698 (Liveable Cities–Transforming the Engineering of Cities to Deliver Societal and Planetary Wellbeing), EP/N010523 (Self-Repairing Cities–Balancing the impact of City Infrastructure Engineering on Natural Systems using Robots), and EP/P002021 (Urban Living Birmingham), and the University of Birmingham for funding the Policy Commission on Future Urban Living.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2019, © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Keywords

  • gamification
  • liveability
  • Smart cities
  • smartness
  • truly smart cities

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Developmental and Educational Psychology
  • Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous)
  • General Social Sciences
  • Human-Computer Interaction

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Serious gaming as a means of facilitating truly smart cities: a narrative review'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this