Can an analogue game be a planning support tool mimicking a palatial planning probe? 

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Humans have always played games. Archaeological and historical research on the history of games place them among our earlier technological and social constructions. Games have accompanied societies since their existence, and they keep evolving. The purpose of games is rich and varied. New game disciplines have emerged in the last decades, with purposes such as expression, interaction, religion, that connect to our need for being challenged and find meaning. We now recognise that games can be powerful tools.

 

We can use them in urban planning as planning support tools and as means to build interactive experiences for participatory and collaborative planning. Games can be engaging simulations, models that playfully gain life without losing their seriousness. They can be serious games when maintaining a purpose beyond mere entertainment. 

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Although game evolution has generated sophisticated, realistic and complex digital games, analogue games are still relevant. There is growing interest in the distinct experience of analogue game systems and the human interaction they provide. There has been a considerable evolution of analogue game systems with new game mechanics, components, and techniques to make these experiences meaningful and engaging to users, even if they are digital hardcore users. 

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Modern analogue games design trends can support planning processes, allowing users to play with models, get instant feedback, and test their ideas. Despite the increasingly higher realism of digital games, analogue games can be simpler and cheaper to implement. They foster human face-to-face interaction to build empathy and reinforce collaboration dynamics. Due to simplification requirements, analogue games focus on the core of each problem, decision and impact, represented as an analogue playable twin of reality. 

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Micael Sousa created an analogue serious game for the Municipality of Marinha Grande (Portugal) in one of his doctoral thesis case studies. The purpose was to deliver a game where participants could plan the primary school municipal network. The game presents the players with a map divided into hexagons (hex). Each hex contains the existing school facilities and the resident students in that spatial unit. Each hex centroid has a distance of 2 kilometres to the neighbouring hex. The game challenges the players to open and close schools, and they are constrained to the use of the current layout standard for these types of schools (blocks of four classrooms) in force by Portuguese law. Players must allocate all students to a school, minimising the cost of building and maintaining facilities and transportation. The game uses several tracking mechanics to count the costs of the facilities, transport, distances, locations and places to allocate the students.

It is a collaborative game where players are challenged to allocate all students to a school, as near as possible to their homes, spending the least amount of money possible. The game model was defined as a facility location problem, solved in parallel by Xpress Software by FICO (an optimiser).

Knowing the optimal solution from the optimiser helped design the analogue game and allowed players to compare the results after each play with human participants.

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Different cohort of participants with distinct backgrounds played the game.

PhD students from planning and correlated disciplines played the game and were the ones where the solutions were more similar to the result obtained with the optimiser. They played with little knowledge of the territory other than the one provided by the game board. Participants who knew the territory (from their professional practice) got farther from the optimiser, especially those who considered other impacts of the decision of closing, opening and allocating the students. Planning experts from the region and the elected officials from the municipality of Marinha Grande used the game to express their social, cultural and environmental constraints.

Despite considering only operational costs, the game allowed to quantify and simulate other impacts of the overall decision-making process. The discussions between participants provided essential qualitative data, with rich information to complement the values and location of the game, which indicates the game could be used as a method for future analysis for planning purposes.