Discovering the Appropriate Role of Serious Games in the Design of Open Governance Platforms

Abstract

INTRODUCTION Public participation is a key component to democratic government. Though the form of participation may vary, such as representative versus direct participation, the ability for individuals to interact with their government is both a desirable and necessary part of governing operations and government legitimacy (Arnstein, 1969; Innes & Booher, 2004; Roberts, 2004). The development of communication and computational technologies has made direct participation more feasible and given rise to interactive platforms that enable direct interaction (O'Reilly, 2010). Though technology makes participatory opportunities available, sometimes they are unused or used in a way that was not intended by the sponsoring organization (Lampe, 2011). Thus, to realize the potential for novel participatory pathways, we must also take into account the motivation of people who participate. Our objective in this exploratory research is to start the development of a framework for identifying characteristics and applications of serious games in open governance platforms. We pull from two sources of information in the framework development: theory on serious games and civic engagement and current examples of both successful and struggling programs. We begin our examination by reviewing literature on public participation and requirements for making participatory opportunities worthwhile to citizens with fixed personal resources. Applications of information tools associated with E-government have become a standard practice. They improve public-government interactions, but their traditional structure has limitations for participation. We catalog an emerging body of the open governance platforms that have been created to address challenges in public and private organizations in public deliberation, task completion, and learning, all of which encourage the voluntary mobilization of individuals to engage in a participatory activity. Within each category, we compare examples that use crowdsourcing exclusively in comparison to crowdsourcing programs that include a serious game layer. By crowdsourcing, we are referring to an increasingly common approach where a large group of people contributes to solving problems or challenges usually posed by public and private organizations, ... a [crowdsourcing] system enlists a crowd of users to explicitly collaborate to build a long lasting artifact that is beneficial to the whole community (Doan, Ramakrishnan, & Halevy, 2011, 87). Its primary contribution is the ability to coordinate or focus large and diverse population of contributors to collaboratively address topics or activities that interest them. The inclusion of the word crowd is very appropriate- the numbers of participating individuals are quite large on some of these platforms. For example, the English language Wikipedia currently has 14,500,244 users, only 1,786 of which are designated as administrators, and the site is visited by an average of 78 million people monthly (Wikipedia, 2011). Contributions from individuals are mediated by the collective, thereby reducing errors in the final product produced. Games have a unique contribution to participation; they have a dynamic structure that is designed for entertainment and can motivate to the point where people are willing to dedicate their leisure time to participate in games. Games are pervasive throughout society and individuals are well acquainted with both games and game dynamics. Furthermore, serious games are a category games that have an objective beyond the entertainment of the moment; individuals can learn how to plan, build, lead and mediate depending on the game design, also known as the game frame (Dignan, 2011). Collaborative platforms that incorporate serious game dynamics in addition to crowdsourcing with a focused objective are emerging in both the public and private sectors. However, platforms that use gamification (1) are not guaranteed to be successful; therefore, requirements for and barriers to successful implementation must be thoughtfully addressed. …

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 27 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.