Games for Cities
Port of the Future (2016)
Delft [NL]
Developed by:
Reality-based digital education and decision-making game targeting stakeholders involved in sustainable port development.
Creating more sustainable futures means adapting and redesigning current systems. In cities, this is a particularly complex, often slow process involving diverse actors. Port authorities at Deltares in the Netherlands approached the challenge of accelerated sustainable port development through innovative gaming. The Port of the Future is a Serious Game that aims to move away from the traditional port by engaging stakeholder negotiation and decision-making in collaboratively reaching a larger project vision for the “Port of the Future”.
The game focuses on port-specific policy-making in a realistic but fictional environment. Combined with autonomous scenarios and a diverse set of measures and indicators, information is relayed on the impact for society, the natural environment, and the economy. This also allows the game to prove valuable for policy-making decisions with regards to wider socio-economic and sustainable design factors.
As with many games, value derives from process-driven stakeholder collaboration as they work through a number of realistic development and planning scenarios. Debate is stimulated through structured and constructive conflicts. In the end, the game is successful in helping stakeholders to realise that successful new policy-making in ports requires integrated stakeholder participation.
