Learning Participatory Budgeting via Collaborative World-Building: A Case Study of Empaville

Serious Games (SGs) can create a platform for democratic participation by allowing players to make decisions in scenarios that simulate real-world systems. Yet, little is known about what players get from such games and how learning takes place, particularly from a collective and structural point of view. This paper summarises and interprets the findings of 4 playtesting sessions of Empaville, a hybrid (digital and physical) Participatory Budgeting (PB) Role-Playing Game (RPG) in which players need to play a character, propose projects for a fictional city and vote for them. By utilising the Activity Theory Model of Serious Games (ATMSG) as a method of analysis, we identified that the core PB collaborative actions were empathy, ideation and decision-making, but these depended on each of the player’s knowledge. We also identified that operationalising actions removes the learning opportunity (e.g., voting) and that sharing physical props was more engaging than sharing digital photos. World-building collaborative mechanisms that emerged were rooted in the structure of the city and access to services (via a shared map), social class and persuasion, and the players’ knowledge of the real-world mechanisms. To conclude, we extend the ATMSG by proposing an analysis of collaboration and cooperation aspects in an SG as opportunities for learning by co-creating worlds.