Plan Your Brisbane: Exploring Game Design for Civic Engagement

In this paper, I introduce Plan Your Brisbane, a web-based, mobile-responsive game produced by Brisbane City Council. The game was developed as a platform for civic engagement with Brisbane residents to seek feedback and build consensus around a charter of principles to help guide future city planning decisions and the need to accommodate an estimated additional 386,000 residents by 2041. Plan Your Brisbane was available online between 18 February and 16 April 2018 and attracted 100,869 players. The game was particularly successful in engaging residents in the usually hard-to-reach 18-24 and 25-34 age demographics. Plan Your Brisbane contributes to the game design community by demonstrating that games can facilitate civic engagement across all age demographics, even on complex issues such as city planning. This paper introduces the design process and design rationales of the game and shares some of the results.