DEMOPLAY: UPGRADING THE EMPAVILLE GAME

More than 15,000 places around the world are now using Participatory Budgeting (PB) –a process in which a city, region or state allocates a proportion of the public budget and invites citizens to provide ideas for civic projects. The citizens then campaign for their ideas and a referendum is held.

Dr Paolo Spada, (Politics and International Relations) was involved in developing Participatory Budgeting schemes for Lisbon and Milan. His latest research project, ‘DEMOPlay’, is adapting a participatory budgeting role-playing game called Empaville, which is designed as a training tool, to focus on green issues in the UK.

Empaville was developed through two European Horizon 2020-funded projects: Empatia and Phoenix. The Phoenix project, an ongoing partnership of 16 organisations including Southampton, for which Paolo is co-investigator, is funding the technological platform that supports the game. A grant from Southampton Institute for Arts and Humanities (SIAH) has enabled Paolo to work with colleagues including from Electronics and Computer Science and Winchester School of Art to optimize the game flow and the human interaction elements of the interface. He said:

“As well as localising Empaville to green issues in the UK, we have updated the rules, improved the game through working with a professional games designer, and built some research around the game.”

The game follows Participatory Budgeting principles but lasts two hours rather than months or years. Players are given character cards for the roles they are to play and divided into tables to compete to produce ideas addressing issues such as transportation, green spaces, recycling, and energy transition.

“The game is in three phases: ideation, campaigning, where they try to convince other players to back their ideas, and the third phase in which players vote,” explained Paolo.

The Southampton team is conducting research which aims to understand the capacity of the game to promote learning, and a sense of efficacy, and investigate how the role-playing affects participants’ ability to empathise.

“We are aiming to explore participatory decision-making and to equip the University with a tool to build students’ civic skills related to environmental issues,” said Paolo. The team is analysing data collected at several UK and international events and working with the University of Florence on a future Horizon 2020 bid.

Real-world participatory budgeting organisations have begun to take up the Southampton team’s DEMOPlay game adaptation. In Morocco, CESE, an institution which manages the relationship between Moroccan civil society and the state, will be deploying the game as part of their growing participatory governance programme, after Paolo trained facilitators. There are plans to translate it into Arabic and French.

In the UK, Shared Future, a charity that manages the UK participatory budgeting network, is being trained to start using DEMOPlay as a training and dissemination tool.