Generating Consensus: A Framework for Fictional Inquiry in Participatory City Gaming

Contemporary digital urban design games or ‘city games’ can function as a constructive instrument for exploration and discourse, serving as an essential interface between abstract decision-making processes and real world development decisions. Research suggests that city games are useful for engaging stakeholders, allowing them to explore a range of ideas. However when dealing with marginalized communities with low levels of cognitive consensus, one difficulty is that conventional city game approaches tend to engage pragmatic problems set in realistic contexts, rather than providing scope for discussion of the “soft city” or intangible aspects of a community. To address this problem, this paper proposes a new constructive gaming framework that incorporates Fictional Inquiry along with a “perceptual bridge” to help players contextualise a fictional proposition within their perception of real world problems. Fictional Inquiry differs from traditional participatory design practice as it temporarily changes or bypasses existing socio-cultural structures. The aim is to help marginalised communities learn to make effective decisions about intangible issues, and then to transform those choices into desired actions and outcomes. This paper illustrates the advantages of a perceptual bridge through the design of a new participatory design game the author calls “Maslow’s Palace”. This new conceptualised framework may be used as a catalyst to enable stakeholders in marginalised communities to foster a common vision through fictional inquiry as a prefix to pragmatic community design processes where consensus is required.