Playing with Power

Games of the Oppressed

Since the 1960s, Latin American social movements and participatory planners have integrated games into campaigns, meetings, and actions. Led by the popular education and Theater of the Oppressed movements, they have used games as tools to achieve political and social change. By games I mean not the abstract models of game theory but rather real-world games that people consciously play. Following game scholars, I understand games as systems in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in measurable outcomes (Salen and Zimmerman, 2004: 80).

As pioneered by Paulo Freire in 1960s Brazil, popular education wields pedagogy as a practice of liberation, enabling oppressed people to understand their world and in the process change it (Freire, 1970). Popular educators regularly use games, especially puzzles, role-playing games, and physical and mental challenges (Algava, 2006; Centro Ecuménico de Educación Popular, 1996). By playing and discussing games such as assassin, charades, and model jury, participants explore complex issues (exploitation, democracy, justice, etc.) and devise strategies for dealing with them. Social movements around the world, and especially in Latin America, now use popular education games to establish goals, determine tactics, and plan collective action (Algava, 2006; Arnold, Barndt, and Burke, 1985).

Since the 1970s, Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed has developed another set of political games (Boal, 2002). In forum theater, actors present a short play in which a character succumbs to oppression, such as police harassment. They then repeat the play, inviting spectators to become “spect-actors” by taking a character’s place and acting out ideas to resolve the conflict. According to Boal (2002: 244), “The game is spect-actors—trying to find a new solution, trying to change the world—against actors—trying to hold them back, to force them to accept the world as it is.” In the 1990s, Boal linked forum theater with political decision-making through legislative theater (Boal, 1998). After being elected a city councilor in Rio de Janeiro, he let citizens draft laws through forum theater, and 13 of these laws were passed by the city council.

Inspired by these experiences, planners and organizers in Latin America and elsewhere have increasingly mixed games and game techniques into participatory processes. Games have become a key tool for campaigns, meetings, workshops, and actions, usually through physical icebreaker and team-building games, mapping simulations, and contests (Al-Kodmany, 2001; Arias, 1996; Romero et al., 2004). Planners are also making participatory processes more gamelike – as in Brazil’s participatory budgeting and Venezuela’s communal councils (Lerner, 2011). Without necessarily using games themselves, they are applying common game elements, structures, and processes—what I and others call game mechanics (Rouse, 2005: 310; Sicart, 2008). Rosario Hábitat illustrates how games and game mechanics can engage people in participatory planning.

Rosario Hábitat

Latin American cities are marked by a long history of decidedly nonparticipatory planning. Typically, local and national government have displaced shantytown residents by force, paving the way for more profitable real estate development (Angotti, 1996; Smith, 2002). When residents are organized well enough to resist these attacks, they are still left with dilapidated infrastructure and unhealthy living conditions. Planning has either exacerbated or maintained inequalities, not reduced them.

In an effort to reverse this trend, however, progressive local governments in Latin America have recently launched a wave of experiments in participatory planning and democracy (Chavez and Goldfrank, 2004; Selee and Peruzzotti, 2009; Welp and Uwe, 2009). Rosario has been at the crest of this wave. Lying along the Paraná River four hours northwest of Buenos Aires, Rosario is Argentina’s third-largest city, with over a million residents. Founded in the late seventeenth century, the city gradually grew because of its large port, major rail terminal, and growing industrial production (Johns, 1991; Municipalidad de Rosario, 2011). Sprawling agricultural fields enveloped the city, making the surrounding province of Santa Fe one of the breadbaskets of Argentina.

Rosario has long been a hotbed of leftist movements. In 1989, a progressive coalition led by the Partido Socialista (Socialist Party) was elected to city hall, and it has remained in power ever since. The administration’s electoral success largely stems from progressive and participatory programs in public health, social economy, children’s well-being, and decentralization (Almansi, 2009; Maxera, 1999; Municipalidad de Rosario, 2006). In 2003 the United Nations Development Program awarded Rosario first prize in Latin America for good governance and local development.

Despite their success, Rosario’s participatory programs initially had little effect on one of the city’s most serious problems: horrid living conditions in the villas. These informal settlements had begun to grow on the outskirts of Argentine cities in the 1960s, mainly because of internal migration and slum clearance (Almansi, 2009). By the late 1990s, there were 91 villas in Rosario, occupying 10 percent of the city (Rodriguez and Salomón, 2009). They housed 115,000 people, 13 percent of the city’s population, in fragile homes made mainly of scavenged materials. Most residents occupy the land illegally, without legal connections to the city’s water, gas, or electricity networks. Most have little formal education, low incomes derived from informal labor, and darker than average skin. Because villa streets are usually unpaved and lack sewage systems, rain turns them into muddy quagmires.

In 1998, Mayor Hermes Binner called for a participatory program to improve conditions in the villas. Rosario’s Servicio Público de Vivienda (Public Housing Service—SPV), a city agency that had already led small interventions in the villas, proposed Rosario Hábitat as a comprehensive development approach. It obtained a loan from the Inter-American Development Bank to cover 60 percent of Rosario Hábitat’s initial US$71 million budget, and the City of Rosario provided the rest (Almansi, 2009; Rodriguez and Salomón, 2009). The SPV launched the program’s first phase in 2000, aiming to improve conditions in 11 villas, home to almost a third of the total villa population.

In each villa, Rosario Hábitat works on three fronts. First, it develops urban infrastructure. It generates plans for streets and sidewalks, gas, water, sewers, storm drains, and electricity systems, and facilities such as health and child care centers. It then coordinates the efforts of several city agencies, public utilities, and contractors to carry out the plans. To install new infrastructure, some households need to be relocated. Rosario Hábitat either helps these families move to vacant areas in the villa or builds new houses for them in a nearby neighborhood. The program also delivers property title to each family. Second, staff provides support for children and families, including workshops in nutrition and gender relations, recreation activities, and placement of children in schools. Third, Rosario Hábitat coordinates a work and income-generation program, providing job training, internships, and placement services and helping residents form microenterprises and cooperatives. As María Isabel Garzia, the former SPV director, summarized, “The idea is that the villa stops being a villa and becomes a normal city neighborhood. For that reason, Rosario Hábitat is considered a plan that delivers citizenship, not just housing.” This was the idea, at least.

Not According to Plan

Rosario Hábitat began by trying to intervene in the villas Corrientes and Las Flores. Corrientes was an older community in the center of the city, and many residents had stable—if modest—sources of income. The villa already had roads, sewers, and other basic infrastructure, but irregular unlighted alleys still permeated the blocks and crime was rampant.

Since security was the most glaring problem, the Rosario Hábitat team in Corrientes decided to open up new, safer passageways to cut through the blocks (see Figure 1). Drawing on a full land-use survey and the program’s criteria, staff mapped out a new plan for each block, indicating which households would be relocated to accommodate the new passageways. These plans were presented at community meetings in the villa, and residents signed in agreement.

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Figure 1.

Aerial map of Corrientes. New mid-block streets in the center are labeled “Nueva Calle” and new passageways marked by dark lines. (Image: Rosario Hábitat)

In August 2004, the time came for the relocating families to move, and they refused. Relations between Rosario Hábitat and the community deteriorated rapidly. As tensions escalated, a resident tried to stab a staff member, and the project team was literally chased out of the villa. What went wrong? As one coordinator recalled, “People weren’t interested in the solution we were offering.” The program had not offered residents many concrete benefits, instead explaining that some of them would have to move for “regularization.” When faced with the real task of uprooting their homes, many families decided that the costs outweighed the benefits. This decision came as a surprise to staff because the community had not been involved in meaningful participation. People had had little say in the new plans for the villa and little opportunity to understand the program’s technical relocation criteria. Their participation had been passive. One facilitator admitted, “When the residents first signed the agreements, they weren’t in agreement.”

At around the same time, another Rosario Hábitat team was intervening in Las Flores, a poorer, smaller, and newer villa just outside the city’s beltway. Rosario Hábitat started to engage the first two sectors of Las Flores as in Corrientes, presenting new plans and trying to secure agreements. The results were like those in Corrientes. Because there had been little communication with residents, staff realized late that its land use plans were not popular. Community members became furious that not all families fit into the plans, and they blocked nearby roads and highways in protest. For one coordinator in Las Flores, these conflicts “proved that there had to be another way. . . . You can have a perfect land use plan, but without participation it’s not going to work.”

After these initial setbacks, Rosario Hábitat went back to the drawing board. The program invited Gustavo Romero, a Mexican expert in participatory planning, to lead several training sessions in which staff learned more participatory facilitation, decision making, and design techniques. Rosario Hábitat also recruited more experienced facilitators. The training workshops and new facilitators inspired staff to design a new participatory process and implement it in the remaining sectors of Las Flores. The experiment paid off, as the work in the other sectors went smoothly, without protests. Mariana, a veteran facilitator, explained, “With the same people, after having gone through a participatory design process, we didn’t have any more problems. . . . The treatment was completely different.”

What exactly did Rosario Hábitat do to inspire such a different community response? After the initial interventions in Corrientes and Las Flores, the program recentered the development process around a series of participatory workshops. In these gatherings, teams of staff—composed of social workers and técnicos (architects, planners, and designers)—helped residents learn about the program, identify local priorities, decide on rules for participation, reorganize the distribution of land, select new homes, and negotiate community concerns. “We learned how to communicate together and understand both our own teams and the residents,” Mariana told me, “and we started with games.” The following sections explain what the four main workshops—planning, rule making, lot allocation, and relocation—can teach us about participatory planning.

Engaging the Senses

Rosario Hábitat begins inviting participation through initial planning workshops. In these workshops, community members identify the main local problems and ways to address them. At the same time, Rosario Hábitat tries to shake residents out of their routines and inspire them to participate actively. To animate residents, the workshops often start with a game. In one game, for example, teams compete to assemble puzzle pieces into cartoon images of neighborhoods. With reggaetón music as a soundtrack, the teams quickly realize that their pieces do not all fit. Only when the facilitator announces that people can talk with members of other teams do they recognize the trick: Each group has been given several pieces of another team’s puzzle. After the teams trade pieces to complete their puzzles, staff asks what happened and what this has to do with Rosario Hábitat. Residents jump in quickly with ideas: “There was a lack of trust in the other teams.” “We need to have open communication and work together.”

The next activity puts these lessons to the test. In small groups, facilitators ask residents to identify key problems in the villa and solutions that Rosario Hábitat might offer. To help with brainstorming, each group receives a stack of cartoon cards depicting neighborhood scenes, as in the puzzles. Facilitators ask the groups to look at each card and write down on sheets of green paper any problems that the image suggests. (A picture of a dingy alley, for example, suggests “dangerous passageways” and “people irresponsible with trash.”) After people tape up the problem sheets on the wall, facilitators ask them to propose solutions on pieces of orange paper. To deal with the alleys, some people suggest more police and education while others propose wider alleys, street lights, and dumpsters.

Finally, each group posts its problems and solutions on the wall and presents its main ideas. Facilitators work with the teams to prepare creative presentations such as talk shows, TV news reports, and skits. By the end of the workshop, residents have covered the wall with descriptions of neighborhood problems and proposed solutions, which staff later compiles.

How do dozens of villa residents manage to lay out broad neighborhood improvement plans in just three hours? They start by playing a game. According to the facilitators, the initial game serves three purposes. It gets nearly all participants out of their seats and actively taking part, making it less intimidating for them to speak later. The game helps people get to know their neighbors and establish a collaborative atmosphere. The trick at the end forces them to question their perspectives and assumptions, making them more open to new ideas. While most people assume that the game is competitive, by the end they discover that collaboration is essential.

For these and other reasons, games have become a mainstay of Rosario Hábitat. Games such as the puzzle challenge, however, tell only part of the story. Staff also engages residents by making the entire workshop more like a game. The planning workshop in particular illustrates how three basic game mechanics—vibrant visuals, sound effects, and enjoyable core mechanics—can engage people’s senses.

First, rather than just using visual aids periodically to present information, the workshop fully incorporates vibrant visuals into every activity. Participants begin by assembling puzzle pieces of colorful cartoons, then review more cartoons, write on and arrange colored paper, and present and view theater scenes. People participate not only with their eyes but also with their ears and bodies. The reggaetón music helps them push aside distractions and adds dramatic tension to the puzzle contest. The workshop also makes them move through intrinsically enjoyable “core mechanics”—the basic actions that participants actually do (Salen and Zimmerman, 2004: 316–317). Matching puzzle pieces, flipping through cards, sticking papers on the wall, and acting are all relatively enjoyable in themselves, at least compared with typical workshop activities such as asking questions and making arguments. For many scholars, the tight linkage between engaging visuals, sounds, and actions generates the deep and meaningful experience of immersion that is common to games (Csikszentmihalyi, 1991; Salen and Zimmerman, 2004: 315).

But does this engaging participation really matter? If Rosario Hábitat’s goals are already set in advance, are residents just jumping through hoops to arrive at predetermined “solutions”? Yes, the solutions are partly constrained by Rosario Hábitat’s work plan, as in any development program. The program goals (develop basic infrastructure, support children and families, generate employment and income) are extremely broad, however, encompassing most of the problems and solutions raised. While it seems that the cartoon cards might only suggest predetermined solutions, they consistently lead to new ideas as well. Resident proposals have added several components to the program, such as workshops that let families decide on floor plans for new houses, contracting of local cooperatives for construction work, and a citywide program for informal trash collectors. Residents have not, however, proposed deeper changes to the program, and no one that I interviewed voiced disagreement with the basic program goals and approach. In some cases this might be a sign of the agenda-setting power of the state, keeping certain questions off the table (Bachrach and Baratz, 1962; Gaventa, 1980). In Rosario, however, villa groups make vocal demands of the state all the time, organizing regular piquetes to block city streets (as in Las Flores). If, after the first two interventions, residents did not express major grievances during interviews or in public protests, it is unlikely that they are discontented with Rosario Hábitat.

Still, using colors, sounds, and movement may seem like mere window-dressing for the “real” work of community participation. As the Argentine educator Mariano Algava (2006) has found, however, stimulating people’s senses and bodies inspires them to participate more actively and creatively. Once people get used to moving, speaking, listening, and looking carefully, they are more likely to carry these habits into later activities. When this did not happen in Corrientes and Las Flores, residents became used to participating passively—sitting in their seats and paying little attention. The residents signed where told to and did not ask many questions. Rosario Hábitat paid a high price for this passivity when it had to redo the entire planning process as a result.

The Rules of the Game

After the initial planning workshops, staff holds rule-making workshops in each sector of each villa, using a participatory process to establish clear program rules. Facilitators start these workshops by explaining that residents will soon decide which of their households will be relocated and where so that new roads and infrastructure can be built. To ground these discussions, staff points out that Rosario Hábitat has several fixed rules (outlined on posters and handouts) and explains the rationale for each rule. For example, each house must border a passageway or road to ensure safe road access, and each new lot must be at least 100 square meters to guarantee basic living standards.

After going over the fixed rules, facilitators ask residents to develop additional rules—criteria for deciding who will move in case multiple families want a single plot of land. To illustrate, staff mentions and posts on the wall criteria that have surfaced in other workshops, such as length of tenancy, condition of the house, number of inhabitants, and number of family members with disabilities. Participants then add other criteria. Once the list of criteria is set, residents order them according to priority. Staff then adds up and averages out the votes to determine which criteria will have top priority for deciding land disputes.

In the last part of the workshop, residents establish one more set of parameters for deciding where they will locate their houses. On a giant map, they indicate where they want to have passageways in their block. Staff present several long rectangular cut-outs of colored transparency sheets, each representing a passageway. A facilitator demonstrates how the cut-outs might be placed on the map and then invites residents to try moving the cut-outs around. At this point, new questions surface: Do the passageways have to be straight, like the cut-outs? Yes, because otherwise they would be unsafe. Why are some cut-outs wider than others? Because the width depends on how many families use the passageway to reach their houses.

The rule-making workshop helps generate and legitimate Rosario Hábitat’s rules—what residents can and cannot do. To do this, it uses several key game mechanics: participant-generated rules, multimodal presentation, just-in-time information, and modeling.

First, Rosario Hábitat lets participants develop and order their own rules for negotiating land conflicts. While most games start with fixed rules, some also enable players to craft their own rules through what Salen and Zimmerman (2004: 475) call “transformative social play.” ³ Sometimes players end up more interested in the rules they create than in the original rules. This seems to be the case in Rosario Hábitat. As a resident boasted, “We set the rules ourselves . . . so if we complain it’ll be stupid. And they have to be maintained, because the agreement was collective and consensual.”

Rosario Hábitat also imposes fixed rules, however. Some are technical constraints for installing infrastructure, while others outline the rights of residents. The rule-making workshop does not assume that people instantly understand the rules but rather recognizes that rules need to be constantly communicated, explained, and reinforced. As do good games, the workshop accomplishes this through multimodal presentation of information. As James Gee has observed, games convey meaning and knowledge through images, words, sounds, and other modalities (2007: 110). Just as board games such as Monopoly communicate rules by presenting them in the instructions and on the game board, the workshop facilitators communicate rules by distributing them as handouts, writing them on the wall, and reading them aloud. When asked how clear the rules were, one participant pointed to the wall and said, “They’re very clear, because they’re there.”

Finally, the workshop helps participants understand the rules through just-in-time information and modeling. Games avoid overwhelming players with information, instead presenting it only at the moment when it is actually useful (Gee, 2007). Similarly, the workshop explains the rules about passageway size and shape at the moment when participants are actually arranging passageways on the map. By gradually adding more information, the workshop helps participants process the rules bit by bit. The colored passageway cut-outs also serve to model the rules, providing physical models of the rules governing passageway size and shape. Having facilitators first move the pieces around on the map similarly models the kinds of trade-offs and calculations that ultimately have to be made.

By enabling participants to learn and change the rules in multiple ways, Rosario Hábitat mediates between expert staff knowledge and experiential resident knowledge. This helps bridge technical language barriers between experts and citizens, generating more understanding of the “rules of the game” and diffusing tensions between technical constraints and local democracy (Chaskin, 2005).

The rule-making workshops stand in stark contrast to the initial interventions in Corrientes and Las Flores. In these villas, residents could not make any rules. Staff did not present or justify the fixed rules clearly, and, as a result, residents of Corrientes and Las Flores misunderstood and rejected them.

Collaborative Competition

At the heart of Rosario Hábitat are two basic conflicts. First, there is conflict between residents and the municipality. City planners want some people to leave the villa so that there will be space for roads and 100-square-meter lots, but many residents do not want to go. Then there is conflict between residents. Most want larger lots and newer houses, but there is limited land and housing available. To make matters more complicated, some people do want to leave (even if they do not have to), and some do not want to move to larger lots or newer houses (even if they can).

Rosario Hábitat tries to negotiate this web of conflicts in lot allocation workshops such as the one described above. In these workshops, staff resolves disputes by blending competition and collaboration. As in the rule-making workshops, participants are invited to try placing colored transparency cut-outs on a giant block map (Figure 2). This time the cut-outs represent house lots, and they are shaped like squares, rectangles, and Ls, as in the video game Tetris. Each piece represents a 100-square-meter lot, and its dimensions are written on it. The goal is to arrange the pieces in such a way that each family has a 100-square-meter lot within the available space.

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Figure 2.

Participants rearranging lots in a lot allocation workshop. (Image: Josh Lerner)

Facilitators first ask residents to place cut-outs where their houses currently lie. They then focus on areas where cut-outs overlap or jut out into roads or passageways, modeling how the pieces might be rearranged and asking the residents to try rearranging them. Most families are able to fit their lots onto the map with a few adjustments to lot shape and size. Some residents find that there is little space for their lot, and they volunteer to move to a new development built by the program.

Often, though, two or more families want to claim the same parcel of land. In these cases, facilitators ask the workshop participants to work out a solution by playing with the map pieces. Sometimes, a family agrees to give up some land or road access to reach an agreement. When no clear solution emerges, participants return to the decision-making criteria that they have identified and rank-ordered in the rule-making workshop, which are posted on the wall. Usually it becomes clear which family has priority on the basis of the criteria. When an agreed-upon plan for the whole block is finally reached, staff ask the residents to sign on the map where their new lots will be located.

The lot allocation workshops manage to negotiate key conflicts among residents and between residents and the program. This is possible partly because earlier workshops have established norms of active participation and agreed-upon rules. With the stage thus set, the workshops walk residents through the drama of conflict resolution using magic circles and group vs. system competition.

As Johann Huizinga (1955: 10) described them, magic circles are play spaces temporarily separated from the ordinary world, within which special rules apply (Huizinga, 1955: 10). Just as the marked rectangle of a soccer field defines a magic circle for soccer, the puzzle map serves as a magic circle for the lot allocation workshop. Conflicts that at other times have led to violence can be played out on a safer playing field in such a way that outcomes depend on agreed-upon rules. Land disputes take the form of overlapping colored puzzle pieces that neighbors can rearrange safely. When discussing these disputes, residents tend to point to the map, not each other. On the simplified map terrain, land inequalities are communicated more clearly. Thanks to the mapping puzzle, a facilitator concluded, “We were able to achieve consensuses that would have been impossible otherwise.”

This level of consensus is also encouraged by group vs. system competition, which some games use to bring a group of players together to compete against the game system (Salen and Zimmerman, 2004: 250). ⁴ In the lot allocation workshop, neighbors struggle together against the constraints imposed by the program rules and the map itself. For one facilitator, the residents’ collective quest to complete the puzzle “generates a certain intimacy . . . a group spirit.”

Combined, the workshop’s magic circle and group vs. system competition create what I call collaborative competition—competition that both requires and enhances collaboration. The workshop activities instill a competitive drive in participants, but they also compel people to work together if they want to compete successfully. While planners often call for more collaborative participation (Healey, 1997; Innes and Booher, 2004), Rosario Hábitat shows that certain kinds of competition can be the friend rather than the foe of collaboration. The lot allocation puzzle is not always appropriate, however. The puzzle pieces are sometimes too rigid, getting in the way of creative solutions. In these cases, facilitators use the puzzle exercise to scope out options before switching to other mapping techniques to decide on final lot distribution.

Linking Participation to Outcomes

In the last round of participation, families that can no longer fit in the villa are invited to select homes in a new housing development. To accommodate those who are leaving their villa, Rosario Hábitat builds new housing developments throughout the city. The residents weigh in on where these new developments should be and then choose which one they will move to. Finally, in relocation workshops they pick their new houses.

These workshops are often held near the new developments so that the residents can see their half-constructed new homes. Since participants come from different blocks, the workshops usually start with a round of introductions. Facilitators ask residents to tell how they use their houses (e.g., their social habits, work, family life) to help them determine whom they would and would not want to live next to. Staff also posts on the wall and presents information on the new housing, including block maps, floor plans, and house sizes. The houses differ in both size and street access—some are on corners or streetfronts while others are set back from the street. As in the rule-making workshops, participants then identify and rank criteria for negotiating conflicts over lots. Finally, the families choose which lots they will live on, using the decision-making criteria when two families want the same lot. Staff labels each lot with the name of its new family, and at the end of the workshop participants can sometimes tour their new lots.

Impressively, most residents participate actively in the relocation workshops for up to three hours. Why? In part because of the game mechanics discussed earlier but also for a new set of reasons. The relocation workshop in particular illustrates how Rosario Hábitat links participation with outcomes—a key challenge of any participatory process (Fung, 2006). It enables families to see the results of their participation by presenting clear and measurable outcomes, maintaining uncertain outcomes, and keeping score with points.

By definition, games have clear and measurable outcomes, meaning that a player wins, loses, ties, or receives a score (Salen and Zimmerman, 2004: 80). Rosario Hábitat is fortunate that its workshops have extremely concrete outcomes. When asked why they participated, most residents said that they wanted to get paved streets, new houses, closed sewers, and other infrastructure. Scholars generally acknowledge that clientelistic processes depend on community members’ receiving specific and desired goods (Auyero, 2000). The Rosario Hábitat case suggests that participatory democratic processes also rely on such concrete benefits. The program makes these outcomes even more appealing by presenting them vividly. In the relocation workshop, staff posts plans for new blocks and houses and sometimes giant posters with photos of other villas before and after improvements on the wall and holds meetings within sight of the new lots. Tellingly, all the people I interviewed said that they believed that the infrastructure would be built, though they were skeptical of other development programs. As Julia said, “I’ve lived in the villa since 1973, and many programs have come and gone, but none of them delivered. Rosario Hábitat is the only one that delivers.”

Although concrete results are guaranteed, residents do not know what exactly these results will be. The families know that lots will be assigned but not who will get which lots. Uncertain outcomes are essential for sustaining people’s attention in games—if the outcomes are known, people will stop playing (Fullerton, 2008: 32).

Finally, staff uses points and scores to quantify the results of participation. In the relocation workshop this occurs during voting on decision-making criteria, but residents have also voted on locations of new housing developments, models for new homes, and other improvements. These vote tallies allow people to measure the impact of their participation. The quantification of lot sizes also serves as a kind of score, as many residents measure outcomes in square meters received.

The outcomes certainly seem more impressive than in Corrientes or Las Flores. In Corrientes, the program offered more modest improvements, making it a harder sell. In both villas, staff failed to present outcomes vividly, and new streets and alleys were mapped out before community meetings, leaving little room for uncertainty. Results were not measured in points, and staff did not establish a clear link between participation and outcomes.

Game Design for Democratic Participation

As the Rosario Hábitat experience illustrates, games offer a treasure chest of tools for community participation. Games such as the puzzle challenge ignite participation, build community, and open people’s minds. Game mechanics such as vivid visuals, sound effects, and enjoyable core mechanics activate and engage people’s senses. Participant-generated rules, multimodal presentation, just-in-time information, and modeling establish and legitimate rules. Magic circles and group vs. system conflict generate healthy competition that increases collaboration. Linking participation to concrete but uncertain outcomes and measuring progress through points provide more incentive to participate. These game mechanics build on each other when used as a systematic approach to participation.

Rosario Hábitat was much more effective when staff designed participation using this game approach. In Corrientes and Las Flores, none of the game mechanics were used. Residents participated passively and did not understand or respect the rules. Participation did not seem to matter to project outcomes, and it devolved into violent conflict. In later interventions, the new game techniques addressed many of these initial problems. It is perhaps no surprise that, when asked why Rosario Hábitat uses game techniques, the program director had a simple explanation: “For me, because they work, because they give results.”

By learning to speak and enact a language of games, staff and residents also changed the political culture in the villas. When new community issues emerge, staff and residents now expect participatory workshops. They start by discussing how to engage residents, establish rules, negotiate conflicts, and generate clear outcomes. As a result, they develop new skills, knowledge, and attitudes. Residents learn about urban development and city government and their potential to influence both. Staff becomes more sensitive to the needs and local knowledge of community members. Both staff and residents learn negotiation and conflict-resolution skills. Rosario Hábitat thus develops both the city and its citizens.

Games and game mechanics are, of course, not new to democratic participation. Planners and facilitators have been using games in participatory processes for years (Al-Kodmany, 2001; Arias, 1996; Borries, Walz, and Böttger, 2007). Many game mechanics are also similar to participatory techniques discussed elsewhere (Baker, Addams, and Davis, 2005; Fung, 2006; Innes and Booher, 2004). When viewed through the lens of game design, however, the Rosario Hábitat case builds on these discussions in five ways. First, it suggests that games can serve as more than appetizers for the “real” meat of participation—serious discussions and decision making. While the literature mainly discusses games as simulations or preparatory activities, each moment of participation can and should be made more engaging, and game techniques can help. Second, the lens of game design reveals several tools that have not surfaced in the literature on democratic participation, such as core mechanics, just-in-time information, and magic circles. Third, game mechanics offer more focused and succinct terms—such as modeling, multimodal presentation, and points—for ideas that are often discussed vaguely. Fourth, these mechanics help explain when, where, and why certain participatory practices work—for example, that visuals can have the most effect when fully incorporated into every meeting activity and material, since this more deeply stimulates people’s senses. Finally, game mechanics illustrate the handicraft of democracy: how exactly facilitators can pursue—or undermine—theoretical ideals such as active participation and legitimate rules.

In the end, the experience of Rosario Hábitat suggests that government programs can enhance democratic participation if they use games and game mechanics that engage the senses, legitimate rules, generate collaborative competition, and link participation with outcomes. A game approach helped Rosario Hábitat effectively engage community members in improving the quality of life for villa residents. In the process, it modeled new ways to address some of the most common challenges to making participatory democracy work.