Decision-Making as a Social Choice Game: Gamifying an urban redevelopment process in search for consensus

The paper reports the formulation, the design, and the results of a serious game developed for structuring negotiations concerning the redevelopment of a university campus with various stakeholders. The main aim of this research was to formulate the redevelopment planning problem as an abstract and discrete decision-making problem involving multiple actions, multiple actors with preconceived gains and losses with respect to the comprising actions, and decisions as combinations of actions. Using fictitious and yet realistic scenarios and stakeholders as simulation, the results evidence how different levels of democratic participation and different modes of moderation can affect reaching a consensus and present in a mathematical characterisation of a consensus as a state of equilibrium. The small set of actions and actors enabled a chance to compute a theoretically optimal state of consensus, where the efficiency and the effectiveness of different modes of moderation and participatory rights could be observed and analysed.