Seminar: Hopetown 2030 – Serious Gaming Housing and Ageing

In Spring 2018, a group led by Dr Vikki McCall at the University of Stirling held a series of events with practitioners, older adults and policy makers from Scotland, England and Wales to consider challenges in housing and ageing over the coming decade. We used a megagame-style bespoke ‘serious game’ called Hopetown, designed by Jim Wallman of Stone Paper Scissors, to engage a diverse group of people in thinking creatively about the challenges in delivering housing for ageing, and how they might be overcome.

In this session Professor Alasdair Rutherford and Dr Vikki McCall describe the game and discuss how it was effective in producing a creative and participatory approach to identify challenges and explore potential solutions. They reflect on the role of serious games in this megagame style both as a research tool and as a way to engage diverse viewpoints from a broad audience in a collaborative process. They go on to talk about our future plans for using this game (including perhaps running it as a megagame!) to explore the issues further, and welcome the views and suggestions of the megagame community.