Play the City

Serious gaming for smart and social cities

Changing the way we engage stakeholders, Play the City designs physical games as a method for collaborative decision making. We localize our games and tailor them according to particular questions of our clients. Since 2010, we have developed games for issues such as affordable housing, circular economy, migration, inner city transformation, urban expansion and participatory design.

We use gaming as a problem-solving method, bringing top-down decision makers together with bottom-up stakeholders. In the accessible environment of games, free from professional jargon, players engage with a problem and with each other, facilitating collaborative outcomes.

We believe that gaming offers a real alternative to standard formats of civic engagement in the 21st century. Our method has been acknowledged internationally and has been implemented for large-scale projects in Amsterdam, Istanbul, Brussels, Shenzhen, Dublin, Prague, and Cape Town. In this article we described our services in detail.

Enjoy TEDx talk of Ekim Tan, the founder of Play the City, and if you feel further interested, we may order our recent book sharing our knowledge and experiences on city gaming.