| This dissertation poses two questions: Can games make democratic participation more appealing? If so, how? For most people, the opportunities to participate in democracy are not very enticing. Faced with limited time, they would rather watch TV or go out with friends than sit through a community meeting or public hearing. Even if they see democracy as the ideal form of government in theory, in practice they dread it. As a result, people are engaging in democratic governments less, trusting them less, and granting them less and less power.;To reconnect with citizens, some governments and organizations are including games and game-like activities in democratic processes. To see if these efforts can make participation more appealing, I studied five local government programs that use games or game mechanics to engage people in participatory workshops or meetings. In Rosario, Argentina, the first city in the world to pass an ordinance endorsing game-playing, I researched three programs: Children's Councils, Theater of the Oppressed workshops, and the participatory development program Rosario Habitat. To test if game design would work in less fertile soils, I also studied participatory budgeting at Toronto Community Housing, and I designed a participatory evaluation process with tenants and staff. In both Rosario and Toronto, I used ethnographic observation, surveys, interviews, and participatory research to assess how games and game mechanics affected democratic participation.;Through four years of research, I found that games and game mechanics can make democracy fun---and make it work. In the cases I studied, they tended to make participation not only more enticing, but also more efficient, transparent, and fair. But these results were not guaranteed. They depended on whether facilitators effectively weaved together certain games and game mechanics. I thus propose that democratic processes include five kinds of games: animation, team-building, capacity-building, analysis, and decision-making. I also suggest that governments and organizations design democratic processes more like games, by drawing on 26 game mechanics that engage the senses, establishing legitimate rules, generate collaborative competition, link participation to measurable outcomes, and create experiences designed for participants. |
