Understanding Stakeholder Perspectives: Towards the Design of a Serious Game for Positive Energy Districts

Positive Energy Districts (PEDs) are highly energy-efficient urban areas that manage a surplus production of renewable energy. Recognising the key role they can play in the transition to a less carbon-dependent society, the European Commission launched its PED Programme in 2018, to implement and support the development of PEDs. However, as PEDs are still a relatively new concept, their implementation can be challenging, and local administrators often lack clear guidance and reference points for their design, implementation and evaluation. To address this issue, the Positive RObust PEd Localities (PROPEL) project has among its main objectives the design of a serious game to provide practical insights and user-friendly tools for local administrators interested in implementing and developing PEDs. Indeed, by drawing on the power of digital games to set goals and allow the player to autonomously define a strategy to achieve them within a set of constraints, serious games can be a very powerful tool to support local administrators in their decision-making process, enabling them to explore multiple scenarios and to evaluate the results of their choices. This paper outlines the design principles and the main features of a serious game aimed at supporting local administrators in the implementation of PEDs. These design principles and features are derived from a research process comprising several steps. Firstly, the drivers and barriers to the adoption of a serious game among local administrators were identified. This was done through in-depth interviews with local administrators and PEDs experts from the different countries involved in the PROPEL project, namely Italy, Sweden, and Turkey. Secondly, a comparative analysis of serious games developed for related research purposes was carried out. This provided further suggestions for the features of the serious game. The findings underscore the significance of incorporating real data, adopting a modular structure to emulate the systemic complexity of PEDs, and ensuring accessibility across multiple devices as paramount features that the serious game should have.